Brief 5: YCN Submission and Evaluation

As I did last year, working on YCN brief's are great practice for me personally as I enjoy following brief guidelines and the challenge of taking an existing brand and creating a concept for their target audience. I chose this brief as the target audience was students, so there was a lot I assumed you could play with in terms of bold and exciting design which is my interest.

I chose to contact my collaborator as she works well creating shaped illustration, which I envisioned for this campaign as it is a popular illustration style I have seen targeted at students in the local area and allows a narritive to be portrayed in a simple eye catching way! Getting my moodboard together to show the collaborator was important, as knowing the direction from the beginning and keeping in contact is a must that I have learnt whilst working in groups over the past 2 years.

The communication was initiated by myself by meeting my collaborator in person- knowing we were both excited and on board for the idea motivates me to push it forward. Having these shape illustrations creating a new story for a student to relate to, to further the campaigns aim, meant a strong use of copyrighting was needed. Recently I have realised I really enjoy coming up with slogans and copyrighting for campaigns so I came up with many of these and discussed through feedbacks which aimed to use a student tone of voice and be relatable to draw students in to buying the pass, the aim of the brief.

This collaboration project is one of the strictest brief's I have worked on in terms of guidelines, but also the most cooperative of a collaboration. Despite this, this helped in terms of gridding and keeping consistency and I feel like I would now be more ready to be given briefs with strict project packs like these where information relevant has to be sourced out!

Compromise over colour pallettes was a huge part of this design campaign after illustrations were refined and I created the structure and design of the posters. Her pallette was more true to brand, whereas I wanted to go for bolder and louder which I had seen through my research was more in the student market. However after discussions from both sides I came to the conclusion that I could see the pastel colours may encourage a more appropriate tone for galleries and museums, and the brand itself so we went for the pastel pallette.

Ideally I wanted 6 posters as this gives a stronger scope for the campaign and shows a lot more of a concept but due to timing issues with collaborator, and her tutor saying more weren't essential, we stuck with 4. I still feel the concept is clear as the layout stays the same and illustrations follow a pallette. However, as I really enjoy copyrighting, seeing two more of the headings come to life would be more exciting.

Again with lack of confidence and wanting to get the project submitted, I didn't create social media banner mockups/animations which I think really would have uplifted the campaign and make it come to life to judges and students alike. This is a regret of mine, however I know that I want to work in a collaborative studio in the future and that when I make projects like this with the right team with the right skills these kinds of ideas will be amplified absoloutely.