Professional project
I have created a series of three posters for my final piece in this project, this is accompanied with a short animation, which explore and serve as a campaign for endangered wildlife in Britain.
My main aim for this project was to attempt to create something slightly out of my comfort zone, so that I would really be pushed to research and look really in depth into. I struggled in the first stages of this project in deciding what to do, advice given to me was to do something in which my passion lies. Initially I wanted to experiment with typography and martial arts, which is a combination of an area of design, which I like, and a sport that I have been passionate about from a young age. Although I felt this could be a nice project, I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself enough, I personally felt like I wanted to have some kind of meaning and to be able to solve a problem so that it would serve as a driving force to my project. I ended up looking into my love for animals and working on issues that threaten them. This led me to look into endangered species of wildlife and then specifically wildlife in the Britain.
A lot of time was spent on the project just trying to research into which species of animals were actually endangered in the UK. On the surface there are many articles claiming a top ten most endangered, but they all contradicted each other. A big part of my project research was simply finding a reliable source of information. The difficulty in finding this simply reinforced that what I was doing is good, although animal endangerment is widely campaigned about, there is essentially nothing when it comes down to this country and it is highly ignored.
Once I had the information worked on actually coming up with a concept for my campaign. I wanted to express how important the issue was, without being to forceful, my aim was to make people aware of the issue and therefore encourage people to look further into it. The concept I chose to work on is “Don’t let Britain’s wildlife disappear” this I felt had many avenues but I eventually decided on creating paper stencils which were mounted on white backgrounds. The stencils themselves took quite a while to make and I soon realised that the best option was to look into laser cutting. This helped me speed up my work and opened new avenues for design as I was then able to push my concept further by burning parts of my tag line onto the poster.
The second aspect of my work I felt should be an animation, this way I am tackling the project from still print perspective and a digital perspective giving my campaign a large audience and multiple platforms. I chose to design the animation in a similar way to the posters, using vector imagery, this way I felt I would keep a system in place, to make the work all encompassing. While designing the animation I did encounter a few problems, first of all I found myself spending a lot of time designing imagery. The problem was that I probably didn’t distribute my time evenly and in retrospect I would have allowed myself more time to actually make the animation itself. Secondly I made a fundamental error of not rendering my work as I went along, so when I rendered the final thing, I actually realised it was a lot faster than I wanted it to be. This in mind I still feel the animation works, it uses nice visuals and finishes strongly with type disappearing to strengthen the concept within the animation. If I could spend more time revisiting the project I would definitely work on timing of the video and I feel with that fixed it would be just as strong as my poster designs.
Working on this project did have its issues, at many points I found myself going back on myself. This being said I feel I dealt with the project very well and I am happy with the outcomes, I am especially happy with my posters and feel like it could be some of my strongest work to date. I am really happy with the project as a whole and felt like I got to explore issues that interest me and to try out new techniques and equipment, which I can now use in the future as well. From this project I feel I have developed as a designer, I made a few mistakes but feel as a whole I have learnt from them and can work on them as I progress onto third year.