Crit

I had the chance on Monday to show my work to the class and receive feedback on my design. What should be tweaked and what works well. This is always an invaluable experience as it allows you to gain perspective and see your design through other peoples eye's. It also forces you to justify every decision you've made and really critique your own design in a way not possible without this process. All of my classmates were really positive with my designs and didn't have a bad word to say about them. There were however a few they suggested I change.

Book Cover:

Everyone thought that my book cover was really successful at portraying all the messages and themes I wanted it to. There were however a few very small things that I overlooked. 

• The first was that the text on the spine was facing the wrong way. This was fixed with a simple use of the rotate tool. I rotated it 180 degrees, thus fixing the problem.

• The second was that the text on my blurb was fairly narrow and thus, hard to read. I realised this myself before the crit but had no time to attend to the issue. I realised the text was also a little bigger than it needed to be. This allowed me to lower the size of the font and then make it  a slightly wider font face. This made it more legible and allowed it to still fit nicely in the gap I had allocated for it.

• The third was that the tower at the base of the title was a little too close to the authors name. I simply selected it and moved it further over to the right, giving the title a little more breathing space.

Having fixed all the issues that arose in the crit this is my final book cover design for The Big Sleep:

Everything works together really well. All of the themes and undertones I wanted to be present are there and they all work together really well to create a successful, aesthetically accomplished and unique cover. It is also a original and full answer to the original brief.

A2 Poster:

My poster was equally as successful in the eyes of my classmates. Only one or two points were highlighted:

• A highlighted building should be added somewhere at the bottom to link it to the cover a little more and to add definition to the bottom of the page. This was a very valid point and one that I tried to implement extensively however, I came to the conclusion that it didn't really work with the rest of the poster. One solitary building looked out of place and when I tried to add more buildings it became too crowded and was distracting, thus detracted from the overall design.

• The quotes and text on the left hand side was too narrow. This is a point that I agreed with and had noticed before the crit. Like on the book cover I simply chose a slightly wider font face and then made the text slightly smaller. This fixed the issue and made the text far more legible.

• The colours don't quite match the book cover's. This was a simple error on my part. I hadn't properly configured the colour profile to match exactly with the Illustrator file the book cover was in. It was fixed by going into the "Edit" window and opening the "Colour settings" dialogue box.

Having fixed these issues this is my final design for the A2 poster advertising the book re-release:

I am really pleased with how this turned out. I simply combined all the elements I thought necessary from the book cover and really gave them pride of place. It is a really effective and eye grabbing poster by itself but it also ties in perfectly with my book cover design and conveys all the same themes and messages. It is a very successful poster I think.