Evaluation

My Poster

I have now finished the project and overall I am fairly happy with my final poster seen here. First off it answers the brief by promoting and aspect of social media this being following on twitter in the style of propaganda taken from the 1900 - 1950's my inspiration being form world war two. I am happy with the poster itself as it looks pretty much how I had planned, the colours are sourced form the original poster minus the twitter colours so I think these work well together and the blue of the birds really stands out and makes these the focal point of the poster. At first I thought the blue might be too strong to work and look out of place but I think it works and fits in with the rest of the poster. 

I am really happy with the typography for the poster at first the font I had chosen to use didn't really work or look like the original but after the crit I changed this based on the feedback I got and the new font really works in my opinion and links back the original poster but also the timeframe of ww2 I also think the hash tag in the word following works as you can tell it is a hash tag but also the text stay readable and this is what I was aiming for. 

I think I could of improved the birds however as I struggled to draw these in 3d like the original so I settled for 2d with a similar perspective to the barrel in the original poster.  I would have liked to experiment a little bit more here with the 3d effects in illustrator to see what I could of created or at least practised drawing a 3d twitter bird to see if I could create something better than the birds I eventually used. 

Overall I am happy with my final poster but I still think there are areas I could of tidied up a little as well as a few more experiments I could of tried on my work. 

Ideas and Issues 

At first I found it hard to decide what aspect of social media I wanted to promote in my poster. However as I researched more into the my chosen areas of propaganda I found that ideas started forming based around these poster and the aspect fitted into these ideas. This is where my first solid idea came from based around the someone talked poster I researched I came up with the idea to promote poking on Facebook as the giant hand led me to this aspect and the imagery of the poster was really strong. After developing this idea further however I decided that it would not really work or have the effect I would want as finding something to go in the hand that was as powerful as the original posters imagery was near impossible and I began to doubt the idea and how well it would look. 

This is the first main issue I had in the project but I found coming up with ideas a lot easier now I had a sense of the propaganda I was going to use as inspiration and I decided to go along with my of new ideas which I really liked based on the aspect of followers on twitter. I developed this idea in my sketchbook coming up with the imagery I wanted and the slogans and taglines I would use on my poster as well as looking at colours. 

Other issues I cam up with was my limited knowledge of illustrator but as the project went on I learnt more about the program and started to overcome these problems to make my poster. 

Pitches and Crit

I found the pitches and the crit to be a very helpful process on the project as you get everyones views on your work and ideas. Which gives you a nice range of views to work from. Particularly on the crit as everyone has a different opinion on what worked and what didn't on your poster so you always have something to improve on or justify. The pitch this project whilst being helpful at the time I think my change in ideas meant I didn't everyones opinion on my new idea which made it hard to see if people liked it or thought it would work, so if I did the project again I would of like to pitch my new and final idea rather than the idea I had at the time which looking back now I think is pretty weak. 

Blog and Sketchbook

First off on the blog I thought my research was thorough and detailed into the different ranges of propaganda, at first however it was really broad and covered most any propaganda from the 1900 to the 1950's but I thought I narrowed it down well to styles or artists of propaganda that interested me and that I would think about using as inspiration for my poster. These were the Spanish style propaganda from the civil war in 1938 and Henry Koerner who created american propaganda during world war two I thought my further research into these areas was again detailed but also relevant and useful to what I wanted to do with my poster.

Once the research was done I thought I kept the blog up to date so people could see where I was going with my ideas and the main inspiration behind them as well as keeping people up to date on how I used illustrator to make my poster. I explained my change of ideas half way through the project and the reasons behind this and the new idea I was going to use. As well as putting in pictures of some rough sketches of my ideas so I could explain these further and in more detail than if they were just in the sketchbook. 

Finally I used the blog to post about the progress of my poster and how I was making the different sections and the tools I was using to do this.    

Overall I though I used the sketchbook well throughout my project getting loads of the ideas I thought off down in the sketchbook in rough sketches at first but the ideas I liked I tried to experiment with and draw up in more detail so the idea would become more developed than before. Also featured some drawing practise here and research to show my progress on the project in my sketchbook as well as my blog.