Secret 7 - Interim Crit

Idea 1                                                 Idea 2

Idea 3                                                  Idea 4

Idea 5

Feedback

• Ideas 2 and 5 represent the artist well but need 'jazzing up'.
• Idea 1 is clever and unique but worth thinking about more in terms of creating something more than just a shape.
• Idea 3 is strong as it represents anger and stress, which are connotations of divorce.
• Idea 4 is very straight forward and to the point.
• Idea 1 has an underlying point of how important mornings are in relationships, as it's important to start the day feeling positive.
• Idea 2 represents decay and corrosion without being obvious, but it would be interesting to see it developed with different colours.
• Idea 2 is very obscure which is relatable to the band.
• Idea 1 as well as having a strong concept has a suitable colour scheme as the brown and ivory relate to the dark murkiness of divorce, although the image/photo quality isn't excellent.
• All my ideas are too basic and without concepts.
• Idea 4 is completely irrelevant and unrelated to the concept of the song.
• Idea 2 is a strong visual.

Discussions

After speaking with others in the group about my Ideas and my feedback, I think it's fairly safe to say Ideas 1 and 2 are the ones I'll be looking to take further. It should be noted that these weren't the order in which I came up with the ideas, as that came about in the order 5,2,3,1,4. 

Not many people picked up on the fact that idea 2 was a crusty bread roll, which was good, because I was trying t represent an earthquake. When I discussed this with James, he suggested it would be interesting to scan the bread onto a computer and see how that worked. Whilst I think this is definitely an interesting idea, I'm not sure how appropriate it is given that I'm trying to make it look like it isn't bread, and more emphasise the cracks and shadows.

 Whilst I came out of the crit thinking that there wasn't much I could do to expand on idea 1, after talking it through with my flatmates in the course and taking on board the general feedback on all of my ideas, I think adding some sort of pattern to the background could be the way forward. It was suggested I do something floral such as the vector graphics shown below. Although they look very nice, I'm not sure how appropriate these would be, and I think it's something that requires it's own branch of research.

Feedback I Gave

Naturally I'm inclined to think that the feedback I gave was useful. But I think perhaps the most useful things I wrote in this crit were on the below pieces of work.

This design was done for the same song as mine, Grounds For Divorce by Elbow. Whilst I appreciate the skill involved in the paintings and the time it must've took to paint them, I feel that a lot more time and effort was put into this design than the others done by this person (which I didn't feel the need to photograph due to me only really commenting on this one). I don't necessarily think that this is a bad design by any means, I just worry that because of how much more time this person put into this design than the others, they're going to be bias towards this design, and therefore not really consider the other designs, which, with a little work could've had a lot of potential, but weren't given a chance.

This is a design for Lorde's Team. One of the questions asked by this person was which design I liked the best and way. Clearly they're quite similar and so it really was quite difficult to say which I preferred. In the end I decided instead to comment on which was more appropriate, which was the bottom left design becuase it's a bit darker and edgier, which are, to my admittedly limited knowledge, traits shared by Lorde. Another question that I was asked was how it could be improved, to which I suggested trying out something more creative rather than a grid-like pattern, as the pattern is something you'd normally see faded as a background or on something like wallpaper, not something like a record sleeve.