Group Task - Recycling

Notes from Module briefing for 'Design process' new module - OUGD405

After our module briefing on this new 'Design process' module, after being delivered a presentation giving us an insight to the 'What is research?' element of the module we had a studio workshop to kick start OUGD405.

We were split into groups of 5 and given a specific theme to work with, the group I was a member of were given the theme 'RECYCLING' to work with.

Our first task was to create a spider diagram using the theme recycling and discuss different possible angles/perspectives/branches we could approach recycling from, what recycling in this current day and age consisted off and how the world is aware of this.

It was interesting to discuss this amongst a group as we all had different ideas/knowledge upon this this theme from charity clothes to compost to recycling campaigns.

Shown below is a collation of our ideas upon the theme recycling:

After producing this spider diagram we then decided to distribute a certain area within recycling to each person, everybody seemed happy to research further into there specific area which had been allocated. After this we were then told to reflect upon our specific areas and quickly think about how we could expand out area to formulate a rang of research.

As you can see form my notes below I was allocated the area 'Recycling campaigns', on the right hand side is a quick spider diagram of possible attributes I could look at in order to formulate and produce 3 mood boards in response to my area.

We were then asked to create 3 mood boards in response to our given area, one mood board must be primary research the second mood board must be secondary research and the third mood board has to be direction of research.

SECONDARY RESEARCH - RECYCLING CAMPAIGNS

I started off collecting research for my secondary research mood board by searching on the internet for recycling campaigns which are fairy well-known, there were a fair few however I thought it was necessary to research further into the ones that seemed larger and find out there main aims and how long they had been around for. Below are some of the logos I found along with information relating to the organisations:

1) THE GREEN PARTY - The green party are simply a political organisation who's policies are based around savouring the environment in correlation with maintaining democratic approach to the way that the country is governed. All of there policies seem to be driven 'ecological sustainability' which predominantly focuses on a positive attitude towards recycling. 

About the Green Party

The Green Party of England and Wales promotes the policies of ecological sustainability, a fairer more stable economy, a more equal society, a higher standard of democracy and accountability of politicians to the communities they serve, and social justice on the global level as well as in our own country. 

REFERENCE: http://greenparty.org.uk/about.html

2) GET IT SORTED - Are a non-government funded waste campaign founded in Gloucestershire in 1999, as mentioned before the are not-government funded thus succeeding and maintaing there spirit by being a waste management campaign is a true success, they are one of the more larger organisation that I have found that have a positive attitude and approach towards recycling. 

About Us

Get it Sorted was founded in 1999 to run the Gloucestershire ‘Get it Sorted’ Waste Campaign, which worked in partnership with the six local authorities and other stakeholders to promote recycling and waste reduction in Gloucestershire.

Having built up a high level of expertise we decided to offer our services to local authorities in other areas. Over the last six years, we have grown quickly to become the leader in the field for recycling and waste reduction promotions. We have worked with over 100 local authorities, government organisations and businesses in the UK, providing marketing and communications services, specialising in recycling, waste and environmental promotions.

REFERENCE: http://www.getitsorted.org/about/

3) CAMPAIGN FOR RECYCLING - After looking at larger organisations I decided to move onto looking at organisation which were more local, as I am living in Leeds at the moment I decided to look at organisations based around Leeds. 

About the campaign? The Campaign for Real Recycling wants central government and local authorities to act urgently to improve the quality of materials collected for recycling in the UK.   The Campaign has been formed by members of the UK's leading materials re-processors, the community recycling sector and Friends of the Earth. Real recycling is about maximising the economic, environmental and social benefits of recycling for everyone, from the local council tax payer to the global re-processing industry. Our concern is that collection systems that gather a range of different materials in one bag or bin and then compact them could permanently undermine the environmental and financial benefits of recycling. Our campaign aims to influence local authority policy and practice, and build consensus within the UK of the economic and environmental importance of highly separated collections. Through this site we'll explain how real recycling works, feature case studies and good practice and provide regular campaign updates, so whether you work for a local authority or are a concerned citizen not entirely convinced that recyclingn your area is as good as it could be. REFERENCE: http://www.realrecycling.org.uk/ 4) FRIENDS OF THE EARTH - Along with the Green Party one of the most-recognized and established organisations in Britain are Friends of the Earth who aspire for 'a beautiful world, a good life and a positive relationship with the environment.

What we stand for

28 March 2012

We stand for:

• A beautiful world 
  We depend on the planet, so let's keep it in good shape.
• A good life
  A healthy planet is one that works for people too .
• A positive relationship with the environment 
  Acting together for the planet and everyone who lives on it. 

REFERENCE: http://www.foe.co.uk/

After researching a fair few organisation I further went onto collating the first half of my mood board (the left hand side of the arrow), this side of my mood board consists of official organisations logo's , images and advertising campaigns. As we can see from this half the design direction board everything is fairly crisp there is a fair amount of clarity, everything seems to be green, the colour which represents the environment and recycling. 

As you can see to the right hand side of my secondary research design board I have decided to input unofficial recycling campaign logos and promotional pieces such as posters, billboard adverts and merchandise. I have done this as I feel it is relevant to see whether my recipients from my questionnaire which I will conduct as primary research will find this unofficial advertising more noticeable or whether they will find the official advertising more noticeable. The reason behind carrying this comparison out is to see whether the awareness of recycling campaigns noticed and acted upon or whether the design side of these campaigns are letting recycling itself down due to a poor aesthetic.

PRIMARY RESEARCH 

As apart of my primary research I decided to carry out a survey based on a series of questions that I had produced myself in order to find out 'how aware people are of recycling campaigns' as this ultimately affects whether people recycle or not.

Series of questions asked to 50 recipients:

1) Do you recycle ?

Recycle - 80%
Do not Recycle - 20%

2) How long have recycling facilities been offered to you? (out of the 80% who said yes above)

under a year - 32%
1-2 years - 29%
3-4 years -25%
5-6 years - 11%
7-8 years - 2%
9-10 years - 1%%
10 years + - 0%%
3) How many of the following have you heard of?

Green Party - 61%
Friends of the Earth - 43%
Get it Sorted - 0 %
Refined Giving - 0%
Real Recycling - 0%

4) Out of the two sets of image presented to you which do you prefer in terms of building awareness?

Official - 68%
Unofficial - 32%

5) Do you think the design/branding of an recycling campaign effects their level of awareness?

Yes - 91%
No -  9%

From these five questions that I asked my audience I ultimately found that the way that the campaign is designed ultimately effects the awareness of the campaign, further effecting the noticeability and the rate of participation towards recycling. This ultimately effects the number of people that decide to recycle thus effecting how healthy our environment is and how many people contribute to maintaing a ecological and sustainable environment.

Shown below is the design board based on the quantitive data/statistics found from my primary research, this board is purely type based the reason behind this is that I feel that it is important for this board to reflect the findings from presenting the secondary board to my recipients.

As you can see I have decided to pick out the relevant questions from my short questionnaire rather than trying to present all findings on the design board. I felt that the three questions:

1) Do you recycle?

2) How many of the following have you heard of... 

3) Out of the two sets of images presented to you which do you prefer in terms of building awareness?

It was interesting to actually see in the form of statistics that people preferred the unofficial campaign designs in comparison to the official campaign designs, after carrying out the questionnaire I then asked the recipients why they preferred these campaigns their verbal response when having this conversation seemed to be that the unofficial campaigns seemed 'more-relatable' in terms of the the content which had been used communicate the message based upon recycling.  

DESIGN DIRECTION

As I have now collated my primary and secondary research I am now able to create my design direction board. As I am not completely sure as too how to put together a design direction board I have decided to simply select the useful information from my primary and secondary research mood boards, decide on how this will help me and direct me onto a pathway and apply it to my design direction mood board using text and image. 

What does the design direction board consist of:

In my questionnaire one of the questions I asked was 'how many of the following have you heard of' I then gave a list of particular recycling organisations. From the statistics which were gathered the 'Green party' and 'Friends of the Earth were the two organisations that my recipients were more aware of. Therefore I felt that researching into the history and background on these two organisations seemed necessary and beneficial. 

Along with looking into these two organisations a little further I also felt that is was necessary to show one of the stronger unofficial recycling campaign designs that my audience found more appealing as a way of promoting recycling. As you can see the design is based around the coca-cola advertising this is obvious and recognisable through the use of bottle which is focal point in the centre of the page. The design concept is recognisable as coca-cola is a large company which are known worldwide, audiences of a varied-age range are able to relate to the symbolism, it is a a great way of promoting recycling through associating and raising awareness of recycling through synergy with large companies. 

Towards the upper area of the arrow I have decided that it is important to document and consider 'improvements and auggestions' from my recipients from my questionnaire. I found the response fairly interesting and I feel that this could direct the brief which will feedback off from this research after our critique on friday. 

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Notes from the tutorial:

STARTING WITH THE CORRECT SETTINGS:

1) SIZE 

In order to produce a piece of graphic design/ edit a photo correctly we must work with the correct canvas size, unlike illustrator we can not increase and decrease the size of the design and maintain the clarity/resolution, this is due to the fact that illustrator works with vector graphics and Photoshop does not. Therefore it is important to adjust the size that we are working with when opening Photoshop, there are a fair few default settings on Photoshop however if the paper size you want is not available as a default you are able to create your own by clicking on 'custom' as long as you know what paper size you need. 

2) RESOLUTION 

The second step we need to take before using photoshop is establishing the resolution (pixels per inch) we need to work in. If you are working on a print format piece of design the standard print resolution should be 300 pixels per inch, however if your working on a web design the standard resolution tends to be 72 pixels per inch. 

3) COLOUR MODE 

The third step-up step you need to take is to make adjustments to the colour mode, the colour mode is dependent on what format you are working in whether the piece of design is going to be printed or whether it is going to be used for the web:

WEB FORMAT - RGB - Red, Green, Black

PRINT FORMAT - CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black/key

PROOF SETUP:

After learning how to set up a canvas we then moved onto learning about 'proof setup', we loaded an image from our hard drives which had been prepared for us beforehand. The proof setup button simply shows us how the image would look when printed out, the colour different is fairly significant and noticeable and this tool simply makes you aware that what is shown on screen (in terms of colour) is not always necessarily the colour that will be printed out onto paper. 

A screenshot of the image on screen before the proof setup tool is applied, as you can see the colours are very strong, the blues are fairly sharp.

A screenshot of the image after the proof setup tool has been applied, as we can see when the image is printed the colours seemed to have faded, this is due to the fact that printers can not simply print the light at this spectrum of brightness.

GAMET WARNING:

The gamet warning tool which is found under the view icon on the toolbar shows you the areas that need to be put into colour range, these areas are highlighted in grey and are noticeable in order for change to occur.

As you can see this is the same image from above with the blue lights, the gamet tool has been applied here and as we can see the areas have been highlighted in grey. 

In order to reduce the hue/saturation to correct these areas which have been highlighted you must go onto the adjustable layers icon found at the bottom right hand side panel:

ADJUSTABLE LAYERS - Adjustable layers work in a non-destructable manner so that the changes do not effect the original layer, this is a smart ay of working as any changes can be back-tracked easily.

 An example of an adjustable layer, as you can see the original image remains on the background and all amendments are made on following layers so theres no real deconstruction to the original image.

In order for us to get rid of these grey areas shown in the image above we need to increase the hue and decrease the saturation.

As we can see once the increase and decrease has taken place the image will turn red to acknowledge the amendments.

AUTOMATE TOOL

Along with learning how to edit images during our tutorial we were also shown the 'automate tool', the tool simply automatically resize a batch of images, the droplet tool allows you to set what size you want the image and leave it to process.

PANORAMA

In order to create a panorama image we need to select the photo merge tool which is found within the automate drop down menu

We then need to select the image we want to merge by clicking on the 'browse' button followed by selecting the images we want to be apart of this panorama, then check that at the bottom that the 'Blend Images together' button has been selected. 

Vigenette removal - These are the dark shadows around the edge, the tool compensates for these dark shadows and tried to remove them as much as it possibly can. 

Once the photos have merged (in this screenshot I have merged 3 photos together) the edges will still be fairly out of place.  Therefore you need to use the crop tool to edited these so that the finishing image looks rectangular.

The final outcome produced by the merge tool.

END OF MODULE SELF EVALUATION

1.  What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

One of the most important skills I have learnt/developed are the basic tools on Adobe Illustrator. I feel that from the tutorials which were given I managed to pick up the basic skills necessary to use Illustrator such as the pen tool and the blend tool I feel that learning this opened a pathway in which I can now feel confident walking upon. Prior to this module I was not bale to use illustrator/ did not have any confidence producing a vector design however now I feel that I can experiment and continuing practising these skills which will inform my design in the near-future. I also feel that this module has enabled me to be more considerate in terms of time-management, it has opened my eyes to fast-pace designing and producing work rapidly through developing designs (design development) efficiently rather than spending a mass amount of time on one design, in essence I know now how to structure my time when given a one-week brief.

2. What approaches to/methods of design production have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

I feel that my approach to design development has changed in a positive way, my design development has become more structure, at the beginning of the module my development was in one chunk, in comparison to it being structured into initial designs (rough layout sketches), development and further development. With this structure I can now sketch my initial thoughts quickly and as development progresses the additional detail can be added. This has further informed my design development as it has given me a broader range of initial designs to work with.

3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

I think that a strengthen within my work is my application of colour to my designs, I feel that I have consistently applied colour to my work in an appropriate and strong manner and where required have always met the colour and stock deliverable requirements. I also feel that my work, which delivered on my blog, has a sense of organisation to it, each post feeds into the next, research and final outcomes are clearly organised in chorological order.

4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

Although I have blogged self evaluations onto my PPP blog I feel that I haven’t evaluated and reflected as much as I intended too throughout each brief which had been giving to me. I feel that this is a weakness as the importance of self-evaluation is nurtured a lot on this course, instead of evaluating on my own accord I feel that I have had to be prompted to evaluate through critique feedback rather than from the critique feedback and from my own accord. Another weakness that has become evident through this module is that on some briefs my time management skills were fairly poor, I have found that I have been spending more time on one brief than another I feel that in the next module I could improve this by sticking to designated time given on one brief to avoid falling behind, I could also structure my week as soon as I receive a brief in order to avoid this too. 

5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

• Time management when receiving a brief – The quality of my work will improve as I will not be rushing to get things done thus I will enjoy what I am producing more and be more confident in my outcomes.
• Improve with self-evaluation – If I reflect on my work more on my own accord to will inform my design decision a lot better thus resulting in stronger concepts and ideas.
• Blogging consistently – Although my posts are fairly organised and structured I feel that if I just blogged my work at the end of the day then this would save me time instead of blogging in one go, this would also improve m time management skills.
• Writing clear and concisely on my blog, I think that it is important for me to write concisely on my blog when explaining work as at the moment I feel like I am writing far to much irrelevant information, I think if I do improve this I will be able to understand my work a lot better in the future when looking back on it.
• To be more confident with new skills that I have learnt, to apply my new-found skills on illustrator confidently, not to be afraid of asking peers on how to develop these skills and not to be hesitant using them within my design outcomes. 

6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas: (please indicate using an ‘x’)  5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance				x
Punctuality				x
Motivation				x
Commitment				x
Quantity of work produced			x
Quality of work produced		x
Contribution to the group				x
The evaluation of your work is an important part of the assessment criteria and represents a percentage of the overall grade. It is essential that you give yourself enough time to complete your written evaluation fully and with appropriate depth and level of self-reflection. If you have any questions relating to the self evaluation process speak to a member of staff as soon as possible.