EVALUATION

Pluto music //2

Pluto music brief I started in work experience the summer just gone. It was supposed to be a really quick 1 day brief of designing a homepage for their website and I was a little worried as I had never designed a website before but I remembered from my web sessions with Simon, the easiest and best way to make a website is simply by finding an existing one that you like and copying the layout. So I stumbled on inthebasement.com which was a website showing music videos, it was very bold and stood out to me as it was black and red with white text so I worked on this. Pluto music had sent my placement a bunch of photographs from the studio and they were very nice photos I thought so I wanted to make them the main focus. The photos however were very bright and so much going on in them that I had to tone them down in Photoshop by desaturating some of the colours and making them a little subtler. After I had finished designing the home page, Design by Day were very pleased with it and they went on to design a short animation to it.

One of the things I wanted to do was to collaborate with someone and design our own ident video to put on it but I never did so that is one thing I regret. However I decided to make it into a bigger brief by designing promotional material like a booklet and business cards. I then made it bigger by designing a CD cover and flyer to make it a more established brief. I didn’t really experiment too much with ideas as I only decided to make it a bigger brief right near the end of submission so I didn’t get much chance to play around with ideas, I just thought of one and then stuck with it and this is an area where I can improve in the majority of my design.

As this was my final brief that I was working on, I noticed I became much more confident with layout and I started working a little more openly using grids and so not making everything be in a straight line that you read from left end of page to right. I think the reason for this is that Hierarchy became key and I started looking how to make the reader see things in order on a page without having it read top to bottom.

I was very unorganized with time management and at one point I had to do some printing on the laser printers and the quality of the colours made my design look very ugly and dirty with streaky lines and blurred letters so I decided to go to morning drop in and I could not have been happier with the colours. The orange was very bright and vivid and on gloss stock it looked very professional. However, I wanted to print the front of the magazine on thin gloss but I found out it isn’t possible to print double sided on gloss so I refrained to matt and the black went really scratchy. So if I had more time I would print it on much finer matt paper or perhaps it laminated so it wouldn’t wear and tear. However it is a free magazine so keeping the cost of print down was vital.