End Of Year Exhibition Branding: Evaluation

Evaluation

This internal collaboration brief was executed by a group of four graphic designers, who were tasked with creating the branding for LAU's End of Year Exhibition shows. The project needed to speak to a broad target audience consisting of both professionals, families and students, and so reacted by designing a campaign that was both playful and professional to represent us.

The project lasted two weeks and focused on the use of a traditional children's toy to represent the university values, the diverse student body, and their individual development. The proposed name of the exhibition encompassed what the students are working towards, designing, making, capturing, and most importantly creating for tomorrow. The design therefore focused on branding, working on a variety of formats and softwares to produce deliverable for screen and print. This included Cinema 4D for imagery, Photoshop and AfterEffects for moving image and editing, and Illustrator for layout.

Working in a group of graphic designers with varying tastes sought a lot of compromise from everyone. However, this was a great brief in preparation for industry, through the consideration of ways of communicating your idea to a group, as well as ways of communicating your opinions back to others. Despite a last-minute rush, and the creative challenge of fitting everyone’s needs in a way that didn't hinder the design outputs - the group were all happy with the end result meaning the design was successful in communicating its key concepts.

Organisation was a key element that was lacked within the group. Having four designers working on the project meant there was less workload for everyone individually, however organising a time where the group could all meet was sometimes hard. This also included getting hold of all the group members for sharing relevant files to complete the process. Despite this, Google Drive was a great solution for organising everyone’s work into one space and keeping track of the projects development (i.e. being about to easily resort back to initial sketches and research imagery).

Due to the designs focus on the Cinema 4D software, which only one designer was able to use, it meant the process was slow in generating the desired imagery. In turn, this impacted on the speed at which the design developed, as the typographic treatments couldn't really be advanced until the final imagery was produced. This meant there was an initial misbalance of workload between the group. Hence, the methods chosen for a collaborative project was possibly not ideal. However, this was the direction the design wanted to take to have a point of difference from the other design entries and produce industry standard design. Accordingly, this hurdle was conquered by working more intensively towards the deadline.

My role within the project was mainly concept leader, ensuring all the design decisions were considered and in line with what the brief asked, and the research generated, so that the development of the project was efficient and contextually relevant. This included idea generation, typography choices and colour application.

The biggest obstacle was settling on a typeface, with a group of graphic designers who have various strong typographic styles. Nonetheless, with pitching and reasoning, the design was able to settle on conceptually and aesthetically appropriate type choices that were fit for purpose.