OUGD401: STUDIO TASK 1 - Critical Analysis

Task

Based on the material, exercises, discussions and concepts introduce during the sudio session:

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

It helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way of overall improvement, which only adds to the development of your knowledge and understanding.

It helps you identify the areas for improvement. It allows others to see what you have missed which can be very important when it comes down to presenting your work to a specific audience.

Allows you to see others work for inspiration. It's a brilliant way of getting inspiration and to see what level others in the class are working at.

Improves your confidence. They can boost your confidence which helps improve your presentation skills, and it allows you to improve your own opinions of others work helping you critically analyse precisely, which then could prove helpful for your own work.

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

The group crits are very useful in the development of your work, skills and opinions.  It allows for others to view your work and pick up on the strengths and weaknesses which you cant see yourself. It builds your skills up by allowing you to see what you are doing wrong, and in some cases allows you to present work to the correct audience to see if it functions properly. It allows you to assess others work which helps improve your knowledge of what looks good and what doesn't, which can also help you pick out the faults in your own work. It's a brilliant way of getting a range of opinions and it helps greatly when coming to improve your work.

Choose 5 criteria from the list that were generated during the studio session. For each criteria briefly 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).

layout

If I'm looking at layout, the image has to have a professional quality about it, there has to be thought behind where specific texts or images are being placed. The context and content will play a huge part towards whether it's laid out neatly and clean, or whether its jumbled and distort. Taking the image which i disliked, which i brought to the session, it was easy to see a lack of skill and thought with the layout of the image.

 visual content

If I'm judging a piece of work on the visual content it's always down to whether the visuals are interesting and whether it fits in with the context of the piece. Poor visuals can ruin the whole image, as seen by the image i picked. I like when an image grabs your attention and really makes you look at what the work is about, whether the image be colourful or black and white it's always important that the visuals work well with the rest of the piece.

quality of execution

How the work has been executed to the audience is a huge factor on whether i dislike or like an image. It's all down to the designers knowledge and skill. If an image has been poorly executed, i.e. aimed completely at the wrong audience, the image isn't filling its purpose therefore doesn't work! It's great to see a strong simple piece of design which has been professionally developed and well executed, and it's usually the simple designs which do this!

 message

If i am to judge an example of work on the message which it is portraying it's obviously got to be clear what the message is, but has to be portrayed in a clever and interesting fashion. The message of a piece of work is the basis of what the work will be about, so straying away from the message can be a huge error in design! Like i said before simplicity is usually the best form of design, which is usually strong effective if trying to deliver a strong message.

Audience

Judging a piece of work on the audience which its delivered to can be pretty difficult. The work could look great and be very professional but it could be being delivered to the completely wrong audience. The categories above all come together for telling whether the audience is formal, informal, elderly, young. A strong piece of work is one which is clear to see what audience it's aimed at and whether it's working by delivering the right message to that specific audience.