Design critiques are a great opportunity to show how you are progressing on design projects. They offer the chance to get peer feedback, as well as guidance from a lecturer, before you commit to a final hand-in on a piece of work. Just having other people’s ideas and opinions on your designs can help you gain insights and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have, it also provides the opportunity to help your peers with constructive feedback.
This week marked the half way point in this semester, so was scheduled as a design critique session, with two projects well underway, the timing seemed right to get some feedback. I was looking forward to not only receiving feedback on my own work, but also seeing the work of my peers as these projects have been solo endeavours.
Having placed our work on a Miro board, so it could be displayed on the large projector screen, each student’s work was brought up in turn. I was very impressed with the quality of my peers work, some of it was truly outstanding and the only feedback I could give was minor adjustments like alignment or inconsistent letter spacing.
I have found when giving feedback to my peers, I prefer to do so verbally. I find it easier to explain my suggestions verbally in writing, especially as these sessions are fast-paced. I also find the sticky notes in Miro small in size and as I struggle with writing consisely especially quickly, I find this works best for me and allows me to give my peers the best feedback I can.
I was happy that during this critique, I received more feedback than the previous session for the other module. The feedback definitely gave me plenty to consider and experiment with before the final hand-in, in January. For both projects I had included more designs than I will need for assessment and saw the design critique as a great opportunity to get an idea of my peer’s opinions. This would help me decide what ideas to pursue and which to leave, I definitely feel, I am much clearer on which ideas to refine for submission. The session was very useful, and I have included screenshots below of my work and the feedback.
For Project 1: Point Line and Plane, I didn’t receive a lot of feedback, but from my lecturer’s verbal feedback and what I did receive, I feel my work is on the right track, I am hitting the brief and the work is of a good standard, I will of course, look at all the pieces again to see if any improvements can be made, but I am happy with my work, with only very minor improvements required.
For Project 2: A Design for screen which demonstrates one of the Articles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I received much more feedback, after consideration I have decided to pursue the designs for Article 4, as they are stronger, though I appreciate the feedback I received for the other designs and it definitely would have improved the designs had I wanted to proceed with them.
The feedback I received for the designs I want to pursue, is also very useful, I don’t agree that the design with the shackles is the best, but design is subjective and I appreciate the comment. I do believe on the other designs the feedback I received is fair and my designs could be improved by doing some more experimentation, especially with the kerning. I kept the kerning deliberately tight to as this was a common theme of one of my design inspirations Wim Crouwel, but I do need to find a balance between the look and the readability of the work. I also think the comment of the number four being lost in the design with the black background, is a fair remark and I think with some adjustment to the opacity, and maybe switching the layer order I can make this clearer to the viewer and improve the design.
After the critique session I decided to experiment further with my designs, using the feedback as a starting point. Below are some new iterations of my designs.
Whilst I don’t think I have arrived at my final design as yet, I think by combining the best elements of these, I will find my final design for submission.
With Projects 1 and 2, well underway and the critique completed we moved on to the theory for the final project a website to host this semester’s work. Whilst it is unlikely we will be asked to write HTML to build websites during our career. A working understanding of how it works and its limitations, will be extremely useful, especially when working with engineers as a team.
To work on HTML, we needed to download some software to our computers, GitHub a hosting service which will store our code, and Visual Studio Code a colour-coded code editor in which to write the code.