OUGD201 evaluation

OUGD201 Design for Print
For the brief “What is Good?” I selected the response “Obama is good...” I firstly looked at some initial secondary research, such as reading Obama’s autobiography and polls on his popularity etc. which I found to be useful in terms of basic facts, however it merely described Obama as a symbol for change, for me personally, I saw this as not an accurate reflection of everyone’s view. In light of this, my primary research took on the role of contacting marginalised groups of both right-wingers and left-wingers who might not view Obama as the media-horse for change. I did this through email and internet forums because it seemed like the only way to get in touch with some of these extreme views. I think this was useful in terms of getting a wider range of views, however, I was disappointed by the lack of returned emails from the right wing and left wing political commentators, including the Westboro Baptist church. having some more views like this to build my work from may have given me a more credible final piece. Using my peers to test the political awareness of 18-24 year olds was incredibly useful, combining that with some secondary research on figures for political awareness allowed me to create a really cohesive picture of who my audience were.
In terms of idea generation and my utilization of different techniques, I feel that I was very limited because I spent so long tracking down the research to inform my piece that I left myself very little time to play around with my ideas and really I only had two concepts to work with; the paper fortune teller and the spinner and I made the decision to run with them, I think I may have sacrificed some of the potential of my final piece by doing this. This decision to spend so much time ironing out a great concept also had a detrimental effect on the visual response I engaged with. I feel like I went to default illustration, even though it may have been an appropriate choice for my final piece, I perhaps could have explored a lot more visual responses.
The final product engages the brief pretty well, it resolves my concept statement quite well and the spinner is visually engaging. Unfortunately I struggled making the rest of the packaging visually engaging to a standard that I wanted. It didn’t have the professional finish that I really desired.
I do believe that my concept boards were to a high standard though in terms of layout and representing my product effectively. My documentation PDF may have been a little too flabby however.