OUAN503 - Secret 7" - Brief Summary

Throughout this selected brief I set out to create seven individual designs using a range of refined, experimental methods and techniques to push myself in an area of design and illustration I feel like I've lost touch with. I saw the Secret 7" brief as a good opportunity to explore different media and use imaginative ways to solve a problem in the form of a competition brief, and I believe I have achieved the level of exploration and refinement that I wanted to quite well.

As a brief I think it was suitable for approaching the design and illustration avenue with a huge amount of scope to the point where there were very few limitations on the kind of work we were asked to produce, with the only real limitation being the dimensions of the piece. The breadth of opportunities that were available to be taken advantage of due to the open interpretation of the tracks allowed me to focus on my practice a lot, and in turn I think the skills I've learnt throughout the process will filter into my design work as well as providing new windows of exploration in the future. The range of different responses is evident in the artists I used as inspiration, and also in the visuals present on the finished record sleeves. The time frame for me to complete this brief was around ten days because I started to work towards the competition deadline quite late in the competition timeline, however I think this was a reasonable time to complete the brief with around a day and a half dedicated to each design. Of course my work would have been different and possibly more refined if I had dedicated more time to it, or even done less designs. But my main focus was to gather a range of responses and ultimately experiment - so the refinement was less important to me. Perhaps the shorter timescale that I gave myself to complete all seven tracks for the brief pressured me into working more efficiently and running with ideas instead of pondering on designs which is something I've considered as a bad habit of mine in the past. The challenge for me in this brief was designing with the limitations of the title track and the dimensions of the record sleeve. I haven't had this kind of restrictions of my design and illustration work in the past because it's either been early production work - where there is no rules - or it's been personal work that I have undertaken in my own time. Another challenge was working at a pace where the work was consistently being turned out. For example, there was a day and a half of work time allocated per record sleeve, and if I ran over this time then the time allocated for the next design would suffer and have to be reduced in order to accommodate the deadline. The presentation format was relatively simple, there were a few complications regarding the colour mode at the beginning of the brief when I made a mistake and set the Photoshop file up to RGB instead of CMYK. However, this problem was resolved fairly quickly and I made sure not to repeat the same mistake.

As a whole the Secret 7" was a good mixture of an open brief but still working under certain requirements. I was able to further my practice in a big way by using new techniques and revisiting certain mediums that I hadn't used in a while. In addition it made me work to a certain pace that it was vital to maintain or better and I think my approach to deadlines and managing work has improved over a short time period because of it. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the level of illustrations I was able to create, and the amount I was able to learn. I certainly think there are areas that could be improved and ideas that I should have gone with in reflection, but I'm happy with what was achieved nonetheless.