Reflection/ 7x7 4

Fast Fashion Arcade:

To me, my biggest success this year was my fast fashion arcade because it represents me as a creative so well. It is the brief I most enjoyed and it is exactly the sort of work I want to be creating in the future. I've been doing it for 2 months and it has always been my refuge from other briefs I've been struggling with. I enjoyed having a brief that was aesthetically open but very targeted - I had to explain our brand mission to 16-25 year olds in a way that they would enjoy and understand. I think that I was successful in doing this, creating something that is interactive, quirky and fun - this is exactly how we want to communicate our brand opinion. However, the animation part was very, very time consuming. 

Red/ Blue Fast Fashion Images:

Initially, I thought I had exhausted fast fashion as a topic. However, when I came back to it I had so many ideas. Generally, throughout the briefs I've found that the third in a series is always the weakest because I’ve been looking at it for too long and feel like I've run out of ideas. However, I've seen that when I leave things and come back to them, that’s when the ideas come. I work well juggling different briefs rather than focusing to much on one (it helps me to reflect). Looking back through my sketchbook, my projects are very jumbled at the times where I was creating my best work.

However, something I struggled with was knowing what concepts an average person would and wouldn't understand. I've done so much research into fast fashion that I forget that most people don't know what it is. I kept coming up with ideas that I thought were amazing then showing friends and they wouldn't get it – I almost wanted to convince them that they did. This is something I need to think more about. One thing that was really useful was sitting with a house mate who had no knowledge of fast fashion and working out together how I could simplify them.

Overall I am happy with these images. I feel like I have finally found a way of working that works for me. I was finally able to think of an idea and quickly construct it. I had an image in my head of exactly what they were going to look like before I created them, which I haven't up until this point. However, although I like how it looks aesthetically I can't go on using the dots professionally - it takes too long !! I've been creating dot effects, then image tracing them. However, to do this effectively I have to make them massive so it takes a long time to load - some of them took 4-5 hours to turn into dots then buffered for 20 s every time I tried to change something. When I have time I am going to research if there is a plug in alternative.