YCN Evaluation.

During the search for a collaborative partner for the YCN brief, i had the option of working with Matt Milner, Tim Wan, Craig Laing and Sam Reynolds. Matt Milner and Tim Wan where my preferred partners at the time but because of my reluctance to decide i ended up being by myself. Fancifully i was aloud to join a group as a trio and chose Tim and kate Fenton. Tim and myself have very similar design practices, we both enjoy print based design and are both organized individuals. Kate is more into Moving image and video, her design practice and methods of working are different to my own. Much more direct and spontaneous.

Having got into a trio we felt as a group that we had no excuses not to do a decent design product. With three of us we could do more conceptualizing and design work then the other groups. Taking advantage of this we embarked on a research trip to holland. Something that i liked about the group i was in was that we all wanted to do a research led brief and because of this we chose P&O Ferries (very open brief). The organization and time-management was given to Tim. Something i would of enjoyed doing but in the end Tim was excellent at. The trip to Holland went very smooth, the research we gained from it helped us with solving the problem and coming up with a solution for the P&O Brief. For all of us this was the first time we had decided to go abroad to collect research. Something i will defiantly do again in the future.

With the first week mainly being about research, the second week was about coming up with a strong concept and initial ideas. The time management in the first week was great however the management of time would become much more difficult in the coming weeks because of commitments outside university. Meeting up together at the same time would be the difficult but threw the use of technology ( Internet and phone) communication was always fluent between all of us and on a daily basis. Each of us had our own roles to do. Tims was project management, mine was research (questionnaire designs etc) and kates was note taking and organization.

The development of the concept took a lot longer than expected. This was mainly down to the fact that we had three strong voices and not two. Overall we spent the best part of two and a half weeks developing the concept and only leaving us a week or so to design and make the product. Even though it took so long the concept we developed was very good and the result of the final design can be seen threw this.

Getting to the final outcome was interesting. At one moment we was going to produce a video but this then changed after developing a few more idea's and having crits with other groups. The publication direction i felt was a good and the correct one. The map design was done by Tim, the publication by me and the symbols by kate. Each of us completed our roles incredibly well and the travel publication i feel is a great success. Overall i have enjoyed working in this collaborative brief and its something i will hope to do again in the third year. The different methods of working i have gained have been useful and something i might include within my own design practice. If i had the opportunity to work with Tim and kate again, i would jump at the chance. Not only that but we have become much closer friends outside college. Something i feel is very important.