Final Major Evaluation
My project started with a personal experience of feeling uncomfortable in a new place, where I was too anxious about speaking in another language in case I pronounced something wrong making me seem ‘imperfect.’ At first, the focus was about feeling comfortable in language but after doing some more research, I found that I had narrowed down the subject of ‘comfort’ too early because I found many articles and spoke to many people about what their comfort zone meant to them. This is what I found really interesting so, in the end, the final concept of the project was to look at comfort zones and how feeling uncomfortable could be projected as something positive, not negative like the norm. The final editorial piece gives a place for people to share their uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, in a light-hearted sense, in the hope that people will start to ‘get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.’ – Luvvie Ajayi.
I interviewed a few people and asked them about what makes them feel comfortable and what doesn’t, which I found really interesting. Talking to people about the subject was what made this project great, it was research but it also opened conversation. I found when doing this, I could relate to a lot of what people were saying, which really helped. When doing the interviews, I also found that people felt uncomfortable when the microphone was on, and didn’t open up so much - it was when I switched the recording off that the really great conversations happened which was slightly annoying as I didn’t have it on transcript. However, I still took things people said as inspiration for some content of the book. I also found some great responses on he site ‘reddit’ and ended up using these as part of the book too. I would have liked to conduct more interviews, with many different age groups and people in all kinds of situations. I think this would have really helped my project to feel more in depth and varied, and would have really dug into the question of people’s comfort zones and personal spaces.
I thought about different ways that I could create the final editorial piece, one of the ideas was to create a collection of small zines which each represented different forms of comfort, or different people’s responses. I thought this would have been nice as each single book could be a representation of the ‘comfort zone.’ However, in the end I decided that keeping everything together would unite people’s thoughts and ultimately create a sense of unity amongst the topic. I used red and pink as I liked how they created a contrast yet harmony between them, the red was bold and in your face and the pink was subtle which worked well with being comfortable and uncomfortable.
I am pleased with the aesthetic of the final outcome and I enjoyed pursuing a topic which felt close to home for me. I also loved involving other people in my project as this was more interesting that just focusing it upon myself. I think that the piece is slightly more brave with colour than usual, I tend to stray from this and always end up being way too minimal, however this time I wanted to branch out from that, which I think I did quite nicely. I whip-stitched the book and left the spine on show as I felt that this worked with the idea of being an ‘open book’ when it comes embracing the feeling of being uncomfortable and a bit awkward.
If there was anything I would change or improve on it would be my photographs. I would have liked to take more of these and really master the visuals, I feel that the body photos I took were really strong but I lacked confidence with the camera when taking the others photos of people in their bedrooms and the lighting wasn’t great either. I also feel that I should have explored how I could represent the subject typographically even further than I did. These are things that I could possibly change for the final show and my portfolio.
Also, when I printed both my final outcome and process book the printer would not line up my crop marks very well, so some of the headers and page numbers are not in the right place, but this is just a printer error.
My portfolio is very simple, and some of the pictures I would liked to re-take as I feel they could be more confident and effective than they are now.
Overall, I think I was able to capture the sense of comfort well and I hope that when it is read, there is that sense of unity about uncomfortable thoughts.