OUGD406: Studio Brief 04 - Speaking from Experience (Evaluation)

Out of every brief completed so far this year, I would say that this has been the most enojoyable simply because it’s been based all around the past 6-8 months spent at university and on this course. The people I’ve met and worked with throughout the time on the course have all gone on to influence this brief, through their quotes on day to day life.

The final content of the piece is a mixture of common quotes but also ones that will actually go towards advising the first years coming to uni next year. Quotes such as ‘Book your print slots now’ will genuinely be helpful for new students as this is something I naively ignored at the beginning of the year.

My whole aim for this brief was to create an entertaining piece that would interest students into reading it, but also within the process of making it, I managed to turn it into something useful as these can be used as tea/coffee coasters within the studio or within their own flats, and will hopefully act as a constant reminder of what to expect within first year.

Creating the final piece was something that I enjoyed as I much prefer creating a physical piece but also I’m very much interesting in packaging and so making packaging for the coasters was an enjoyable yet challenging process.

I think that the colours work well in conjunction with each other as not only do they contrast well enough to be eye catching but they fit perfectly with the tongue and cheek content of the whole piece. The typeface I used also fits with the piece as it’s bold and striking much like the illustrations and colour scheme used.

After presenting my final peice to a couple of peers, one thing that was pointed was with the content of the piece. They said that only really one coaster was advisory with the rest being quotes from other students, maybe if I had done a half and half split of both advice and entertaining quotes it would have made for a more informative piece which would have ultimately been more useful to first year students.

A few suggestions were along the lines of ‘A blog a day keeps the stress away’ and potentially others that talk about where to shop, or go out in leeds for food, drinks etc. Having other pieces including this would have made for a much more useful set of coasters rather than being purely entertaining.