Importance of Critique

Self-critiquing is something that I need to improve on, it was only an issue once it was raised in this part of the course. Basically, I often will think I've finished a certain project and have it critiqued by either my dad or in this case my tutor. Deep down I know that there are faults with it but for some reason, these faults only truly come to light when someone else gives their critique. It's having that new perspective on work, you've been sat in front of that project for what could be hours, you then show it to someone new and they spot all the faults that you have been oblivious to, for me I think I spend too much time on one project, it often becomes a monotonous chore, as a budding designer I want to have fun with design, not get bored. I think that's where the main source of the problem arises. Granted I don't have the longest attention span however when I get bored of designing and it starts to become something I feel like I need to complete rather than desire to complete, that's when the settling kicks in, I'm desperate to finish just to relieve myself, so when I think I've reached an end, I show it someone for their opinion and they point out its flaws. Now this has proven to work and I have added to and improved my work, but in some cases, I rely too heavily on other peoples perspectives. Most of the time if I just gave myself a break and came back to the piece later I would have fresh eyes and could self-critique my work instead of getting other people all the time to critique for me. It mentioned that as a designer you need to be able to self-critique and not really on other people because it would take an age to design anything. Self-critiquing is not always being negative, its "evaluating what you want to achieve vs what you've already produced.

This next exercise was so much fun to complete, I had to create a poster for an upcoming event, now I know this isn't technically local, but Kendrick Lamar is coming to Birmingham in 2018 so I thought I would create a poster for this event, now I try to put a lot of effort into these exercises to actually get something out of them. Now the main point of this exercise is to design a poster packed full of information and then design a poster that uses Occam's Razor and pare back the information to a bare minimum, without forgetting the essentials of a poster.
The first poster I created was packed full of information and had that much text that I wouldn't be surprised if no one read it. Now all the information there is relevant to the gig, however, using Occam's Razor you get rid of nonvital information. I also wanted to be artistic with this poster and actually create something that I feel looks visually striking and professional. I first got together a bunch of posters for other rap artists to create a mood board, this allowed me to do some small thumbnail sketching, I didn't do many as I tend to prefer using photoshop once I have a general idea of how I want the poster to look. I'm very confident in using Photoshop for things like this, and when I'm designing things like posters, I defiantly find it easier to use photoshop to put together visual elements of the poster in different ways to get something that works visually.

Here is the final DAMN poster, as you can see the information I chose to include is what I would call vital to the poster and everything else I got rid of. The album has some very large biblical metaphors and in the HUMBLE music video, light is shining down on Kendrick like he's a god. I loved this imagery and wanted to implement it inside the poster. So I took some stock photography of this happening, I then adjusted the hue so It looked almost red and fiery, but also allowed some purple to sneak in which is the colors used in Kendricks DAMN cover, for the overlay on the bricks, I flipped it vertically because then it would double as spotlights. Now a lot of rap artists use a minimalistic look for their posters, my poster is inside that minimalistic spectrum, for starters I really like how the image is inside a box, it means that it isn't the background of the poster. Now I love this because I find it hard when using an image for the background of a poster as it means there isn't a platform for mounting text, using a method like these allows for black space to be utilized when adding text. I then overall parts of the text to make the image feel like it's part of the poster, also it adds a sense of layering and allows the poster to not seem flat and lifeless. My choice of font for this poster is very simple, the DAMN is written in Times New Roman, now this wouldn't be my go-to font for a header like this, especially for a poster, however the font (or one similar) is used in the album cover, so using it on the poster made it consistent. Now the poster was designed to be very out there and slightly disjointed, some even complained that it wasnt designed well. But the overall concept of the poster was to be impactful and to spark conversation. I didnt want to go full on abstract for my poster so I decided to add a little abstract flare where I could. I wanted to keep my text very uniform and balanced, my layout means that "Kendrick Lamar" and "European tour" almost wrapped around the word DAMN and they felt like they were connected but filled the top of the poster without being in a straight line. I then added the Parental Advisory sign in a very unconventional way as in the original album cover it was designed to be part of the cover not just an added symbol. To balance the poster, even more, I flipped Kendrick's fact to add weight to the other side as the right looked a little busy what with the majority of text being on that side. To tone down the brightness of the red and white and to make blend in and not be an eyesore. I added a grungey texture to the text.

Throughout this exercise I was constantly self-critiquing myself, I was constantly going back to what I wanted to achieve with this poster and the message I wanted to express. I sometimes think these terms can sometimes be quite loose and overly abstract. I like to link a message in with my work but on top. I'm really into this trend of artists using very abstract almost 'weird' ideas and creating an album cover that looks stylish.