Evaluation

The way in which the two pieces meet the brief is by doing the two double page layouts for the fictional magazine Photography Now. I have made the sizes 200mm x 200mm, done a body of photography work to edit and put onto the layouts. I have linked my designs to a layout that I found for inspiration, as I liked way that the layout had been done with the image and text. So I tried to follow this type of layout, minimalistic and simple, to me this is a lot more appealing on a magazine layout. I have also written an article for the magazine layouts which I think works really well with the photographs that I have. The ways in which my work fails to meet the brief is maybe a full plan for my photos, I knew what I wanted to do with my images and so I had an idea in my mind of the images I wanted and anything else that I took photos of were just spare of the moment images which worked really well in Brighton as it is pretty unpredictable what you will find there, it’s a fast changing city. I knew that I wanted the pier as my main photo, and so I focused on this area a lot.

The strengths of the visual communication in these pieces of work is that I have made them simple and quite minimal because I think that the image that I have chosen to use on my first double page spread is quite bold, so I wanted this to stand a lot, so the visual communication in this works well with the title and the image they link and work perfectly together. The weaknesses I think that my layouts have is the images on the second page. I have cropped right down on the smaller square images, so these don’t quite show Brighton as much as the first image does, but as I have that bigger image being the first piece to be seen, I don’t think this matters quite as much as if I was to have another photograph there.

The ways in which the piece could be mis-read or mis-understood is on the second page, like I have previously said in the part about my weakness, where the images don’t really portray Brighton.

The practical ways in which I could develop or improve on this piece would be to when making the document, I would make the columns to 5 straight away as I at first was making the piece with 6 columns and when making the double page spread, when placing the text I found that the text columns were too skinny and I that sometimes there was just one word on a line.

My time keeping with this project was good. I feel that I am getting better with this as every project goes on as I am getting used to the amount of research that I need to do and the amount of designing too. My research for this project was good, I feel that I found out all the layout information that I needed from the Internet and books. I found out good information from books mostly about grids and columns, this made me look into normal magazine layouts and try to see the amount of columns they use to make their layouts. I feel this helped me a lot to understand. I used my research to generate ideas in this project. I found layouts that I liked and were quite simple and keep a colour scheme using minimal colours within this. So I used these layouts to get ideas and get inspired.  Throughout this project I have experimented within InDesign with interactive design, making slideshows with images and also I have experimented with layouts a lot.

The parts that I enjoyed most about the project was taking the photographs in Brighton, this was because I have done photography previously and so it felt good to revive this love for photography. Also I liked the designing and making on the layouts, this was because I gradually learn` new things as I experiment on any of the adobe programmes and this time round was no different, I like to lean new things about the programmes I am using a lot. The parts of the project that I enjoyed least about the project were trying to choose a font that was suitable for the images to match to. I eventually chosen two that I put both on to the piece, this was because I think that it made my piece a little more interesting using more than one font. The areas that I found challenging within this project was the interactive design on InDesign, although I enjoyed making this, I found it all quite fiddly as there was quite a lot to remember to make each part.