A brief summary of what I said during my interim critiques is that I have decided to take a different approach to my campaign and base my theme on a student work book. My reasoning behind this is because my formative feedback mentioned to be aware of becoming to predictable with my imagery and visual assets. This did confuse me to begin with because my campaign is school themed so my assets would be school themed too. I was a bit deflated by that to begin with because I didn’t understand until after some clarification on my feedback, explaining that I didn’t want to be too on the nose with my assets, i.e chalk boards, classrooms etc, and what I personally took from that was that if I was to obvious with it, I’m only really stunting myself due to predictability coinciding with unoriginality.
However, even after having this realization I found myself back to square one with no real direction. I had mentioned during a one on one feedback session that my preferred form of creativity and thinking is drawing so I was advised to do just that.
The only thought I had at that point was just to redraw my assets, but this time on paper. The following image is a digital drawing I did on procreate for my original campaign design. I used this image as a background for my graphs and posters but I added a blur to it to make it appear dusted out.
Something I notice now, looking back at this image compared to my new ones, other than this one being digital and the other being analogue is that I can see the lack of confidence and understanding in these drawings. I did the whole thing in maybe 5 minutes. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going with it or what I planned on doing with it but instead just wanted to have something to show. I didn’t even plan on breaking these assets up as individuals - the only idea I had for this design was that it was going to be some kind of chalkboard backdrop and that was the extent of it.
I didn’t have any particular plan in mind when I started drawing these assets, nor was this art style a deliberate choice, it is just my way of drawing (analogue, my digital drawing style is something completely different)
The very first asset I drew was the compass and that’s what kickstarted an inkling of an idea.
I was informed in my formative feedback that my logo was hard to read at a smaller size so that was the first step in redesigning. At this point I didn’t plan on hand drawing everything but I did want to draw a compass in the shape of an A which I could then use in my (still to be determined at the time) new campaign logo/title.
After drawing the compass, I spent the rest of the day drawing the rest of the assets. I took reference from my previous procreate drawing as well as math/science icons and symbols that I found on Pinterest and google.
Once I was done with drawing the assets shown, I started thinking of what I can do with them which was when I thought about a students work book. As a teenager the margins of all my books were filled with drawings like these and that was when I decided that I am going to design my campaign with hand drawn aspects and display my information and everything else included in the campaign like a students work book.
My first focus was to redesign my title/logo. As you can see, I originally wrote out only the letters for the title and this was so I could start playing around with how to lay it out.
These are just a few ideas I had about possible title layouts, playing around with doodles and letters
After seeing how well the title letters worked together, I thought it would be best if I did the whole alphabet just incase I wanted to make a header for a poster or graph of some sort.
The idea behind this was when I was in school, I’d always waste time writing out big block letters for unnecessary titles in my books, and I know I'm not the only one who did and I wanted to include that nostalgic feel.
At this point I thought I may as well include numbers too because I’ve committed to it now. I had an idea for a infographic showing a percentage of some kind with these numbers
Now that I was aware of the angle I was taking with my campaign design I had to start thinking about how I was going to put it together and what other assets I would need if I wanted to continue down the hand drawn style.
Looking at the letters I had created I thought about making a font as well, the main reason behind this was more so a challenge for myself. If I wanted to fully commit to creating every asset of my campaign by hand, then surely that means I need to make my own font too!
The feedback I received during the interim critique sessions were mostly positive I think. My progress so far was referred to as a “big jump” which was a bit ambiguous, I’m not entirely sure if that’s a jump forward, backwards or just up but I’ll like to take it as a positive.
Other feedback I received was to consider more variety with my color pallet which I can 100% agree with. I do want to avoid any bold bright colours as I would like to stick within the range of a work book but I will definitely incorporate blue and red pen ink along with the back. I plan on just adjusting the colours of my vector assets to red, blue or black so I don’t have to consider redrawing the same designs in different colours.
Another thing that was mentioned was that the compass A seemed too thin compared to the rest of the title letters. I do agree with that however I’m a bit on the fence about changing it because I do want the compass to stand out as a compass rather than it disappear into the shape of an A but I will still adjust the stroke on the drawing and see how it works out.
Overall I am pleased with my progress and can ease up a bit now that I have a direction.
