Formative feedback Student name
Rebecca Weakley
Student number
524276
Course/Unit
Graphic Design 1
Assignment number
One
The first part of the course focuses on getting started by introducing you to the subject and exploring a brief history of graphic design. Overall your response has been very good – with a good overarching process and final pieces produced to a high standard. Provided you remedy the gaps in your research and development, you will be in a strong place going forward. Overall Comments Project: Sending and receiving Understanding how visual communication works is crucial to graphic design, your first exercise asked you to explore this through playing visual charades. This was good exercise – and it was good to think laterally and see how you could use a different medium to communicate with a message with the work you produced using emoji’s. Assessment potential You may want to get credit for your hard work and achievements with the OCA by formally submitting your work for assessment at the end of the course. More and more people are taking the idea of lifelong learning seriously by submitting their work for assessment but it is entirely up to you. We are just as keen to support you whether you study for pleasure or to gain qualifications. Please consider whether you want to put your work forward for assessment and let me know your decision when you submit Assignment two. I can then give you feedback on how well your work meets the assessment requirements. Assessment Criteria The Visual Communications degree has overarching assessment criteria that link to the course and trace the development of your work. At level one these criteria are:
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Creative and analytical thinking (40%) Analysing information, formulating independent judgments; employing creativity in the process of investigating, visualising and/or making, developing a personal voice. Research and idea development (20%) Sourcing and assimilating research material; and using visual language to investigate, test, interpret, and develop ideas. Visual and Technical Skills (20%) Using materials, techniques, technologies, and visual language to communicate ideas and information. Context (20%) Awareness of critical, contextual, historical, professional, and/or emerging contexts; and personal and professional development.
Your Tutor Report feedback will make reference to these criteria and give you a broad sense of how your exercise and assignment work, learning log and sketchbooks are meeting them. Feedback on assignment Assignment one asked you design a series of postcards that says something about yourself and your interests as a way of introducing yourself. This is a very good start Rebecca, you have some nicely finished final pieces and your cards are produced to very good standard. You also have a good overarching process structure that you worked within which is good to see. Something that is missing in your work at the moment is research – this quite limited and thin on the blog. You do evidence and reference some visuals, but there isn’t a sense you have explored beyond the direction you have already decided in your head. You should evidence everything you have looked at, creating a mood-board perhaps of everything you have looked at – not everything has to influence your final piece, but you should evidence this nevertheless, picking out specific pieces to reflect and analyse more that might be influential in formulating your ideas. We want to see you explore visually, looking at diverse range of ideas from various sources. Your limited research is most evident with the ‘Beach’ card you produced. This was really well finished as a final piece to an excellent standard, but we didn’t see you explore any other ideas or visualising this in a different style or direction. A key part of the course is ‘creative decision-making’. Some of this is intuition and judgement, but we also want to see you explore other avenues and develop other ideas that you can compare and contrast, reflecting on what you feel best answers the brief and is most successful in its aims. This applies also to your final card based around ‘Family’ – for example did you consider a different way of communicating this? If not why? Even with the stick-men idea, did you explore as many ways of visualising this as possible? You also referenced pop-art and Andy Warhol, to help you develop this direction but apart from two images there wasn’t any evidence of any other images you may have looked at. Could you look at other artists in this genre? 2
My immediate thought was actually Keith Haring! This might not be reflective of the style you want to produce which is ok – but the key thing to take away from this is that you evidence that you have looked at other things, showing a broad body of research, that you can draw on to assimilate ideas from. You are starting to experiment with your ideas a bit further however as evidenced in your development of the ‘Creativity’ card. It was really good to see you look beyond the initial incarnation, resisting the temptation to jump and settle on a solution. It is important for the development of your work – you should interrogate your ideas more and push them further, going back to research further if necessary to help you develop and refine your ideas. You should think of each idea as a pathway within which you push your ideas in various different directions. I would think of coming up with 3 variations that are relatively finished and then pick one, explaining why – always keeping in mind the aim of the brief – before refining this to a fully polished outcome. For example with the your yellow ‘Creativity’ card you had an earlier version with a clean san-serif typeface – this actually has potential, if you used a darker contrasting colour and you played with how it interacts with the drawings around it. Could some of the drawings be obscured while others overlap over the text to give a three dimensional interplay between elements? There is potential here for something very refined and well-polished. Having said all of this, this is a very good start and you should be particularly proud of the standard you have finessed your final pieces to. I am confident that provided you remedy the issues with your back-up work you should be in a good place going forward. Sketchbooks There was minimal sketchbook work here. It is important to remember, keeping sketchbooks and a learning log is an integral part of this and every other OCA course, not only because they constitute 20% of your marks if you choose to have your work formally assessed but they are also an excellent way to document and reflect on your development. Learning Logs or Blogs / Critical essays Your learning log could do with a rethink in how you are presenting your work. At the moment all the exercises for each part seem to be in placed in one post making it difficult to navigate to each exercise – I would strongly advise rethinking this so it is easier for an assessor to review your work. Suggested viewing/reading If you haven’t already done so you may want to look at the WeAreOCA blog at http://www.weareoca.com/ or browse through other students work on the OCA Student Site http://oca-student.com/. You may want to post your own work for critique or join some of the forum debates that often contain links to relevant reading and viewing. 3
If this is your first OCA course, and if you haven’t done so already, it's advisable to take The Introduction to Studying HE course. It's designed to introduce you to some important concepts and practical techniques that will help you as you prepare to study in HE. The course is available on the OCA website and should take you between five and ten hours to complete. Pointers for the next assignment The next part of the course focuses on the creative process of problem solving. This is an excellent opportunity for you to develop and implement your own personal strategies for research and development that help you focus your solutions on achieving the applied aims of the brief. Tutor name:
Ash Ahmed
Date:
08/05/2020
Next Assignment Due:
TBC
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