EVALUATION - V&A By Bradley Santon 0380

TRIP TO V&A – THE BRIEFOn our initial trip the V&A we were met by the clients, who briefed us on the project, and what it would entail as a final outcome. This was team working abilities, and the design and production of a website

specific to our chose material object from within the V&A.

We were asked to come up with a website homepage with animation and a video about a chosen object within a specific material given. We were put into group – or design teams – and each group was given a material. Prior to our meeting with the V&A we were given a material to research. Mine was TEXTILES.

It was only after we went to the V&A and met the client there, that we then worked as a group to start creating the home page. However in a real life situation would probably would have had interim reviews and meetings with the client.

As with a professional practice, we needed to listen carefully to the client’s brief and take appropriate notes which would help us further into the project. It probably would have helped to have been able to have one more meeting with the client with our group and only about our material to get a more specific brief.

RESEARCHThis was an important part of the project, as we had to look into our chosen object and come up with a way of either

using the history to represent them, or an as aspect of the objects themselves. It also had to work with the other objects in our group .

We did some observational studies at the V&A of our object

A painted study that I did of the purple velvet coat flower detail.

As with a real life professional practise, we had team meetings regularly while still researching and on our individual objects. My object was a heavily embroidered, velvet evening coat.

TIME MANAGEMENTTime management was a key aspect of working within a team. We had to work out a way of collectively designing the homepage for the website on our objects, and also deciding on the correct style , colours and images for the final outcomes. Our team sessions were mainly time spent in class where we would

discuss and decide what needed to be done by each individual before the next class.

As with a real design company, the team worked on each person’s strengths and as such we designated certain parts of the job to each member. As I had the most experience with the computer, I worked mainly on the set up of the page while the two other group members worked on the images (with my input)

These are some of the colours that we will use for our group homepage animation which were obtained from the Kuler website. We chose these colours because they were softer than the original red tie dye colours and also they do not conflict with the chosen textile objects.

In the initial textile research, I had done a tie-dye experiment and we decided to use this idea as our fabric unzipping. Here’s a screenshot from the Kuler website using our tie dye image re-coloured and showing which colours on the bar are represented.

DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS As a team we had lots of initial ideas and drawings for how the page should look. We each presented our ideas to the group before deciding on the images, some of which transpired to our final outcome.

Each team member also had to develop a storyboard video specifically about their object. Mine concentrated on the embroidered flower that was on the evening coat. It started with the coat and no flower which eventually grew through the animation.

One of the team actually created textile buttons that we then scanned and re-coloured for our page icons. Each object and page was given a different colour. These looked great but were not used for this purpose on the final outcome. We decided to use two of them on the last slide of the opening animation.

FINAL OUTCOME & EVALUATIONOur final group outcome for the website homepage, and object videos was well received by the V&A

client.

For our FINAL textiles homepage, we created an animated webpage that is a fabric unzipping, to reveal a multicoloured font made from rolls of fabric and saying ‘TEXTILES’. Above that was 2 embroidered buttons and an image of the unravelling thread – all of which immediately indicated textiles to the viewer.

Overall I really enjoyed working with a team to come up with ideas and was happy that the client felt our work was professional and interesting.If we had had more time I would have liked more ‘material specific’ meetings with the client. Also would have liked a full run through of the presentation prior to the final, so that any hiccups or mistakes could be sorted out first.