Evaluation

The way in which my cover and double page spread meets the needs of the brief is that for the cover I have used my own image that I have created. I made this by drawing it by hand and then I scanned it in to be able to edit on Photoshop. For the double page spread I used a found image from a photographers website, referencing this image on my blog. Also referencing the article on the blog in full. The only way I think that it fails to meet the brief is that when printing it off, I realized that there are a few mistakes that I haven't noticed before when I did practice prints. I will reprint these for portfolio though. The strengths of the visual communication on my front cover is that I think it portrays the theme really well, illustrations that I have done show what I am basing my subculture on and also the shape I have done these illustrations in, both these components link together to make the visual communication work. The weakness of the visual communication I feel is on the double page spread. I think that by only having that one image - it works but I don't think it fully puts across the subculture with just the single photograph. The way in which the pieces could be mis-read by the audience, the audience being, the usual customers of Creative Review and people interested in the surfing culture, I also don't think there is a limit on the age group although I think that it would be from the age of 18 youngest. But the only way I think that this could be mis-read that it could look as though from the cover it is a issue on illustration. Although if you look under the title it does say it is 'The Surf Issue' but this isn't automatically visible. A way in which the front cover could be developed or improved is that maybe to put something else on there. I think that if I had more time with this cover to develop it further I would want to do some more illustrations to put along side the ones I have on there. With the double page spread I think that I would put a little more detail in around the text. I am happy with this layout though as I think that sometimes the less on a page, can look better and less daunting.


My time keeping throughout this project I think I kept quite well. I did all my research at the start and gave my self enough time to do designs and enough to be able to change these designs if I needed to. I think that I did enough research to be able to get my ideas and final designs and get a  good understanding of the subculture and its history, style and graphics.I used my research to generate ideas by looking at David Carson and other poster designs. I liked David Carson's illustration designs and so I came to my final from going online and searching through a lot of his art work. Also when I made the VW Camper van on illustrator it came from the culture that is well known. It was quite an obvious thing to look at for the surfing culture and I thought it would be a good idea to make it so that any audience would instantly recognize this cover as a surfing cover. I experimented during the project using InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop to create different ideas and change colours. As a personal target I wanted to use colour in this project and so I played around with this a lot in this project. The parts of the project that I enjoyed and feel that i worked my best at was the designing process, experimenting with ideas and colour because I wanted to try new things out and this was exciting but on the other-hand the part that I didn't really enjoy was trying to get InDesign to work properly for me. I have never used this program before this project and so I found it quite difficult to try and learn parts of it in such a short amount of time. The printing process was also quite difficult, having problems with the sizing when trying to get both the pieces to print from InDesign and Illustrator. To make future projects easier I want to develop my skills with using InDesign, I think that I could really benefit from this.