It was wonderful to receive this feedback! I was thrilled with the comments my tutor made, and also pleased that she noticed how hard I’d been working to address her previous action points. First, I combed through the feedback, noting down any positives and some suggestions and action points to take forward.
The feedback for the assignment was overall really positive. I definitely agree that I could have delved into this overgrown theme even further – it seemed like the possibilities were endless! If I’d had more time to spend on this assignment, I would absolutely have found other ways to completely cover the final spreads, using more of my artwork, my own photos or even real plants and flowers too. I love the idea of playing with scale, especially the foldout – this was something I hadn’t considered but would have worked really well.
I’m pleased that my tutor gave me some things to consider when working with concrete/visual poetry, as this is an area I really enjoyed and would like to explore further. I’ll take these action points forward with me, thinking about how to create a visual link between pages and ensure my text is still legible, even when it overlaps, for instance. I think black and grey text can be useful – it’s conventional in novels or longer, more academic, books, so might indicate to the reader that the content is serious, longer, more in depth or is possibly more formal. It can be bold, against a contrasting background.
Again, collage is an area I would definitely be interested to revisit and utilise for my final assignment, so I’m happy to continue collect more printed ephemera to use or reference. These action points are all vital to take forward for this project – I’ll need to bring together everything I’ve learnt about book design, including layout, structure, positioning, folding and binding.
Lots more positive comments, which were joyous to read! Pushing myself and stepping outside my comfort zone has certainly played a huge part in the progress I’ve made so far; I intend to keep doing this, beyond this book design module.
I’m always excited to get some reading and research suggestions as these has proven inspirational so far. I’ll be delving into these!
In terms of my strengths and areas for improvement, I know that one of the exercises in Part 5 will require me to reflect on these in depth, so I will keep it relatively brief here. I think I came into this module believing I had strengths in traditional materials – drawing and painting in particular – and had a passion for books and a desire to try new methods. Throughout the course, I have pushed myself to develop my digital skills, which I’m going to keep working on. There have been lots of positive comments surrounding my exploration and my ideas, which is really nice to have recognised. I have worked hard on tying my research into my work, drawing inspiration from various places and using these examples of good practice to evaluate my own work against. I’ve been motivated to improve. I think I need to be continually aware of the whole book – the physicality, the design, the type, the illustrations – and what this experience is like for the reader. I feel that I have tried to do that during Part 4 and it’s paying off, so I want to keep this going in my final project. It’ll be a case of bringing everything together and showing off what I’ve learnt and how much I’ve enjoyed the process.
From these most recent comments, I need to continue to push myself, generate exciting and innovative design solutions, and refer back to previous work too. Concrete poetry and collage are two areas I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring, so I feel like these could be the focus of my final project.
Jade's OCA Learning Log 