Collaborative Brief evaluation

Why have you chosen to work with your creative partner? What are your aims?
Vickie was a good collaborative partner in terms of practical skill sets that I wanted to learn about, for example, she's quite well renowned for her craft work and I'm really glad that that's something we got to use in creating our final pieces. She also has a good track on research and idea generation, which I occasionally skimp on, so it was really helpful having someone who could keep my mind active rather than me drifting out of concentration which happens when I'm on my own.

What are your specific areas of creative interest in this brief?
In this brief, I was interested in exploring craft, which is something I haven't had chance to do since the pop-up book I created in the first year. I was also interested in trying something different in designing for a space, as a pose to traditional forms of design. I managed to do both of these, though the former outweighed the latter, which is a shame, it would have been better if we had managed to really fully explore what design for space could of meant through lighting and possibly ambient technologies such as light projection.

What specific design skills do you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? How do you intend to use them?
I have skills as an illustrator, particularly working with illustrated typography, unfortunately I managed to stuff this up with legibiity which I feel utterly awful about. Normally, I consider it to be one of my strongest assets, perhaps I was over confident and 'dialed it home'. I also have good skills with illustrator and photoshop, which I used in creating the layout of the board, which I felt overall looked strong (except the promotional material boards) as well as convincing window decals. I was happy that Vickie used some skills too, to do the mannequins because it was an opportunity for her to progress and feel confident with software and she did a really great job of it.

What specific non-design skills do you have to offer in relation to your chosen brief? How do you intend to use them?
I managed to keep quite on top of blogging as well as organisation. Vickie was like a fountain of creativity, literally just pouring ideas out onto the page. I wasn't really able to keep up, however, I was able to rain her in and keep the focus on the project when she went off on a bit of a tangent, or I thought the idea may be a little implausible or difficult to implement convincingly. In this sense, I think the collaboration was really successful. It also allowed for me to take charge when we were starting to wander into apathy towards the subject or we had very different ideas about where the project was going. For instance, Vickie wasn't initially keen on making the window edgy and I think we disagreed on this, but with a bit of persuasion (and a crit), we came to a compromise that didn't effect the quality of the solution.

What will your specific responsibilities be in the collaboration in relation to your brief? I was really responsible for the organisation and to an extent leadership, though that's not to say Vickie wasn't a leader at times. I was able to lead us when we were starting to struggle. I was also quite good at focusing Vickie's idea generation as well as being able to use my skills in type and layout to develop the layout for the final boards.


What will your joint responsibilities be?
Joint responsibilities came in the form of crafting the final thing as well as initial research and idea development. I think ultimately we had to share the crafting of the final resolution, because we were so pushed for time. I also think that because we were pushed for time, the presentation of the third board and the promotional product it's self was actually quite weak, which was disappointing.

final boards

Here are the bards of my progression:

Open publication - Free publishing - More ted baker

YCN hand in: getting the boards prepped and what went down!

Ok so these are the boards we were going to submit, Te splash page was great and the scalability one worked well too. Using very simple vector shapes to simulate the shopfront. I had suggested that on scalability we have a second window for the mannequins which has a similar set of background material (trees and logs etc.), so we took a photo of the set, sans the characters and Vickie actually photo-shopped the mannequins in, which is odd, because she wanted me to do software, thinking she was less capable. Quite the contrary, she did a sterling job and I think it was good to let her do some of the things she might of been timid about doing in order for her to progress as a designer. I also added a window decal to the design to continue the saying from 'Tally Ho!' to 'Tally Ho! The hunt is on!' which ties the window concept with the concept of 'hunting for fashion' that we had talked about. I simply put the window frame from the 'Tally Ho!'sign through illustrator, turning it to a gold colour and using hand drawn typography. I quite like that as an image and I think it works quite well when put into context.
The final board, promotional material, was asked for in the brief, however because we had so many other things to do outside of this project and a lot of time where we couldn't get on with it, we ran out of time which is unfortunate because it looks rushed.







Once we were done however, Fred pointed out a legibility issue with the text that we hadn't realised, staying too close to the project to examine it thoroughly a mistake that turned into a last minute typographical change and spending an extra £6. However it was necessary for the concept to tie together. Here are the boards with the adjustment:

Creating the final 'shop window'

Here's the progression of different colours and layouts me and Vickie tried out, and a few different angles for the photography, we decided on the last picture as the best, this has been photoshopped to increase the clarity and improve the lighting.
Early on it was decided that it was too clustered so we tried to simplify it by changing the background to white and trying to remove some of the leaves and logs, and we just carried on playing around till we got the results we wanted.

Final crit and progress.

Here's a quick progression from where we were at last week. We started planning on what we needed to pit into a narrative to make it coherent: Hunters, dogs, fox escaping. From this we started to make a few visuals in the format we'd want to work with. The trees and the background work really nice, but we both agreed that with character we needed more detail than just the very basic origami shapes, otherwise the characters sort of become the background and it's a series of coloured shapes rather than a narrative.

With that in mind, I added some texture in the form of line detail with an orange pen as well as using white and black paper to create the foxes features:

We also added a frame, that was in a collection of old things that vickie had, that I thought would be ideal for putting into the composition, giving it a very 'English-heritage' out in the country-side kind of feel to the work, and we used a script font to fit this. Taking this to the crit with Graham, we got to main bits of feedback: Aesthetically, it was good and pleasing to the eye and the detail levels worked and stuff, however it wasn't funny, it wasn't edgy enough.

Witht hat in mind, we reverted to another idea we had, about the hunters being turned on by the foxes, with this in mind we have to start making extremely quickly with only a week left and it being a very lengthy process.

Crit Feedback

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive in terms of the concept and image generation. One of the most significant and valid points was made during the crit by Craig Laing, he said that we need to be careful about our colour and pattern choices, that we need to avoid reducing the image to a series of block collars and make sure that the narrative comes first over stylistic flourishes.

Matthew Milner and David Gasi suggested that we need to inform our decisions with more contextual research, however, I feel that we've done quite a lot, and they were unable to view our blogs.

For the next crit, we need to have developed a set of visual directions that relate directly to the ideas we're doing. So the two strongest that we got feedback from on the crit were the idea that the animals begin hunting the humans, and the idea that animals escape in unusual fashions. Both are quite an irreverant take on hunting, and it's 'Britishness' means that we will fulfill th brief quite well with both of these options. Matthew Milner also suggested that the displays by Ted Baker he has seen involve motion, this is also something to bare in mind if we're looking to win.

What We've done so far:

Ok so heres a summary of the sheet work we've doe so far, it's what we took into the crit yesterday and what we talked about, so I'm going to establish what we talked about in the crit and then follow it up with a blog post on the feedback we got.

So the first 5 or so images are sort of initial response brainstorms for the brief, we created a list of key points from the brief and generated a few quick thoughts on each one, in hopes that it would clarify the brief for us. So the key ponts were : it's a shop window, it has to be scaleable, it has to avoid looking traditionally autumnal and it has to be irreverently british.

this brainstorm on British humour is Vickie's work and I think it's a really strong way of getting anything and everything about Britishness down, whilst I approached it with a few posts on my context blog she literally documented everything she could think of.

At this point we had done a little more research, looked at some of Jean Jullien's work and stumbled upon the idea of hunting, which actually turned out to be a pretty great idea for a concept. Below is a very quick and messy jotting of ideas, I think we've moved o from the idea of hunting for clothes, though we might try it out again if we're struggling for impact with other ideas, however the list of qaulities we want in our work is quite significant.

This is a quick mapping of what we need for our concept and our outcomes, we've decided that the best way to do it is 3 concept boards and either a scale model or a lot of detailed and high quality photos of a model.

After the crit last week and some subsequent research, we began to worry about looking at hunting as a concept, Graham suggested that it would be good to push it and make it controversial, however, Vickie and I find it very difficult to approach the subject in this manner, so we began looking at alternative concepts. We really liked the saying in the image below and thought that we could perhaps generate some visuals in response to this.

Below are a series of visual responses to this quote done in a very paper crafty and high-touch way. I think after a while we realised that it wasn't going to fit the brief, that building a concept around a quote might make some interesting visuals, but ultimately it wouldn't necessarily be 'irreverently british' or humourous in any way.

So we came bac to the hunting idea, here is a mood board of visuals and colours we were thinking about at the time, however, I think we need to think more in terms of narrative because the research we've done on Ted Baker so far suggests that they create dioramas that tell a story.

here's another that deals with potential colour schemes we might like to look at. I think we perhaps jumped the gun, we need to develop a clear narrative or a few narratives at this stage before we can start developing an appropriate visual response to them.

Below is a summary of our two potential concepts and a few ideas around it. I think this was good at getting a little clarity and really establishing that hunting was the way forward. There's a few ideas there that I think would create a witty and inviting punch-line out of quite a controversial subject.

Below is a quick diagram of a shop window, it just sort of establishes something we've been thinking about in terms of the need to make the shop window viewable, readable as a narrative and engaging from several different viewpoints because a shop window isn't always going to be viewed by the audience straight on, they're shoppers and they're going to be walking past, it needs to attract and grab attention from the angle as they approach the shop from either side in order to really draw attention.

In respons to this, we made some very quick 3-dimensional animals and visuals that give an insight in terms of the aesthetics we would like to explore as well as the ability to view the idea from several different angles, i think increasingly we need to start putting our ideas into very quick 3D visuals to play with layout and such at an early stage. This will allow us to see if an idea is or isn't going to work earlier, hopefully avoiding wasted time.

Next post, the feedback we've got.

Collaboration Contract and creating a concept statement.

We were told to write a contract and sign it to sort of give an inclination into the roles we were going to adopt over the next four weeks, we will then evaluate the process at the end using these initial roles to compare against how it went. I'm looking forward to how monumental the change might be.



After this we filled in a concept statement, really ironing out our interpretation of the brief and finalising the direction and approaches we need to take, the deliverables were the most important thing here, I felt. Especially deciding upon the idea of using a scale model.


We then used the scotch egg example just to clarify what we were doing, before moving onto an action plan that will see us through to next tuesday, delegating tasks between us in order to have a good sense of what was going on. I think that the bits of research we do individually we'll get together, discuss and evaluate their worth and I'll post the sort of outcomes of that discussion on my blog, as I'm sure Vickie will too.