professional practice journal

final project summary

in the end we had to abandon the idea of developing our pictures on photographic paper together with the text, because we couldn't get into the darkroom which was fully booked for the entire day (thursday - the day of the presentation). the reason why the pictures could not be done any other day was that i hadn't had my induction to the darkroom yet - i did it wednesday evening. the other reason was we got the text printed on acetate wednesday. i and greg only managed to do a few test strips before the year 0 students took the darkroom over.

finally we printed the sample on regular paper, but since that was not the result we were looking for, we decided to pass out the test strips to give an idea of what we had in mind. we also displayed our spinning prototype.

the presentation went well. the time, effort and communication we had put in to the project showed and the toutors pointed out they saw our creative energy and that it reflected in our well thought through result.

the roles of the group:

graphic design: Alice Whehelan and Philippa Rabbitts. ali came up with the general look of the typography and philippa helped make the hand-made lettering.

photography: Greg Hayward and Mattias Malk. i came up with the general idea and look for the photos, greg booked the studio and asked around for voluntary models. greg shot digital for backup purposes and to give the graphical designers images to base their typography on. i shot 35mm film (rollei retro 100iso) for the final images and developed the film by hand.

the creative process was well balanced - everyone listened to each others ideas and reacted with comments or new proposals to further the progress. one of the important things that all of us did was if we didn't completely understand eachothers ideas we always asked to clerify - this prevented anyone being left out of the process. overall the team was a great match - we didn't have any big quarrels about ideas or the outcome and the atmosphere was welcoming and open.

things i could have done differently: since the others are mac users, they could not open some of the archival files i sent them and thus i should always include files to be opened in both operating systems - mac and windows. i could have asked for a private induction to the darkroom, but taking into account we only got the typography printed on wednesday afternoon, it wouldn't have made any difference, actually.


project status - success.