#colour coding and text hierarchy has never been more important

[leithillustration]

Well I missed Sunday, but thank you for the tags @monbons, @artsyunderstudy, @nausikaaa, @that-disabled-princess, @thewholelemon, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe and @blackberrysummerblog. As always, it's wonderful to see what you're all working on. You guys are a true inspiration and this is truly my favourite little corner of the internet.

I am slowly plodding along with Snow On Ice chapter 3. I stayed with my parents in the countryside last week, and was able to get a bit of writing done on my ipad when inspiration hit on a sunny afternoon half way through walking the dog.

Simmy was a bit annoyed to have his walk interrupted by a long sit in the grass. (I didn't even let him eat all the weeds he wanted to. I'm such a cruel dog parent!) But I had a lovely time writing in the sun on the edge of a peaceful field.

Simon is having less of a good time in this SOI snippet under the cut:

I gritted my teeth while my brain sluggishly attempted to process his lecture, but the page of dense notes and tables in my hand was eating up most of my bandwidth. A muscle twitched in my jaw as all the tightly packed words became a jumble of black and white demands, trapping me in the cells of a table that was fastidiously titled ‘Training Schedule Week 4: Penelope Bunce & Simon Snow’ as if Baz thought it likely I could forget both Penny’s name and my own at any given moment. I felt my breath catch in my lungs as my throat began to close up.

I ended up writing a load of this section in past tense since Simon is recalling something that happened earlier on in his week. I used to write in past tense all the time, but now it feels so weird! Simon and Baz are apparently meant for nothing but present tense in my brain.

Hope you're all having a good week. Sending love and no-pressure invitations to share what you're up to if you feel like it ✌️

@youarenevertooold @iamamythologicalcreature @alexalexinii @cattocavo @that-disabled-princess

@orange-peony @cutestkilla @rimeswithpurple @larkral @best--dress

@scribble-tier @theimpossibledemon @artsyunderstudy @raenestee @thewholelemon

@nightimedreamersworld @itriednottothinkaboutit @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @angelsfalling16

@the-beard-of-edward-teach @monbons @katatsumuli @fiend-for-culture

@aristocratic-otter @snowbazdaily @argumentativeantitheticalg @lovelyladzzzz @nausikaaa @blackberrysummerblog

[fragmentalsvc]

Project evaluation

What informed and motivated my design decisions?

One of the most important things for me before designing was to fully understand the topic and subject, without that, I find it hard to create anything with depth. I’ve learned from previous projects that I need a sense of direction while creating imagery. Without any direction I find my work lacks meaning and context and those two things are probably the two most important things to show in my work. After I felt comfortable with the subject of my book I could then look at visual inspiration relating to my two words. Although looking at visual inspiration was helpful most of my initial ideas came to me when I really wasn't looking for them. Setting myself a complex target of attempting to visualise sound really helped me to intensively search for ways in which I could achieve my ideas. 

What changes and developments has my projects gone through?

Throughout the whole duration of this project, I had one question that lead my research and experimentation. How can I visualise sound into shape and colour? This question meant that my development and experimentation followed a structured path and allowed me to go through clear changes. As soon as I felt comfortable with the visual theme of my project I made little changes and really stuck to my original ideas. Although I made very few large changes I made lots of small developments on every single spread, almost all the developments involved typographic changes as early on in creating my project I had a lot of issues with the continuation of point size and typeface throughout my book. 

Did I manage my time well throughout the unit?

Time management is always an important thing for me during a project. I think this is down to my nature of never really being fully content with ideas and images. This drives me to then push myself with idea generation and image-making until I'm as happy as I can get, as mentioned earlier I like to feel comfortable about understanding what I need to do and this really helps me manage my time effectively. 

As I had to learn a new skill involving creative coding I knew it would eat up a lot of my time so I set it as a priority and I assigned a large proportion of my time to learn and experiment within Processing and p5.js. This decision definitely helped me manage my time throughout the project as I had all my imagery available to use during the creation of my book. I could imagine that creating your book as well as creating imagery is a very inefficient way of managing your time. Breaking the duration of my project into sectioned helped me save time although sometimes I would have to go back and amend certain images after completing them, but this was as expected.

How did I respond to my feedback?

The feedback of this project certainly shaped how I presented my ideas and imagery. The majority of the feedback given was surrounding issues with typography which then had a knock-on effect on my layout, colour changes and image placement. I made an effort for everything to be connected to help my narrative and to ensure continuity, so once I changed a small detail of type I found that very slightly, the whole page would read much better. This was the case on some of my earliest feedback as I needed reminding to be conscious of the hierarchy of my typography. Once this was bought to my attention I found that the placement of text and imagery felt much easier and I started making creative decisions based on learned knowledge. Another reason why I felt feedback was so useful is that it just straightens your path when attempting open and broad briefs like these. 

Are there any areas of my design process that needed more practice?

In terms of my design process, I feel like I could have been slightly more experimental with my approach to the layout of my book. Although I am a fan of my clean layout decisions I feel like it is a very interesting and fun topic. The whole basis of being able to hear colours and shapes seems very abstract to the normal person and I feel as if I have not shown this with my design process. I would have loved the chance to create another book about the same topic but take a completely different approach and take it down a much more abstract and experimental route, this would have challenged me much more but I felt with all of this along with using code to create images would have been a giant task to achieve and would have been too much. Even before this task was given to us I had been really enjoying looking at editorial layout and found I naturally became much more interested in a clean and classic approach rather than an abstract and experimental one, this may have been a reason as to why I chose the method I did.

What have I learnt from this unit of study?

I have learnt so much during this study, I could definitely say that I have probably never learnt so much about a range of areas within such a short time, as well as this I feel like I have a relatively deep understanding of certain areas which is great considering it is only my first project. A massive improvement of my understanding of typography and editorial layout, as well as a much better understanding of adobe software including InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. It is great that I have unexpectedly learnt so much through a lot of the issues I mentioned earlier including how colours can be so different depending on how you are viewing them and how printers work.

On Reflection are there any improvements that I would make to my final outcome?

No matter the outcome I could always find improvements to my outcome. In this case, I feel like I could of better visually represented my idea in a more interesting way, I feel like showing the context of the subject is a big part of visualising an idea and I could have definitely done more of this thought the duration of this project.