OUGD406 - Studio Brief 4 - Evaluation

My interpretation of the brief looks back on my experiences of the year and attempts to display my new skills and knowledge learned outside of the university course. Throughout this past year, I have really aspired towards learning how to cook and have found that cooking has now become a huge part of my personal life. I wanted to bring through this personality and display these experiences in a way which might help new emerging students. I have evaluated the brief as though I am trying to teach my past self skills which I have learned this year outside of my university course. The best way to do this was to showcase these skills in a cookbook.

After researching many primary and secondary source cookbooks, I realised that I wanted to create something that stands out from its competitors that represents student living. Therefore, I looked at manual methods of printing and book design in order to create a more hands on tactile recipe book. Most other cooking books are clean and finished however, mine has attempted to represent healthy living whilst also looking shabby and budgeted. A polished slick book design would have looked too expensive and classy for my desired target audience and therefore, a traditional printed cookery book was ruled out towards the start towards the start of the project.

My only regrets from this project have been that I did not have the time to experiment with the pen printer due to the timescale of the brief. Having said that, the prints are still in co-ordinence with the handcrafted black & white theme of the publication, it would have just been nice to trail out the manual ways of the printer to give the book even more of a tactile aesthetic. This has also been the first time I have ever used paint in a graphic design brief as I am usually reluctant to do so as I have not painted since my fine art course in Australia almost 4 years ago. Using black & white block colours and not having to worry about colour blending helped me make the design more graphical and has allowed me to become more comfortable when using paint in my graphic design practice.