Unit 54 - Digital Graphics For Print

UNIT 54 – DIGITAL GRAPHICS FOR PRINT – LUCOZADE – EVALUATION

For me, the Lucozade project for HA5 was quite a good bit of work. Although with its challenges, it was quite enjoyable as well as a good learning tool.

HA5 was all about creating a design using manipulated images to be used on the wrapper of Lucozade bottles. Working with three different organisations – FRANK (a drug education service), Brook (sexual health clinics) and YoungMinds (a mental health service for children and adolescents) – we had to create three separate designs which promoted each of them.

HA5 was split into 7 tasks;

- Creating three moodboards for the three organisations

- Creating a moodboard for Lucozade

- Creating a moodboard of manipulated images

- Drawing up any ideas we had for our designs

- Taking photographs for the designs

- Manipulating the photo’s using editing techniques as well as showing evidence as to how we did this

- Producing the Lucozade designs

By creating the moodboards I was able to improve my researching skills. It also helped me with planning my idea because I had a general theme that could be stuck to and plenty of inspiration.

I have never been much of a photography fan, be it my own photos or someone else’s. It just doesn’t appeal to me but the process of me taking photographs and then placing them into a contact sheet made me have a slight appreciation for what professional photographers have to go through – with things like movement, angles and how many photos you have to capture before picking the perfect one.

I did enjoy the manipulation part of the project. After researching existing manipulated images, I found myself admiring a lot of them because you could tell how much hard work these people have done in order to create these fairly mind-bending and astonishing images. They all looked great so I knew I had a task of creating something at least half as good as them. Because it was my first time doing image manipulation, although not an excuse, I think that is why mine don’t look too amazing. They don’t look bad though, which I suppose is a positive.

The biggest thing I have taken from the project is the skills I have acquired using programmes like Illustrator and Photoshop. Although not the best examples of this are from this project, my subsequent work using these programmes since doing this project have greatly improved. I am now very confident using these two programmes as well as creating work of a fairly good quality.

My final images didn’t exactly match my original plans. This didn’t really bother me though because I didn’t realise how tough the project would be before beginning it. I am still relatively pleased with my final outcome because, although slightly different from my intentions, they still look okay if you take into consideration my inexperience on the topic.

In conclusion, I see the project as a good learning curve. This is because although the work wasn’t of amazing quality to a professional standard, it was still okay and it has proven to be a great project for me because my work since the completion of this project has been very good.