STUDIO TASK 1 - CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Identify and explain 5 reasons why critical analysis is an important part of education, learning and devloping your understanding.

Identify and explain why the crit (group critique) is useful in the development of your work, skills and opinions.

Choose 5 criteria from the list that were generated during the studio session. For each criteria brefly summarise what will generally affect how you judge what you like and dislike when analysing examples of work. (you should aim to use the images that you brought to the session as examples).

5 REASONS WHY CRITICAL ANALYSIS IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF EDUCATION.

• Helps us develop skills which help us assess what makes a design successful or unsuccessful, this knowledge can then be used to influence our own designs.
• Critical analysis helps to develop analytical skills which can be used in critiques, both in university and in the professional environment.
• Helps us to view work from a perspective (not biased).
• Helps us to explain the decisions we have made.
• Helps improve design skills.

THE GROUP CRITIQUE 

The group critique is useful in the development of our work as  they enable us to receive somebody else's opinion on what we are designing, if they struggle to understand the concept or struggle to read a specific typeface then certain design decisions would need to be changed. Sometimes, when you spend too long working on one project you can miss mistakes that you have made, the group crit enables us to receive constructive criticism formed by the opinion of designers working away from the project, they are the ones who are likely to spot any mistakes or see room for improvement. Furthermore, not only does the group crit allow us to receive feedback on our work, but also enables us to assess other peoples work which helps develop our analytical skills as designers. Finally, the group critique often enables us to present our work and explain the concept, this helps develop key skills which are essential to have in the professional industry, as designers we will need to be confident when presenting concepts or work to clients. 

List of criteria generated in class; 

• Frame
• Format
• Figure/Form
• Ground
• Composition
• Communication
• Visual dynamics
• Type
• Image
• Colour
• Layout
• Legibility
• Readability

LEGIBILITY 

I think that legibility is essential to a functional design, if the audience cant define individual letters it will affect the overall readability of the piece. For a design to be functional and communicate its message the audience must be able to read the text, unless a specific design decision has been made to affect the legibility. I think that the three bottles shows a good legible typeface.

COMPOSITION

I also think that composition holds great importance to the success of a piece of design, if the graphics or type are not composed in a suitable way the whole design can be affected. Again I want to refer to the three bottles, I think that they show a good use of composition as the text has been rotated so it is vertical. This improves the simple design as it makes the bottle more interesting and leaves room for the text size to be increased. 

TYPE

A good choice of typography can really help make a design more interesting and engaging for an audience. However, the choice of typography must reflect the target audience or the message could be miscommunicated. The example above shows a typographic piece created for converse a shoe company, the piece cleverly refers to the companies products by adding lace ends to the ends of certain letters. The typography is interesting, clever and appealing to the companies target audience, therefore the design is successful.

COMMUNICATION

I personally believe one of the most important factors of design is communication, if a piece of design is not communicating its message then it is useless and there is no point for that piece of design to exist. Therefore, it is important that a piece of design communicates its message well, this can be achieved by defining a target audience, collecting an informed body of research and producing a well designed piece. The above example shows how this can go wrong, the sign was produced to inform people that the activities shown are prohibited. However, the sign shows an almost fun looking illustration of each sport in a circle, it almost looks like the sign is encouraging the sports to take place. 

COLOUR

Finally, colour is also a definitive factor which defines the success or failure of a piece of design. The colours chosen for a piece of work must work together, contrasting colours create horrible looking design similar to the example shown above.