Alexandra Bucktin
BA (Hons.) GRAPHIC DESIGN
Level 02 Design Production
OUGD 201
The focus of my work for this module has been primarily learning about printing. The Colour for Print and Design for Print briefs have enabled me to explore print in a much more thorough was than ever before. The Colour for Print brief has been much more about principles, and rules about printing; how everything works in reality. The Design for Print project has enabled me to put some of this learning into practice and start to understand more about colour and printing within my own work.
The skills I have developed since the beginning of this module have been relatively intangible. I have learnt so much about the principles of printing and colour systems, but it all seems to be information, and not physical work. In a way I think that this is a good thing – I now have a large knowledge base of the conventions of printing that I can apply to all of my future work, which will only make it better and more suited to commercial purposes. I am really glad that we started our second year by learning about something that is invaluable in the design world.
I tried to apply all I had learnt from the Colour brief to the Design for Print brief. Granted there was the odd hiccup with trying to print certain colours and tones, but I feel that I was able to make my work better because I was considering the printed outcome, not just the design on screen or paper. I now know that this is really important because it makes me think about the overall design process, and the way in which I am going to produce work. From learning about print, I have also learnt about how digital colour works – I realise that it is the opposite, and in a round about way have learnt about an entirely different area of design.
I really feel that this project has shown completely different strengths to my work, than the briefs that I completed at the end of last year. I chose to use illustration, something I have not yet properly tackled on this course. I was really please to find that tutors and students alike thought that my illustration work was interesting, and slightly different, but subtle. I have capitalised on this strength by making my print brief mainly about the illustration. I purposely used simple typefaces and text in my resolutions so that the illustration was able to stand out.
During the print brief I had to take some time out for family reasons, and this gave a strange break to my work, that I had not experience before. Because I had to take some time away from the studio, using a computer everyday and generally always having my work at the back of my mind; when I returned to full time work I found that my pace of work picked up, I chose an idea and stuck with it, and I was much more confident about the decision I had made with regard to production. I think that this was the case because I continued to work toward my unextended deadline, which made me more organised (something I didn’t really think was possible!) and much more aware of the time I has to produce my final resolutions.
The weaknesses within this brief are more to do with not having as many crits as the other students, due to the aforementioned reason, and generally not having other students to bounce ideas off of so readily. I really like talking to others about my work and their work equally, and helping each other along with new ideas. I think that my work may have suffered a little from not doing this, in that I was forced to make decision on my own, with no real confirmation that I was on the right track.
If I were to have the opportunity to repeat this module there are several things that I would do differently; Firstly I would not take the time off that I had to; this would have provided me with more studio hours, more time to use the print areas, and more opportunity to experiment. I would have possible researched my project in a different way, maybe done it at a more outdoorsy time of year, I think that this has effected by ability to gain primary research and generally be more ‘into’ the project.
I would have liked to use different forms of print. I have experimented with screen print, and really enjoyed the process – however many problems I encountered. I would really like to look into doing more of this, and possibly some different hand based print processes, as the finished product can really surprise you. I think that digital print has become such a readily available output for our design work, that we are ignoring some really interesting ways we can produce more innovative designs.
Having this brief, plus two other theory based briefs, and several workshops all going on at the same time has been quite hard. I realise that we have to learn to juggle a lot of different projects at once, but I think maybe this has affected my work in other areas. Our timetabling has been rather confusing, and I know that this is not always down to human error; however, I have attended some sessions that I was not required to, and have therefore wasted time that could have been used more constructively.
Overall, I have really enjoyed this module. I have learnt so much that I can now apply to future briefs, and I think that I have found an area of design that I really enjoy. With the next opportunity for print based production I really want to try designing packaging, so I am hoping that this will be on the cards at some point this year.
