To crit this brief I was in a small group with John as the crit leader. Everyone in turn told him what our work represented and why and then he gave us all feedback.
My feedback from john was really positive and it was great to get the opinion of someone who works in the industry and can pick up on small things that other students might miss.
John really liked my work and said it was well produced but had a couple of comments that I never even thought about.
The first comment was on the positioning of the stamp on the front of the envelope. Because the address was on the back of the envelope to leave the front clean and clear for the imagery and text, the postman could get really confused about where is he is supposed to send it. John suggested that I move the stamp from the front of the envelope to teh back so that it sits above the address. This is a really simple and quite obvious idea but I never even thought about it. I have since created a version of the envelope with the stamp on the back instead of the front.
John's other comment was regarding the image of the megaphone. Even though the megaphone was in the prisoner position with hands tied up, it was still a full megaphone capable of being used. John suggested that I need to make it more obviously broken or damaged or plugged or something to show that it isn't working properly rather than having it as a full meagphone. This is a really fair point that I had only thought about really briefly when making the image. I really couldn't come up with an idea of how to damage it or make it not work without making it unrecognisable as a megaphone. Since then, I have had some ideas such as having a large crack on the megaphone held together with a plaster or something to show that it is damaged.
Apart from these points, John was really positive about the work.
I am really pleased with this project and impressed with the finished result. The biggest issue that I have with it is the stock. I had a lot of issues with the stock.
The main problem was that I did not want it printed on matt paper but the satin and gloss paper would crack when bent or folded. In the end I had to settle for the matt paper which I really do not like at all. The texture and teh look of the paper is quite unappealing to me and I don't think it shows the work off in a positive way.
On top of that, the paper drained the intensity of the red colour and faded it resulting in a pink colour instead of the bold russian red that I wanted to print.
I know now in future to do a test print with lots of different colours so that I can see which ones work best. I assumed that the colour would come out like the screen colour as was the case with satin paper but I didn't know that matt had this effect on colour.
Another issue was printing on both sides of a piece of paper. This is possible, but can vary as much as 4 or 5mm in alignment. My flier really needed to be perfectly in line, so I had no choice but to print off the front and back on different paper and stick it together. not only did this have an unprofessional look to it, but it was really difficult to cut out the megaphones and stick to the outside line. What ended up happening was that both cut ot megaphones had totally different outside edges and then I had to cut them again to make them fit, sometime takin off parts of one or the other that made it look like a really bad job.
I also wanted to print on the inside of the envelope, but I ended up just leaving this blank which looks quite tacky.
So in retrospect it was really the printing stage of the project that went wrong. This is something that I am totally new to and I'm going to have to get the hang of it quickly to produce work to the best standard I can. I know now that I need to do some test prints and make sure I book a slot in the print room that leaves me enough time to deal with any issues that I have so in future I should be more prepared to handle situations like this.
I am really happy with the actual images and ideas that I have produced and I think they make an interesting mailshot which is informative and which would make people interested enough to look further into the ideas and go to the website.
As an extension to the project it would be really good to actually build a mock website or even just a homepage for 'knowrussia.com' which had a similar style to these posters and mail shot.
It is the digital imagery and ideas that I am most pleased about with this brief.
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