Week 4 Critique

In today's class, we were required to pin up our set of three posters at A2 size (each poster two A3's stuck together) in order to get another critique on our developmental shifts from last week. Personally, I think my posters have come a long way since last week, as I have begun focusing on colour coding, using grid systems, and playing around with hierarchies. However, there are still lots of changes to be made. I have attached the three posters below, followed by some annotations (more in-depth annotations and critiques have been drawn onto the print-outs inside of my physical workbook):

Following the critique from peers, I had extra time to speak with just the teachers about my posters, and get down to all of the finest of details on which to improve and develop. Some of the major changes were based around utilising negative space, and decreasing the scale of some of my graphs and text, as they all turned out quite large. It's crazy how much different all of the spaces look once printed at A2 compared to being on the screen. Small changes like removing the slight gradient in the donut graphs are needed, as it slightly distorts the information, and they're not actually necessary. On poster three, I'm going to play around with changing the greenish tints to grey tints (except for the bold creative arts green), to really make that pop. One of the suggestions from Belinda was to try out a gradient from yellow to blue (as used on poster 2) in place of the bright green on poster 3, as this might be easier for the viewers to realise that it's symbolising a combination of the two. There is still some annotations missing out, such as the titles of the donut graphs which I need to put in, and other minor adjustments like that. On top of this, I'm going to look at changing the scale of a lot of the content, and once it has been scaled down I will reposition it to make sure it still follows my intended grid system. I am going to look at creating visual hierarchies between the headings and subheadings, rather than all being the same size font. I will also continue to work on developing horizontal relationships across the posters. More annotations have been included in my physical workbook.

Overall, the feedback from Annette and Belinda was extremely helpful, and having the one on one time to discuss each poster in depth and possible changes to improve the design was very important, and I feel like this is going to help me improve the posters greatly, and also clarified exactly what they are looking for in a poster, all of the macro and micro aspects. After spending an hour or two going around and listening to Annette and Belinda critique each set of posters, I drew a whole lot of valuable information to use over the course of this paper, as hearing feedback to others work and answers to their questions helped clarify anything I may have not been completely sure of, or hearing the feedback for ideas that I may have been considering trying. The final hour was spent making adjustments and refinements to our posters, based on the prior critiques. By next week, we have been asked to have these posters even more refined, considering it will be the final lesson before hand-in in Week 6. I'm feeling quite happy with the progress of my posters so far, as they have come along way even in the last week, and I am confident that they'll only continue to improve a great deal over the next two weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing how these turn out, and will continue to update my blog as these ideas are developed. I am hoping to get them to a stage, by next week, where I feel there will mainly only be micro/minor changes and adjustments to make, rather than needing to change compositions, hierarchies and all of those larger macro aspects of the information design posters.