Crit 1 feedback

First of all I can actually now say I know what I am doing. Not in life in general, but at least for the next four weeks. The crit gave me the opportunity to voice my ideas, which is always more helpful than just thinking them, and clarified a lot of things for me. I can now say confidently that I like the brief I have written and am looking forward to getting down to designing.

It has proven to be that I am very much print driven with this brief, but that doesn't necessarily give me reason to panic. I can design potential digital ideas, such as creating an online presence of the supplement for example, showing how it can work across all areas of design but the digital aspect to it can simply be a proposal, not a resolution.

My original problem with the deliverables I had set myself, wording it as a 'set' of supplements, raised the question; had I set myself an unrealistic target within the time frame I had? But after discussing this, I realised that was something that would be answered when I begin the actual designing. It could completely depend on how difficult the content is to gather, how long it takes me to resolve the perfect design layout, or the chosen size of the product. If it is a creative fold out supplement for instance with few actual pages, then creating a set of these would be do-able. However, if it were very much content driven and I designed a 16 page booklet, a 'set' of these would be difficult to create and could mean that the design element suffers due to lack of time.

Therefore I have decided to ensure the brief is very much design driven and I will quickly gather the content together to focus my time on creating the right format and layout for my supplements.

Ideas began to form and questions began to be raised as the discussion continued in that I could choose a set of regions to collect information from, perhaps 5 that have obvious strong accents and local phrases and dialects. Good possibilities could be:

• London 'cockney' slang
• Yorkshire
• Lancashire
• Liverpool
• Newcastle
• Birmingham
• Edinburgh
• Cornish/Devon
  

Each supplement could then be dedicated to one chosen region and as a set of 5, could come out weekly or monthly for newspaper buyers to collect.

I could design the type, colour, layout etc to relate to the chosen regions so that each supplement was different, or I could just change one element of it, such as the colour, but keep the grid layout and type the same as a running theme throughout the set to link them all together.

I also know now that I want to combine type and image together within the layout design to incorporate my photography work. These will be images of the regions I have chosen to target.

So there are lots of positive things to think about and as long as I work in a simple, efficient way, I know I will begin to produce the kind of design that is currently sat in my head dying to get out.