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Open in new tab LO1: Increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth
LO5: Working collaboratively with others
This is a flowchart of the Cover making process so far. Praniti and I have been working on this cover for over a season, since September. By working on the cover, I could use my graphic design skills to create a creative piece for the cover of our economics magazine. Since we have worked together before in previous years, collaborating with her was not a struggle. We both have different specialties, Praniti is better at Photoshop whilst I am better than Illustrator. She deals with the smaller details such as tweaking the colours of the leaves on the tree, the saturation, and drop shadows. Whereas my focus is more on the “bigger picture”, such as the overall positioning and layout, the fonts, and background.
One of the biggest challenge was both Illustrator and Photoshop were offline. We had to be next to each other to see what the other person is doing. Both programs also save files differently so we had to find a common format for our work in progress that would maintain the colours and level of detail and definition. In some parts of the design process, we could work independently however, this meant that we both had to be on top of our tasks and meet deadlines. These deadlines do not only affect us, but also the club as a whole. Although we get the majority of the say in the design, the other members of Economeast must also agree. Every week or fortnight, we would have to present our progress and feedback. The real-time and face-to-face feedback also made us work more efficiently. It also helped us respond better as feedback is not always positive, making it difficult to accept sometimes but we can learn from our mistakes.
To continue being an effective team player, I must get more comfortable receiving feedback that doesn’t necessarily meet my expectations. I should also be more open to new ideas since it allows me to see things from another perspective which could greatly affect the end product in a positive way. If it were not for the feedback, the final cover may have been a carbon copy of the cover produced last year, I would not have experimented with new fonts, different background textures, or even straying away from some of our original traits like the black band behind our title. Creating art is also often a personal and highly individual process, to be able to work with another artist allows us to be even more creative and work from each other’s ideas and combine our styles for the better. Working together also means having to compromise when necessary which is an important skill to develop, additionally, it allows me to be even more creative and work around it.
It has been a pleasure working on the cover of Economeast, the first milestone of the layout team in this academic year. There are more creative pieces within the magazine to come later in the year such as the title pages for each section. I am looking forward to that as flat design is an art style I particularly like, it would be a new experience to illustrate a subject as broad as “economics”.
