Crit response: Week 3

I was really pleased with how the crit went this week. I felt we had more visuals to show, making it easier to get our ideas across and now we had a strong design direction I was a lot more confident. We wanted to ask for others' opinions in the group about a few things as, between the two of us, we couldn't decide. As Charlotte and I were approaching the crit we had near enough decided to scrap the interaction games ideas for the posters as we thought the tagline and strong image should speak for themselves. This doesn't mean to say, however, that researching interactive media designs and playing around with pop out and playful paper ideas was pointless, it just means that we have narrowed our concept down, hopefully strengthening it too.

The response we got back was to definitely not spend any more time working out how to make posters, billboards etc interactive, because the environment we wanted our designs in, wasn't exactly right for that. Tube travellers, for example, are always in too much of a rush to 'play' with posters and on-the-street interactivity will probably just get damaged.

The 'Get in on the Act' tagline was favoured over the 'Get involved' which we were pleased about, so we are going to use that on each poster to emphasise the interaction of the exhibition and link the set of posters together giving them a running theme.

We previously experimented in the second week with song lyrics to grab the viewer's attention but our design direction moved us slightly away from that...until this crit. It was suggested that by using a song lyric per poster would engage the passer's by more and define different eras on the designs to show how broad the exhibition is.

We had by-passed that idea, thinking it was too obvious, but maybe obvious is what we need to really polish the designs off. So we now aim to research and choose lyrics that are fun and would get stuck in your head if you saw them whizz by on the side of a bus or tube etc.

As for the image itself, a good point was made that if we were having one song lyric per poster defining an era of music, then perhaps a certain artist/band can be enlarged in the centre that fits that era. The clever arangement that Charlotte designed will still work around that, but the centre artist will just sit in the foreground standing out a little more than the others.