I decided on choosing to pursue two live briefs for this half of the module, the 'Hookworms' Brudenell Social Club gig poster, and the 'Penguin Student Design Competition' with a view to keeping myself engaged with my work through having two very different avenues I would have to follow. Whilst this was true at first, the 'Hookworms' brief actually had a much sooner deadline than the 'Penguin' competition did and I did eventually find myself losing steam whilst working on that one.
I thought the best way of responding to the 'Hookworms' brief would be to simply listen to their music and create an intuitive reaction to it which would hopefully mean that what I came up with would be quite different to the artwork they already have. I did enjoy the initial freedom this way of working presented, a poster for a gig can be pretty much anything, they rarely seem to correlate directly to the band in my experience, they just have to be visually strong. As a result I just started playing around until I had some imagery that I liked.
What I really struggled with, was then having to incorporate all the text required for the poster, which I had not considered at all due to the spontaneous way I'd been working up until that point. My first few attempts at fitting the type into my illustrations were terrible and put me off working on the brief for a while because I became so bored with shunting stuff around on Photoshop. I think the next time I'm working with type I should try and hand draw it into my original artwork before scanning it in and then both facets of the image would evolve in conjunction without one lagging behind and subsequently holding the other back. In the end I was actually very happy with the two designs I came up with, but I used a very different approach to type in each, one had the type very much separate to the image but sat comfortably within the composition so as to not take away from it, and the other involved the type being integrated with the imagery much more. I think both worked pretty well so I still don't feel that confident about how type may fit best into my practice in the future, but I do at least know I can try different things out.
With regards to my 'Animal Farm' book cover, I developed the ideas much more over a longer period of time. Working on two briefs at once did help me refresh my ideas for each when I worked on the other, and my 'Animal Farm' cover was particularly helped by that. I started out trying to come up with visual metaphors and doing clever things with Soviet symbolism, but after spending some time away on the 'Hookworms' brief, I returned with the realisation that my work isn't as well suited to that and managed to simplify my idea down to much more stronger visualisations of the themes within the book. I am also glad I managed to avoid using drawings of pigs. I do think I ended up rushing a bit at the end, and whilst my final submission was, in my opinion, a strong image which made an aesthetically pleasing book cover, I don't think it was quite interesting enough and if I had spent some more time playing around with my final few ideas I could have come up with something in a similar vein but more powerful.
Overall, I am fairly happy with the work I ended up with for this project, and did enjoy working on it a fair amount, mainly because I kept the work very diverse so I didn't really get bored, and I managed to incorporate some painting into the process, which I had been wanting to do. I do still struggle with time management though, and definitely see how I could have developed my work much further in the time I had (particularly with regards to 'Animal Farm') with surprising specificity.
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