Collaborative Design Practice - Task 2

Collaborative Design Practice 

Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Design Exploration / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University 

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INSTRUCTIONS 

Week 5

For this week we tried trying to find a design direction we would want to go in. One that would feel appropriate for EZplast. We thought of going in a more nature orientated design, something that felt very local to Malaysians. Maybe trying to use a lot of nature elements in general to create a approachable and pretty brand. We also have a few goals written to achieve being during our weekly meeting:

• List down all the physical outputs we are doing
• Come up with a mood board
• Find references/examples(visual style/illustration style, typography)
• Identify key visuals (what are the elements that are important in ezplast)
• Decide Font type
• Decide colour palette 
• Task distribution

Week 6

We are continuing on building upon the nature like themes and designs. We have broken down our posts and so far we are all working on different things. Mine being the illustration stuff mostly but I also am just supposed to help around where I can! Here is our goals for EZplast so far:

• Banners, Flyers
• Creating educational content on recycle
• Collaborate with local stores and outlets
• Branch out of Kepayan to Kota Kinabalu   

During this week I had some different responsibilities, one of them being research! I had broken down the social medias we would like to focus on. Tried breaking down our content and seeing how we should generally try and reach out to their audiences. I also created some rough illustrations and post drafts just so we had more of an idea. Lastly, I created a script for our video as well.

Though after some thinking... we have decided to change our general direction completely. Initially we wanted a very nature focused branding with very bright and vibrant colours to sort of imitate Malaysias rich flora and faunas. But Meiling brought up a really good point about whether or not a stranger who saw this would think EZplast is a plastic recycling company, or just some environment based company. This lead us to redesigning our entire design process for a more accurate design. We also finalised exactly what we will be creating.

Week 7

This week we had our presentation with Ms Zazila. We had finalised our design direction and it is definitely completely different from our initial idea. I do however think it is more appropriate for a plastic recycling company and would read as one much easier in comparison to our first ideas. Ms Zazila was ecstatic with our work so far and it was really rewarding seeing how genuinely excited and happy she was just because of our efforts. It makes me want to really do as well as we can for this project for her!

REFLECTION

Graphic design is... hard. It is not what I assume it to be and I am glad I took entertainment. It truly is such a different type of thinking and understanding of design as a whole. Our fundamentals are generally the same but the way of application is a very different lens. This definitely lead to Meiling having to do some extra thinking and it really helped us solidify our designs. Being from entertainment, I view everything with the idea that it should bring life with it. Along with whether my designs communicate my message and character well. In graphic design it is... weirdly similar when you simplify it like that. How can we communicate our message? I've learned a lot from this class already and it is very interesting viewing design from such a different lens.