Out of all the brief that I have completed this year, WYS has been my main priority, the reason that I focused so much on this brief was that Rob and I have finally figured out what we want to do after graduating from the course. By making it our main focus this year we have been able to use this time to really think about the ins and outs of the idea. We spent a lot of time throughout the year developing and defining the overall idea so that we could be more confident in ourselves to continue WYS after university. This is why it took us such a long time to complete as there were many things that made getting to the point a challenge. Although it was a challenge I feel that taking our time to think about the idea properly should benefit us in the future as we are fairly confident that will we be able to stick our plans.
We were able to take full advantage of university resources. We attended business workshops that have been able to help us think more about the business side of our business idea. Without this, I don’t think that we would have pushed ourselves to get to where we are now, because of the business workshops we have also shown our interest in the Duke Studio graduate scheme which we know will bring WYS to life if we are able to get that. As we have thought so much into all the aspects of WYS this has encouraged us to speak both industry professionals and business people about the possibilities of our idea and how we could develop it further to make it work better.
Doing this brief has also helped me to learn new skills, before starting this brief I had no experience using a Risograph printer and if it wasn’t for this brief I wouldn’t have learnt how to use it. I will now be looking to use a RISO wherever possible which will help to continue developing my practice after leaving LAU. I also was able to learn how to fabric screen-print which is something that I a wish I had learnt a long time ago as now I know how to print t-shirts, again this is something that I also want to continue doing once leaving.
WYS has taught me a lot about collaboration, it is at the core of what we do and I think that it one of the most important things I have learnt this year it really helped to push my practice as working with other people helps to set the bar higher than you may normally want to put it. Working alongside Rob has also been a challenge but I feel like we have now got a better understanding of how to work together and we are able to produce work that I don’t think I would have been able to do without him. This is the start of a partnership between Rob and myself, we help to motivate each other and can we can equally share workload and have a range of strengths between us which helps to make us a good match.
The identity that we have created for WYS will not just be a university project we have designed all of our outcomes so that they are ready for the real world after uni, throughout the brief, we have had in mind that we will hopefully oneway be using the identity to its full potential. We have also considered the ease of production for all of the elements so that we can easily reproduce them on a tight budget as we may not have the recourses we have currently at university. Other elements of the identity such as the Promotional pack have been designed to help us meet new people as this is one of the most important things for WYS to achieve.
As well as completing the overall identity for WYS we have been able to link it to other briefs that we have done this year (research project and photography yearbook).
The whole project was influenced by research, from the end of Level 05 we have both been interested in zines and indie publishing and we have used the year to help develop further research into the ins and outs of the industry to help figure out where we belong. This approach has made our final outcomes well considered and appropriate for real-world use. As well as being influenced by our research we have also been able to really figure out who is target audience is and whether the idea is profitable and from the feedback that we have received so far, I am confident that we have will succeed.
I don’t feel that we used our social media as well as we could, if we had used the social media properly throughout the year we could have worked on building an audience before leaving. The reason we didn’t do this was that we spend a lot of time making sure that we got the basics right first which is important, we are now that we have more time we will start to build our audience on social media.
This year we also set out to make as many books as we could, sadly we didn’t end up making as many as we had hoped but we have used this time to help us think about lots of ideas for upcoming projects and also learn new skills. We could have also used this year to test run our first exhibition for WYS but as we did not want to rush into things we had to put it on hold so that we could then considerate on more important aspects of the brief. As of yet we still have not added any stock to our Big Cartel shop because we have been very busy with other things but once we have more time we will be figuring out how we can sell the product we want to sell properly, using professional printers etc. Overall I am very pleased with what we have managed to achieve throughout this project and I am now excited to use what we have learned and spoken about for the last year into action.
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