Final Task > Reflective report, part 2.
As well as this, we had to think of elements such as fonts to include within our work. We were to find and use fonts that would compliment our work in terms of theme and would match well and a minimum of two fonts were required. With this in mind and knowing that none of the pre-set fonts would work well with my work I explored on dafont.com and tested several different fonts, which appealed to me and chose two from the ones I had picked out. The fonts I had chosen to use were “Pidgin Dance” and “Tripping on Acid”. The former I thought would work well for small pieces of texts such as puzzle instructions and contents whereas the latter would be a good type to use for titles. Pidgin Dance was, in my opinion, reminiscent of children's handwriting styles with it's unevenness and tipping letters. Tripping on Acid was the closest type Icould find that fit the image of text written with sauce in a stencil-like style. Both types seemed to me to be appealing for children and fit the theme.
At this point we were required to start sketching the artwork we needed to place on the template cutters for the packaging. We had to plan what artworks to create in which software. In my case I had used a mixture off Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Paint Tool SAI, all three of which are compatible with each other so it was convenient as I could alternate between the programmes freely. I had chosen to sketch and line art in SAI as the stabilisers in the programme allowed me sketch easier and line neater and coloured and edited in Photoshop. The text and general layout were to be done in Illustrator.
I thought hard about what would make my ideas more different and interesting for children. I had wanted to make it in a way that had something more unique than the usual activity packs but following a brief meant I was restricted with my ideas. With this in mind I curbed my idea to just changing the board game task to making a template and instruction set for a fortune teller/ chatterbox. The idea would be appealing for children because it would be something they could make themselves, take home and reuse and play with that is more novel than a sheet printed with an art for a game. The fortunes in the origami piece would be engaging and entertaining.
Although I had decided to go ahead with replacing the board game with the fortune teller it only occurred to me later on that children may have trouble making it, even with clear instructions. Originally I had planned to place a blank template but I assumed the children would find it too much of a task to draw and write their own fortunes on the template and might even confuse them so I personalised it with the characters I designed, colour coordinated it and added fortunes so it would be ready for them to play once folded.
Working in this manner, although in some ways was more convenient for me, had some problems. I ran into various issues that caused me trouble with finishing my work. Although the programmes I used were compatible with each other my inexperience with Illustrator showed in that I had to constantly rearrange and place my work in a round about way. Knowing that the actual print size of the packaging was to be A5 I doubled the artwork in CMYK format on an A4 canvas and saved as a Photoshop file so as to be able to import it to place in Illustrator but once I scaled down the images when placing onto the cutter template the image wasn't crisp anymore. However I easily resolved this by using the “live trace” tool.
Furthermore I had forgotten to turn the text into objects so that when I worked on a computer other than my own the fonts and some of the images were replaced. This was remedied by installing the fonts on that machine and then turning the text into an object so it does not change. During this time I was also taught about bleed marks, setting the canvas with guides and how to save as an AI PDF file for printing. I had, near the end, made a mistake of forgetting about the 5mm bleed zone and so had to resize, which was not ideal but passable. One last problem I had encountered was the missing link files in both my AI and PDF files in Illustrator. As the link files had been moved or could not be found,I had been taught to relink them.
Throughout the project we were also required to record our progress on a blog as well as promote ourselves get involved in social media so I made an account on Tumblr for my blog to record my work which more like a digital journal rather than a traditional sketchbook journal. I also made a Twitter account on which I post many personal art posts as well uni relates posts. On our blogs we were to also post given tasks that were assigned weekly, most of which were usually related to posting our progress but also to do with what we learned during lectures e.g. vectors versus raster images and talking about influences and artists in our field who inspired us. I chose to talk about the artist OMOcat, mostly because her style feels similar to some of my own and her work made merealise that popularity and success isn't always down to having really detailed work but instead down to originality in style and concept ideas. Her work also is manga inspired and adds a lot more meaning to her work than meets the eye, which I felt resonated with my usual work.
I feel the blog also could have been improved more, starting with more artistic research. Although I had researched a fair amount for the project there wasn't enough research for my artistic inspirations or influences. More posts updating my work and better management would also have been beneficial. Generally I noticed that I have poor time management and was not very organised with my posts or files while working so I realise that that is an important point to work on.
Finally we were to submit the cutter AI files, the cutters and board game as Illustrator PDF files with print and bleed settings as well as all the other files we used. I realise that there is a lot of room for improvement but I think I made a decent effort with my work considering it was something new and uncomfortable for me. I gained an understanding on how to use Illustrator and working on commercial briefs and clients which is invaluable for the future. Should such a job arise I wouldn't hesitate and know what to expect to some extent.
