Evaluation

Overall I have really enjoyed doing the research and reading for COP 1 as I had missed the academic side of things when I was on foundation last year, therefore I was looking forward to starting the essays and research and getting back into using my brain more.

I chose to focus on one of the aesthetic questions as I thought this would require less prior knowledge as apposed to questions under the politics/ history categories which would require a certain level of understanding before delving in. From the question I went onto to focus on post modernism, this was a term I had often heard yet I was previously unaware of what it actually meant and the importance it has had on graphic design so I benefited a lot from looking into it. It was nice to learn something new by doing my own research in a method that I wanted and at a pace which suited me rather than being told what to do.

The books I chose to look at were all very wordy and difficult to comprehend as they were about a topic that I didn’t really understand myself so it took me a long time to get my head around things. This caused the research to take a lot longer than I expected as I was constantly going over the same information trying to make sense of it. However, this benefited me in a way because by the time it came to write the essay I was pretty confident that I understood the information I was reciting and that I had analysed the texts well. This helped a lot as I knew what I was talking about and made the writing more enjoyable as I saw it as a way to relay my knowledge and prove I had done the research. 

In terms of the physical work produced I didn’t really enjoy this side of things as I found it a bit boring and realised that it wasn’t something I was really enjoying therefore it became a lengthy drawn out process. I enjoyed the research into Vogue, their readership and the cost of advertisements in their magazines however I did not enjoy designing for a magazine. I thought editorial design would interest me and I was excited to try it out but I soon realised it was not my style of working and got bored easily.  In summary I have realised I much prefer the writing side to things in terms of COP which came as a bit of a shock but I think this is because it gives a nice change to doing practical work which is what I do in every module.