Evaluation

When looking at my original creative partnership form and what I wanted to get out of this project, I will evaluate this collaborative brief comparing it to what I originally said.


Now that this brief has come to an end, I am really pleased that I chose to do it with Charlotte. As I originally stated, I was hoping that our non-design qualities would match to make any design decisions easy and possible. This has proven to be successful, as I was right to say that we are both reliable, honest and organised. I did mention that we are both decisive, and as that is true for most of the time, there were a few days where neither of us knew where to go next with it and I think we were both lacking the creative motivation to just make a decision and get on with it. The fact that we are friends could have been an issue when analysing each other's work, but I felt that whether we were working collaboratively in the studios, or working individually and bringing our ideas together, we were honest with what we thought worked or didn't work.

I feel that as an individual I tried a lot harder and put a lot more effort in than in most other projects and was also a lot more committed to the brief. This was probably due to the fact that I really did like the brief's topic and that working with a partner, there is always that feeling that you don't want to let them down. I knew I could trust Charlotte to go away and work on her side of the action plan, and I think of myself also as someone that can be trusted, so I feel that being friends with her already didn't matter and we didn't let it affect how we individually worked. If anything it was advantage, because it meant we could confidently contact each other when we were apart to discuss options or issues arisen, without feeling shy or feeling that it was an effort in any way.

In terms of our design skills, it was also fairly successful as it was true that Charlotte had the missing elements to my design practice. She knew I wasn't a confident speaker when presenting our ideas to a group, so she always kick-started our crits, which helped me to add in anything that hadn't been mentioned. Another weakness of mine is probably my researching skills, and because Charlotte works in the library, she knew if there would be any books that could help us, which motivated me to research more in my spare time. I was pleased that I could incorporate my love for photography into the London exhibition visit and also share the development workload as I worked on the typography and layout, whereas Charlotte carefully designed the collage image and used her Photoshop skills to create it as a duotone image matching the logo colours and type that I designed. I have become a lot more confident using InDesign so I could successfully bring all the elements of the design together, once Charlotte had finished her image work. My interest in simple design layouts and limited colour pallettes continued throughout this brief, and resulted in me being really happy with our design style.

Obviously if I had been working on this brief on my own, I would have chosen to solely use typography, so it would be interesting to see how they would have looked without the use of image. When designing my individual presentation boards for module hand-in, I hope to continue to experiment with my designs and include them on them.