OUGD404 module evaluation

The design principles module was one of my favourite modules this year. I really enjoyed the tasks we undertook and I feel my final outcomes were some of my best work.

Researching into colour, type, format and layout were interesting and instrumental in creating my outcomes, particularly studying the Marber grid and Massimo Vignelli v.s David Carson’s opinions of the use of grids in graphic design. These differing approaches made clear to me that design is individual and not everyone follows the same beliefs, however the grid can be extremely useful and can help make designs consistent and bring order to designs. This was particularly helpful to me when designing the Penguin book covers, as I was able to manipulate the Marber grid to fit my own work without the structure of the cover being affected. The resulting covers are my favourite outcome I have created this year. Similarly, learning to use InDesign better and making use of the application’s layout features to create a publication has greatly benefitted my Pantone booklet’s appearance, leading to a cleaner and more professional looking book. This is in comparison to the first version, which was in a completely different format, a fold out leaflet. Due to printing issues I was forced to create a low quality leaflet, which I was not happy with. I was happy I got the opportunity to recreate the booklet in a cleaner, more consistent format and I think it improved the outcome and project greatly. Learning to use InDesign is something I think will help me in future, and the issues I dealt with, for example, justification of text, has lead me to look more into editorial design and is something I am now very interested in.

Type was a principle interesting to reflect upon this module as it was not a requirement to make an outcome from but played a major element in all 3 sets of outcomes. In the Penguin covers I learnt how vital a typeface is to create a design consistent with a certain brand. Originally designing using Helvetica looked good but the design didn’t seem to belong to the classic Penguin books. Going back and changing the typeface to Gill Sans, the typeface used in Penguin covers immediately improved the look of the covers and made them seem to belong to the company. I was also able to apply this knowledge to my exhibition poster later on, when I used the typeface “Tate Regular’ to create the poster. After feedback from a designer on The Designers League, a Facebook forum, I changed my original design to fit the aesthetic of already existing Tate Modern posters. Changing the typeface to Tate Regular, following the same layout as existing posters and also adding in an element of negative space helped to keep the poster consistent to existing posters already in use by the Tate Modern.

As well as these principles, researching into colour was interesting in this module. From Josef Albers’ Homages to the Square I learnt how colours can have moods when placed in different colour groups, and the impact that international Klein Blue has had in the world across topics such as design, art and fashion. Perhaps the most helpful was the research into Pantone and the standardised colour matching system as well as RGB and CMYK, how they work and their uses as I can apply this to my own practice in future.

If I could improve upon any outcomes in this module I would have further developed my posters in the time I had in order to create more versions of the poster, although I felt my final piece worked well. I would also have printed it as I was happy with the outcome and the printed piece would have looked more final and professional.

In terms of the module structure, I would have preferred more time with a teacher to provide more structured lessons and been able to have feedback sessions in order to further my designs and create more successful, informed feedback. The structure of the module was quite unorganised and this led to problems allocating time to the design work, as we were unsure of deadlines.

Overall I enjoyed this module as I learnt a lot from the research into principles, which I can use again in my future practice. I also created some of my best work in this module, which I am really proud of.