I was asked to do the yearbook for the DFGA course, a first I was a little skeptical about taking on the brief as I wasn't sure if it was right for me to do. The yearbook was to be a digital interactive PDF, this isn't something out of my comfort zone and I have worked on interactive PDFs before, it was more the fact of working with the DFGA course, as I had been told they were quite difficult and there was a lot of personalities.
This was the work that I produced for the Yearbook.
In terms of working with the course, I did find it quite hard. I was in constant contact with the course leader and he set up regular meeting to discuss the progress of the yearbook and give his opinions on what I was doing. The feedback was always positive and working with him has been good. But the students have been hard work in getting the work off them, they didnt really seem to understand the idea of giving work that was suitable for the template which was provided as alot were portrait images and some just had too much within one image. It was asif they were trying to cram as much work into the spread as possible, but really that was making it worse. Because of this, the content had to be reworked and I had to wait around along time to get anywhere with it. The same can be said for the tutors, it has been difficult getting the relevant content from them. Even though we set up the meetings, alot of them were the same as the progress of the yearbook was quite slow.
It was frustrating as from the start I set working on the brief straight away, since Easter the template of the whole yearbook has been designed and the tutors and students were happy with it, Ive just been waiting for all the content as none of this has been in my control. This was the one reason why I had doubts in my mind about taking on the brief.
Even though there has been troubles with the access to the content, working with both the tutors and the students was a good experience, it was good to work with other people that I didn't know and within another course discipline, this opened my eyes to a new area of design that I didnt really know much about. Working on the project has developed my own design skills as working with the interactive PDF isnt something I tend to do within my practice on a day to day basis, but this has made a good change and something that could be of interest in the future within other possible projects.
I think the experience of this live brief was different to the last, this one hasn't gone so smoothly, but thats because the ball wasnt really in my court this time, the DFGA course were in charge and I was effectively working for them. At times I did feel as though they didn't really care about the yearbook and that had an effect on my motivation for the product, but in the end when all the content did eventually come in and I could work on the yearbook solidly to get it all finished, the end product does look great and the interactive elements work a treat.
The course were positive about the yearbook and are using it within their end of year show, by putting it on a touch screen monitor, which will be good to look for and check out. There are some positives from working on live briefs and that is one. Seeing my work on an interactive screen that is hopefully going to be 90" will be amazing and should do the design justice!
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