Evaluation on Project X

After finishing this projects over the month I feel that I have achieved a lot. I think that my group and I had matched the brief correctly and considered each one of our time wisely. After a few practise displays we were fast to think of a concept to work on and did not sit on our hands for too long in this one. I took into consideration that the final display must raise concerns and bring forward a striking conversation. I fee that as a group we found a problem and displayed it in a rather unique way – The posters were both very different yet they kept consistency at the top by having a similar style run throughout the brand campaign.

I made sure that our group did not waste time on the projects and kept bringing forth ideas and pushing overs for their opinions and ideas to bring up experimental concepts for the display. I took breaks when needed to clear my mind and asked for lots of feedback from people around me, this was consistent throughout the last few days with regular meetings with my group and occasional emails back and forth to my lecturers to be sure I was keeping on top of the outcomes to not only my brief but the others within the group.

I took this opportunity of working in a group to gain some kind of management skills for my future. I have to admit that I was not on top of my attendance at the beginning of this project though I feel I redeemed myself by just throwing myself into the project and working from home to get some knowledge behind me on what the project was all about. Once I attended a few workshops I felt confident enough to take control and kind of give off a role model feel to the students in the HND – I’m not gloating. I feel though that I read the other students in my group well and identified their strong skills very soon which was very handy. Doing so straight away helps because you will know who will do the specific workload the best.

The design in all our content was created in a way to not come across as sinister but yet it had to be so powerful to show the local problem but in an approachable way. At first we didn’t get it with our BETA display which did come across too dark and did confuse the audience. Throughout the further design we kept in mind the target audience and I kept showing parts of it to friends, family and lecturers to gain outside opinions from both professional and normal people.

As a group getting our ethics right and along the same lines was essential as that we all had to agree on the given choice of topic that we brought forward. going to certain exhibitions and looking as previous displays on ethical issues really gave me an insight of how I should base the design of our display around with yet a unique look and way around it.

Getting the feedback from our prototype display was so crucial and I was indeed pleased with the constructive feedback that we got, even though it wasn’t a lot and this was due to the unfortunate placement of our display. However we overcame this issue as a group and took it on the chin. After critically analysing our work along with the feedback we knew full well what we should do to problem solve this matter of confusion.

There was talk in my blog not so long from now of having a GoLocal loyalty system yet unfortunately it got scrapped due to how much time we had left and I felt it would be too much content to fit into one display, it could further on go on and branch out from the campaign. I noticed this before I discussed with the group and didn’t want to inform the others because I didn’t want to stress the group out in any way. When it came to presenting the displays to the other groups I then came to the idea that I was right to not go further with it as there were other groups who tried to cram in a load of things and thus doing so made the audience (the other groups) feeling confused about what the message is.

When it came to printing our pieces we done it ourselves at the university. This is because of how much time we had on our hands, we needed the print quick so we couldn’t go to a high quality print shop though we managed to do a great job of it by ourselves and we only needed a few copies so it would have been pointless to go to a big print shop because they usually only work in bulk. Saying this though I did use an online source to print out our feedback forms as we guessed we’d need a lot and the turn around time on them were super fast and this was a case of professional practise. I thought quickly in the act and thought on how we’d get around printing costs and such. I have a few printing contacts so I laid them all out picking the one that would work best for us in a matter of minutes.

Overall the group and I’s time keeping skills were on top and I again feel that I had redeemed myself by just jumping straight into the project with no hesitation by really building the bridge in our group to make us all feel as comfortable as possible working with each other. After getting my final response from people with the printed versions, I am very proud of my group and I and I’m extremely happy to call this work mine. I used to hate working in groups but now I really do enjoy it.

I feel that this campaign has potential and I will probably go on to further developing it.

 

Finals and PDF’s for print

*HD PRINT PDF WITH CROP MARKS*

 

*HD PRINT PDF WITH CROP MARKS*

 

*HD PRINT PDF WITH CROP MARKS*

 

*HD PRINT PDF WITH CROP MARKS*

The final look of the new display

Here is how I’d like to see the display and I have laid it out on screen to get a real feel for it. I did this to avoid wasting time on the day of setting up so I and our group could just quickly put it up and leave without any further experimentation.

Laying it out this way builds a great balance with the content of our display by really contrasting the two colour ways. Having the good side of the discussion first was key because we had to show somewhat of a solution to the issue. We didn’t want people to get flung into the dark end of the issue straight away. However the dark poster really does stand out and draws attention to the display.

After presenting our work to the other groups we were informed that we should go first and we got some amazing feedback from them, I was very surprised and super happy with this as I did have a few doubts. Comments did arise though as to why the lighter coffee cup is a closer than the darker one, We countered the argument by saying it is to say that the local coffee shops are better and stronger and help out more than the actual pathetic big brands. Another argument came up saying why is the colour palette different in each poster, countered again with it confuses the audience as to which poster is good and which is bad. Doing so reinforces the background colours and photo content. One last comment got brought up being that why the gradient at the bottom of the light poster? I answered we’re not too sure but now I feel that it creates a heavenly feel to the poster, again reinforcing the other good elements within the poster.

Here is the final, physical look of our display and we all felt it worked very well and there were no changes to be made from how I laid it out on screen. I just had an idea just now that would have been handy if we had more time and that was to have the posters smell like coffee beans or even have some coffee beans glued to the posters to cover up the gradients? Just spitballing there but I thought it would be a cool easter egg kind of thing!

Next I will be doing my evaluation of this project and discuss how I worked within a group and managed all the tasks I had to do within the project.

Final feedback and amendments

Here is our final feedback from our tutor Based on what we had a few posts ago. The reason to these changes are as followed:

• Change the title as it may confuse the audience, you should keep it looking as dar as possible and not include any light elements within this poster.
• Reduce the amount of information within both posters as you want the image to do most the talking and if there is confusion then the viewers will look to the fact sheet. Change the hierarchy too of the layout just to experiment a little more.
  

  

  Doing this really did favour us and I feel that it works effectively and was incredibly good advice.

• Change all profits to just profits as that we are unsure on the fact that all profits go to distant executives but do know that some profit goes to them. Screenshots above show evidence of the change.
• Stress a little more on the local economy in the light poster, doing so reinforces the message that we are trying to send out and reduces potential confusion from the audience.
• Do not pixelate the Starbucks logo as people may think that it is a slip up in the design or it is a mistake. I was against this opinion but realised that our tutor is also our audience/ client so we should construct on the feedback given no matter what our opinion means. I understood where she was coming from so we chose to make the change. Screenshots from above show the change.

It was also mentioned that we should have a title panel for the display. This is to reduce confusion as people may find the display being two separate displays even if the styles do match.

This feedback has strongly helped us and I feel that it was crucial to get towards the end of the brief. Constant feedback is always needed and is key for professional practise. Next I will be showing photos of the display if ours goes up and also the PDF files.

Bringing in the light side

Along with our fact sheet about the good points on going local we needed to have a poster in a similar style as the current one but showing the good side of our message we are trying to send out. So I got our guy from HND 2 to get us a photo of a local coffee takeaway cup. There was an issue though, the cups from the local shop didn’t have a distinct logo on it so I had to solve this issue in photoshop.

The poster was to be based on a white background to signify the good side of the campaign and let people know that it was the light side of resolving the issue. Below is the final photo that was chosen to use in our final. As a group we were all happy with this.

I managed to get on to Beyond the Grounds website and obtained myself a good quality PNG of their logo which then I image traced and expanded for full control on changing the colours and sizing.

I touched up areas of the photo to make the background look not so smudgy like and this resulted in the cup standing out even more. Below is me experimenting with different sizes of the logo and placement of the logo to make it look as realistic as possible. This process was executed by using free transform, mainly the warp tool.

Next I shall add similar to the other poster a message at the bottom of the cup to show that buying at a local coffee shop helps the local community.

Here I kept the colours strictly the same as the logo to match with the brand elements. I did this because it builds on consistency, also it backs up the point of our hashtag meaning.

Now before editing this further in illustrator I wanted to get one last bit of feedback from our lecturer to just make sure we were going in the right direction. I will be doing a separate blog post on this next.

 

Good information about going local

As our lecturer had told us in our feedback email and feedback form we were to create some what of a lighter side of the issue, she mentioned that we done a good job of portraying the issue though it was too dark. We should have made it a series of 2 posters and I did mention this before our test displays but we simply ran out of time.

Now was our time to create the other half of our display being “the light side”. In order to do so though we had to research fairly heavily into what good could come out of going local and facts about how going local is better for an individual anyway.

As a group we found the following facts key to use in our display. I have portrayed it in a similar way as I have with the other fact sheet (the current one) and have made it look very light giving it a very positive feel. I did this because I wanted the audience to know that it is not all doom and gloom and once they change it will be for a brighter and better future.

So to match the consistency of the design from the current factsheet I had come up with this, matching the colours more to the logo to link it to being a good thing in general and being the main point.

The photo was also taken from a local coffee shop to show a very homely and sentimental view of how local coffee shops have a much easier atmosphere about them.

Next I will be asking our guy from HND 2 to take a similar photo as to the one from the first poster but instead being a coffee cup from the local coffee shop, I will then take it and go in to creating our next and potential final piece of the display.

Big changes to the main poster

First thing’s first was to strongly lean the poster towards the issue of big branded coffee shops not supporting the local economy with their profits. To back this up in the image I thought it would be necessary to have a quote written into the cup saying that all profits go to distant executives. Doing this helps guide the audience into the issue we are actually wanting to send and not the message about child slavery.

I made the text blend into the picture as if it was actually printed on the cup, to do so I used blending tools on Adobe photoshop. I wanted to make the message look a little sinister too so I made the colour red to make it look bad just like the rest of the text within the picture. This is because… CONSISTENCY! The font is different to the campaign font because I wanted it to match the style of Starbucks.

Next was to change the actual message at the bottom to not only stop pointing fingers but to match the issue that we got given for our brief being local economy. What we were sending out wasn’t clear enough to match with the issue we got given and I feel we were just using the old fact as a weapon as such to blind the audience with radical facts.

So to match the rest of the poster we thought we’d take a fact from our current fact sheet being the following message in the image below.

We changed it to this because it matched with what the photo was portraying and matched more with the brief. The child slavery thing had to get scrapped because it was just too much on the issue, it was almost a completely different issue that got put on top of the one we were trying to send. Keeping the style though from the old sentence with parts of it being highlighted helped push parts of the fact out to draw attention.

We also got rid of the hand prints because they were signifying the child slavery fact. We were thinking of getting rid of the pennies within the coffee beans but instead I thought that we could in fact change the meaning to them. Therefore the pennies now signify the local businesses only getting pennies worth of profit because of the existence of giants such as Starbucks that stomp on them.

From the good feedback provided to us from our audience we found that it was a huge must to kind of steer clear on pointing fingers at individuals so I came up with an idea on how we could resolve this issue. Instead of having a cross through the logo of the coffee cup I thought it would be great to censor the logo out – making it blur but leaving it still slightly obvious to who it were. I did this because it confused the audience on trying to figure out what we were trying to get at. This process was preformed on photoshop and I thought the outcome was wicked because it matched with the emotion of the poster.

to conclude this problem solving I feel that the poster looks a hell of a lot more neater and without the hand prints the white space works very well to make the main part of the photo stand out (being the cup). Lastly I’d like to just point out that the text just didn’t go in my opinion, I felt that having it bold and italic just worked better. I know people disagreed with me but I wasn’t a fan of the new font choice so I changed it back. Below is the final look after the go ahead from the group!

 

 

Critical analysis of feedback on the display

Here I will be looking at our feedback and look for some constructive feedback. Overall I thought that we actually did pretty well with how much feedback we actually got, considering I didn’t see many people go to our display. I’m also happy with the fact that the feedback we got from such a simple question was so constructive, we got told as a group that we should add more questions but after the “show” I feel that we didn’t.

Most our feedback was good and there was a pattern that people understood it and in fact said that they’d go local which is fantastic. However there were a few comments such as “I like my Starbucksness” showing that they were not willing to go local.

This project is similar to my other APP project being the mass shooting piece and I feel that I can bring my research from the psychological part of it being how could I go on to change someones opinion, to make them give something up. So I looked back at this screenshot from my APP slideshow to refresh my mind.

After critically analysing our constructive feedback I came to realisation that some of the points above wouldn’t make much sense with how we’d resolve the confusion of our poster, but some points may help! Below is the constructive feedback and I will discuss how we as a group analysed it.

From this feedback we can see that the poster has worked enough to change their opinion on going local but they tell us that the information is not portrayed perfectly as that the info sheet wasn’t near to our poster in this display. From this we must place the info sheet and poster more together showing that they are more of a joint piece and possibly have the info sheet standing out as much as the poster.

Similar to the previous bit of feed back this made the individual change their mind on going local. Instead of being lost with the information instead the individual was confused on the display of the coffee beans and the burnt cups within the pile. They then later on understood why. For our final display I feel that we will not be able to have the coffee beans laying around as that there will be no one to man the display where ever it would be. An idea of mine would be to maybe put the beans in a frame kind of thing but I’m just brainstorming there.

Here’s a great piece of feedback and that is to say that we should not so much only focus on the dark side of the matter but also look at the bright side. We should give the audience the vision of the side that will show what would happen if the individual did go local. We should show the benefits of going local and show the good side of the matter being the solution to a better economy.

Here we another good piece of constructive feedback that tells us that the individual feels that the display is trying to single out Starbucks as an individual and slate them massively. This is not the message we’re trying to convey and we’re more focusing on the problem of the local economy being so poor. This is telling us also that there are too many messages being present in our display and we need to dim it down just a little and put it more to the point. We’re going to consider another take on the poster and most probably will change a lot of it, this will happen in the next couple of days.

Similar to the last bit of feedback, the individual is looking at the wrong kind of message portrayed in our piece and the information we have about local coffee shops are pretty low at the moment. I feel that we should have looked more into the facts about local coffee shops seeing if they pay well to their suppliers or if their suppliers are fairly local OR EVEN if they would eventually consider paying more to their suppliers the more popular they get and to do so some other piece of the campaign needs to come in to play.

So during the display day I heard a lot of people talk about how they like Starbucks and Caffe Nero because of their loyalty points system. In result we could introduce a scheme known as the “GoLocal Loyalty Card”. We’d pitch this idea to all local coffee shops and they’d get a certificate to say that they are supported by our campaign and are a part of the GoLocal loyalty system.

I will wait and sit on this idea till I have discussed it with my group and will work on changing the poster and bringing in the light side element to the display. I will notify the group with changes and will evident this in my blogs to come.

To conclude my understanding of our audiences opinions I will now take it all into consideration and start to amend our current poster looking at changing elements and making our statement less broad.

The display + health and safety hazards

Right so the other day was the big day and we had a fair few things to do, well I say fair few, we only had to print two things off. We did the print in our University and used glossed paper for it because we wanted to be ethical and if we had used the likes of a matte sheet it would run the inks dry within the printer and also look shoddy. Below is the finishing piece on print of the poster and we were all pretty happy with this!

We also thought it would be an idea to display our piece on a light box to boost the effect of the handprints coming through the background.

Below is how our display looked and unfortunately the positioning was very poor in the end!

To be honest I was very disappointed in the location of our display but I found the layout was very well done as that the viewers would see from left to right thus giving them the information first to look at and then the actual poster and display to see after even though these two parts are the things that are meant to grab attention. Another good thing was that the smell of the coffee beans really drew attention to the display.

As shown in the photo below you will see that our display was not very accessible to our audience and I feel that if someone was to show up in a wheelchair they wouldn’t be able to see the display as that the table was just too high.

Also as you can see in the picture above that people kept standing in front of our display which turned out to hide our display from plain site resulting in not getting much attention which I found so annoying and I kept telling people to move but then someone else would come along and obstruct the view.

We also took into consideration that the coffee beans could be seen as a choking hazard so we made sure we had at least one person to man the display at all times.

The table was very sturdy so we knew it wouldn’t jog about, we stuck the info sheet to the table to prevent people picking up and taking it. We also made sure there was enough space for people to lean on the table and write on.

The reason as to why we had to use this designated table was because we needed it to plug our light box frame and the only plug socket that was available was the one in the corner. Also the frame had to lean on something. In my opinion I would have sacrificed not using the light box and moved to a better location.

The display day went well and I feel we did get a fair few comments that would help us develop our campaign further. Like I said I was disappointed in the location and a little of the team work we put into it. But we’re humans and we learn from our mistakes, I will look upon them as a method of self teaching.

 

I hate making stencils!

In our group we got Sam (HND 1) to paint us a shoe box black to match the style of our display. We thought that we should mark this box with the campaign brand being #GOLOCAL kind of like the same way they did in this piece below.

First thing I decided to do though was to make a hole for the feedback cards to go into. I thought I’d make this almost the same size as the cards to kind of show professionalism, showing that we take note of all dimensions of each different element within the display.

Getting the knife through the card was a bit of a struggle and it did kind of ruin the box, but I came up with a solution to fix this. I decided that I was to get a sharpie and go over the white edges to hide the bad quality once the stencil has been done.

The stencil piece was to go diagonal to go along with the italic look of the “logo” and I feel it worked very well with the branding of our display. I also showed the others and they gave me the all clear!

Now after this experience I have grown to absolutely hate cutting out stencils!… And here is why. Below I will show some screenshots to show my frustration.

As you can see at first I tried to use a scrapple and eventually I got so so pissed off with it because it was making it very hard to go through the process. So I thought screw this I’m going to think of something a lot easier to use and there were a pair of trusty kitchen scissors?! As seen above though it is clear that the results of my actions did in fact work perfectly!

The process was long but in the end it was pretty worth it and once I had glued the lid down it looked pretty decent!

Again like I said about my cups I will show the final form of the piece once our display goes up!