Presentation and Concept Development
On reflection on my final outcomes, personally I was happy with how all the different design elements turned out, however I was most pleased with about how all the figma pages looked as final outcomes. The reason I believe that these web and mobile based pages are the highlight of all my design work is due to the professionalism across the entirety of the pages, especially the product listing page and the product description pages for both mobile and web, I also believe that these are an improvement compared to the current shopping pages, mainly on mobile as both these pages do not convert well when viewing them on phone.
All my outcomes were also shared with my marketing team so that I can get an outside opinion and understand how they received these designs. I worked with the marketing students to gain as much feedback to see how they visioned all the different design elements and direction for both posts and the figma pages, whilst also including my own features across these different design stages. And overall, my team were really pleased with the outcome of everything and all suggested everything was how they visioned and discussed visually.
The strengths of my work, in my opinion, are the designs made for the mobile and web pages. I previously mentioned how they look professional, and something users may match the criteria and expectations they have when accessing and scrolling through the different stages and points of both the web variant and mobile variant. Whilst on the flip side of this, I think my weakness across the whole design process was how the shirt advertisement campaign turned out, the campaign features a dark paper-like background with the shirt centred, alongside shirt details and price. These designs are something I would further go back on and refurbish, as I believe these posters aren’t as eye-catching and engaging as they need to be. However, these campaigns work well visually when placed in a bus shelter design template.
Reflect on collaborative working in a team
Throughout this assignment, I have collaborated with multiple students including my graphics design partner and with marketing students also. Overall, this has been a positive experience with positive outcomes across the past few months. There has been a number of advantages with working in this collaborative assignment but the main advantage of this was getting constant feedback across a variety of designs and mock-ups, each week me and my group would have multiple meetings which were used to show the work complete across the previous week and allowed me to get honest feedback from each member, this feedback was more valuable as my team did not have a graphic design background, so it was important to get the opinion of those who may not see designs in the way that I do. Another important advantage of working with the marketing students for this was that, their prior research into areas such as target audience and marketing trends. Sharing this research with me then meant I was able to tailor my designs and mock ups to these current trends, therefore to reach a large target audience and impression. Similarly to this, the different perspectives of my team members lead to more positive problem solving and creative solutions, as their approach was more data and consumer lead, I was able o bring visual and storytelling elements to this, which therefore lead to generating stronger outcomes.
Across working in sessions and out of class meetings, as a group we only experienced very few challenges across this whole process, these being slight disagreements on the direction for different areas regarding design and client reach. One of the first challenges and discussions we all had was about the platforms we may use to promote our work and therefore reach the right demographic for this brand. Some of the group wanted to use TikTok whilst some other preferred that we use Facebook due to the target demographic they wanted to reach, the way in which the group decided on what platform would be a better choice to use was down to looking into the data regarding the two socials and comparing statistics to see the visual representation on which site would be more beneficial to use and in the end we all came to the conclusion that using Facebook would make more sense to try and reach the goals set for the campaign.
Responding to a live client brief influenced my approach for this assignment because as a group we got constant feedback on the work brought in to present to both Alec and Ash, meaning we had to kepe changing our work in order to meet their expectations and requirements, this also helped to shift the progress of my work. Eventually showing them designs which both were happy with and helped to reach the final outcome and tick all possible requirements.
Feedback from the live client helped with influencing the early design stages of this project as the client project goals are understood from the start of this project. The clear direction at the beginning of the project helps to prevent having to change any major details at the later stages of the assignment, defining the project helped to reduce any further challenges later on. This experience relates to industry practice as, as in design environments, projects that end up being successful usually begin with a clear and detailed client briefing at the beginning of the process. The briefing usually includes important details regarding brand identity, target audience, brand goals and competitor analysis.