Visual Skills Brief 3 Evaluation

Finished book cover for 'The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women' by Naomi Wolf.

What went well

• I managed my time a lot better during this brief - not staying up until 5 in the morning on Sunday night/Monday morning to finish work that I should have made time for before.
• Using a different media - I usually stick to inks, whether in a pot of a pen, but I think the gouache works well here, almost emulating digital with flat opaque colour, but still having a nice handmade quality. 
• The colour scheme - simple is often better. Although we didn't have limitations on colour for this brief, I still chose to limit my palette because it actually looked better than using a larger range.
• The composition in general - I think the final image is well-crafted and looks like a real book cover.

Difficulties

• Not enough experimentation in the early stages - identified during the crit that I could have come up with more ideas and developed my roughs a bit more with colour and media rather than just pencil.
• I'd hoped to focus on digital methods for this brief since I didn't experiment much with it before, but due to not having a print induction yet I realised it might be difficult to produce the whole cover digitally without paying through the nose for it.

What I would do differently next time

• Play around with media and colour for different ideas before picking one final one.
• Maybe start finalising the design earlier so I had more time to think about printing a final digital image.
• Think about the type more - position and font, as although I like the hand drawn quality, I didn't experiment with different fonts and positionings.

Overall, this was probably my favourite brief of the three, as although it was a non-fiction book, I could still play around with the narrative element behind the content of the book and come up with a suitable image with character and deeper metaphorical meaning.