Assignment 2 A book cover

Overall Comments

You have provided a very comprehensive set of documents that make it easy to understand your working and thinking for this assignment.

Assignment potential (after Assignments 2 and 4)

I understand your aim is to go for the Photography Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to succeed at assessment.  In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my reports.

I have been distracted over the past 3-4 months with family concerns in that my husband has been seriously ill and needed my support and a close family member has recently died.  I am now able to focus my attention on my degree work and will do my utmost to get back on track.

Feedback on assignment

My initial reaction to this assignment is that there is an over reliance on the effects and that you do not have a background in graphic design!  This does not mean that the idea was not a good one nor that the result does not have an element of success, just that there are things that could be done to make a much more successful final result. I will deal with the graphic design elements later and look at the images first.

Whilst I do not have graphic design qualifications I have been using design software for many years in the production of posters, newsletters, periodicals and feel you are being unduly harsh in your comments. 

The great advantage of using the sort of effects that you have chosen is that they do add uniformity to the images and cover up inconsistencies that might have been totally unacceptable between the background and figure on the front cover.  However, the back cover is much nearer to ‘natural’ than the front and that is uncomfortable.  I have done a very quick and rough version of the back that moves more towards the look of the front in my mind, to give you some idea of what I mean.

 My cover designs above

Revised front cover with figure removed. I couldn't decide whether I wanted the figure included or not so I left it in.  It was to symbolise a shepherd keeping watch over his sheep, but as I had to use my own pictures I found something that would 'fit the bill'. On reflection I accept that perhaps the cover was better without a figure; it looked better without it.

 

Tutor suggested redesign

I agree that I could have taken the back cover further to portray a more Hockney–like appearance.  

The typeface that you have chosen for the titles is rather casual to convey the idea of a Classic I think.  Typographers tell us, with good reason, that the visual characteristics of the type conveys a great deal of the meaning we receive tro m the text and the whole effect of your cover is contemporary and light rather than historic and serious.  I am reminded of a series of short programmes on commercial television some decades ago called ‘Out of Town’, a friendly look at the countryside and country pursuits aimed at the urban viewer; not really what Hardy was dealing with in this book.

Okay, I accept that the typeface could be more classical but you do not give me any ideas as to what constitutes classical fonts.

From the view of a purely technical exercise you have certainly gone into it with enthusiasm and put a great deal of effort into it but I don’t think it has come off visually.  The inclusion of a contemporary figure is dubious, though I can see what you were trying to do I think, but the rather cartoonish effect of the filter you have used takes the edge of the work, though it does all fit together in some ways and if it were a contemporary book of gentle anecdotes about gentile country life today it might well work. 

The figure on the front cover was to represent a person.  As I was pushed for time by then I used what I could find in my own image library as my understanding was that I used my own work for this assignment and I had nothing really suitable.

The back cover image seems to me to fit better to the book than the front (though it is a long time since I read it and I am thinking of Hardy in general!) 

However, you may well feel that whatever the outcome in terms of the actual book cover, you have learned a lot about image manipulation from the work you have put in and this is valuable, perhaps more so than the success or failure of the actual exercise in absolute terms

Learning Logs/Critical essays

Your blog is a bit sparse at the moment.  I know that it is a gloomy time of the year and that there is a lot to get in the way of study but it would be really good to see that you are doing something to try to break through!  Are you taking photographs apart from the work for the course?  What books, of any sort, are you reading?  Have you seen any photography/other art recently that inspires or infuriates you?  Just at the moment one might get the impression that you aren’t really engaging with the module or with photography in general and you need to address this.

As I explained previously I have had personal problems to contend with but now expect to be able to devote all the time I need to continue successfully in this work.

There are some excellent exhibitions at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) that is local to me and I will be writing them up shortly.  I have noted your reading suggestions below and will endeavour to obtain the relevant books.