Week Five Interim Presentation

The majority of today's class was based around an interim presentation, where we got into groups of 4 pairs and went around showing all of our work for feedback. We presented a few of our poster developments, as well as our flyer, grip claw (free-form idea) and our websites. We got some good, helpful feedback on each of these and feel like we are on the right track moving forward. Some feedback we got has been written below:

General:
- Brighten some of the colours, such as blues, and alter sand colour
- Have teeth consistent across all media

Posters:
- Try combining the two styles of the fish, one looks quite scary looking while the other look super friendly
- Play around with the text placement
- Experiment with possible background colours
- Try teeth similar to flyer, website mouths etc

Flyer:
- Play around with cover
- Add in Love Your Coast logo
- Less Text
- More kid-friendly
- For flyer poster, try having the boy holding our plastic grip claw and fist pumping the air, rather than hi-fiving the fish, as in the poster the person is eating the fish rather than being friends with it.

Website:
- Play around with placement of tabs and logos
- Make a whole mouth rather than just horizontal lines (curve edges of mouth)
- Possibly add social media icons

We also played around with putting the grip claw in context in some photos, to see how it would look when people interact with it. Here is an example:

By tomorrow we are hoping to have some more developments done, so that we can get some more feedback, as it's essentially our final class before the final week of developments and printing for hand-in. Jeremy is going to sketch a new drawing for the flyer poster, and I will render it digitally, in the same style as our current flyer poster. Jeremy is going to continue working on developing the poster, while I will work on the website.

Digital Development

Today Jeremy and I met up so that we could see where each other was at with our independent developments, and continue working on our assignment together. We spent about 2 hours working on it, and managed to come up with quite a few solid developments. 

Before we met up, I had whipped up the inside layout of the flyer, which we were doing a booklet/poster fold-out styled flyer. I have attached each spread below. We are wanting to have the flyer handed out after the event to say thank you. It is a way of praising and acknowledging the participants effort, and encouraging them to continue to clean the beach in the future, and ways that they can do this. As a way of targeting families, we have made the fold-out poster idea so that it's a poster that a kid would like to stick up on his wall. The poster has also been attached below:

I also printed each of these spreads out today, and made a rough mock-up of the flyer, which we will present during Monday's interim presentation. I am looking forward to getting feedback on our idea, as well as ways to improve and develop our ideas. Over the weekend I will continue to work on creating the website and putting it into InVision.

Poster Development and Flyer Poster Design

After class I worked on developing our poster, following some helpful feedback from the class and teachers. I have included some developments below, looking at a couple of different options. These have been attached directly below:

Some of the feedback was to look at ways of making the trash look like it's flying our of the fish's mouth, in order to create more movement throughout the poster, so I decided to add to duplicate each piece of trash multiple times, and then lower the opacity on each one respectively, to make it appear as if they're moving at speed. I have also moved the body copy down into the bottom right corner, so it's not getting in the way of the white negative space. In the top poster, I made the fish slightly smaller, and included part of the hand, just enough to make it evident that the fish is being held and dropped into the mouth. In the second development, it is quite a large scale again, although the text has been placed on a diagonal to keep the dynamic appearance of the poster. We will continue to develop this poster following feedback we receive tomorrow in class.

Along with this, I worked on creating a poster for our flyer. The flyer will fold into a small booklet, each page being A5 size, although this will fold out into an A2 poster. Jeremy sketched up a quick drawing of what to put on the poster yesterday, so I used this as a template when creating it digitally. I have attached the digital version below:

We are looking at having the flyer/booklet more as a 'Thankyou' flyer, which then informs the participants how they can continue to look after the environment, organise their own beach cleanups, and also ways to minimize their pollution. This will be handed out to those that attend, and we are aiming for families to come along, so the parents could read and take in the information from the flyer, and instead of throwing it out or storing it somewhere they won't find again, their kids can hang up the poster on their wall. We have used the text "We did it!" to make them feel like they made a big contribution, however, in the body copy we reiterate that pollution is still a massive problem everywhere, and it's only even a temporary step towards a better environment at that one beach. We reiterate that cleaning up our environment is an ongoing process, and encourage them to attend more beach cleanups in the near future. Overall, I quite like how this poster has turned out, and feel that it's a good way to encourage them to keep the flyer by having a poster on the back. 

Again, we will get feedback in class tomorrow and then continue to make developments to each piece of media respectively.

Website Ideation

Today I was looking at whipping up a basic Photoshop concept for our website, which we will prototype on InVision. I was trying to keep the design style consistent with the rest of the work, such as the posters, free-form object, and how our flyer would also be designed. I have attached a screenshot of the website in progress, which is the first initial look at creating it digitally.

I quite like this aesthetic, and of course at this point it is very rough as it's the very first concept. The text is all just place holder text for now until it's finalised with exactly what it's going to say. I was looking to create a longer scroll page, although in the screenshot I have just included the top part of the scroll. There are also tabs at the top which will help to navigate to other pages, with more details and information them. I feel that the design style on this fits in quite nicely with our other media, although I will continue to look at developing as we go on. I'm also quite keen to continue sketching up some wireframe prototypes to look at user interaction, and develop it that way so that the user can easily navigate their way through the website without any worries.

Over the next few days, before Monday's class, I will continue to look at coming up with some more ideas for the free-form concept, flyer, and website, as well as developing the ideas I have already produced.

Concept Development

Following this week's classes, I decided to head home and work on developing our idea based on some critique we got in class. I have attached the most recent development below, the text has just quickly been written as a placeholder until we work out what the text will actually read:

Over the next few days, I will continue to look at ways of developing this concept. At the moment, I really like how there is an angled visual flow, leading from the top left down to the bottom right, it makes the poster appear more asymmetrical and dynamic. I will also look to possibly change what rubbish is actually coming out of the fishes mouth, and could possibly look into statistics on what is the most popular rubbish found in the ocean and on the beach. The image is definitely more appealing and interesting once cropped in at a larger scale, as it is enough to show that the human is actually eating trash while eating the fish, the hand etc wasn't necessarily needed. 

By next week, I will look at coming up with a few basic concepts for our free-form idea, and digitally creating some of the ideas we came up with in class. I am also going to look at creating a basic website layout in Photoshop, and play around with InVision again.

Week Three, Session One

For today's interim presentation, we shared all of our poster concepts in small groups of about 6 people (3 teams), and got some critical feedback on each of our concepts, and how we could develop them. Some of the feedback was quite helpful, and it was interesting to see just how an audience reacts to our concepts (Wehi). We found which ones the majority found most successful, or which ones had the most potential, and spent our studio time working on developing and looking at these. 

The final hour of class was spent at a lecture down in The Pit, where we were told all about the Transmedia side of the brief. I'm actually really looking forward to designing the website and using inVision, as I have experience from this sort of thing from my elective in Semester One where we had to use inVision and design an app for a phone, or a website. I also quite enjoy the wire frame prototyping process, and looking at user interaction which certain sites and apps. I feel that inVision is a good program to use for this as it allows rapid prototyping of concepts, where you can mock up wire frame layouts on paper, scan it into inVision and then analyse the user interaction from there.

By tomorrow, our group is required to produce wire frame sketches for at least three existing websites. We were shown two in class that we have to do, and then Jeremy and I will do another free-choice website as an extra, so we will have four sketched up to look at.

Further Poster Concepts

I created a couple of concepts to contrast Blake's style and see which direction we want to go with
Both use a much grittier and darker style but still have the same ideas that we settled on for our poster's direction.

The first plays with more of a shock factor, however I don't think it adequately gets the idea of eating trash across.

The next is a little bit more clear but has nothing really to do with humans.

Overall I think we've decided this style isn't for us, and so I will adapt to a more child friendly illustrative approach.

Initial Poster Concepts

Over the past few days, Jeremy and I have continued with our rapid ideation in order to come up with some decent concepts to show in Monday's class. Each group had been asked to come up with a minimum of 5 ideas to bring along to class, so we decided that we would do 3 each, and bring them along. However, while coming up with these we have been consistently communicating via Facebook message to share our ideas etc, and to bounce ideas off of one another. I have attached our 6 concepts below.

The below three are the poster concepts which Jeremy drew:

The below three the poster concepts which I drew:

We will take these to the presentation tomorrow and see what feedback we get from the class and the teachers. When we begin to develop and refine our ideas further, it will allow us to begin generating ideas on what stylistic approach we are going to have in our overall campaign, to run across the poster, flyer, website and also the 'free-choice' media (video etc.)

Group Catch Up Session

Today Jeremy and I met up at 1:30pm in order to see where each other was at with our idea generation and thumbnail sketches, as well as meeting so we could create our moodboards for presentation on Monday. Our thumbnail sketches were coming along quite nicely, as I already had two pages worth, and was planning on doing a third page of rapid ideation thumbnails solely focusing on targeting youth as the audience. Our moodboard consists of two pages at the moment, the top one having research of backgrounds, textures and posible physical images, while the lower moodboard has potential fonts, colour palettes and some inspiration sourced from online.

I have attached the moodboards below:

Over the next few days we will continue to work on our poster concepts in thumbnail form, ad generate 5 larger posters to present in class on Monday. 

Introduction to Koha

Today we were introduced to the new brief, which is dealing with the aspect of Koha, following on from Ihi Wehi. The brief sounds very exciting, despite most people feeling overwhelmed initially because of the amount of tasks required to complete. The project consists of working in pairs, and creating a poster, flyer and a free-choice (video, t-shirt, etc.) which will all then be included in a website. So the brief essentially consists of designing four things, all within the 6 week period.

In the class itself, we were divided into some smaller groups to begin doing a Simpsons exercise, where we get given a character and need to design a poster which would persuade them to come to an event, either a Beach Clean Up Day, or a Meet The Neighbours Day. We were given Marge, and created two A4 posters.

The two above posters are the ones our group came up with. The top poster was focusing on how meeting the neighbours will will bring more support, hence the image of Maggie crying and hands coming from one side. The lower image was showing how meeting neighbours offers support in a way that you can then share your problems and get help, as Marge has an underlying gambling problem.

By tomorrow, we have been asked to focus on two more characters and create a poster for each. We also chose our partners today, and I am with Jeremy Hall.