ANNUAL REPORT ANALYSIS

Today I was also presented with a printed and bound copy of the annual report.

Overall, I really happy with my designs and it is a great feeling to be able to finally hold my work, and am proud of my achievements with the project. The colours have come out very vibrantly, and although I initially wanted more of a pastel theme to the work they put the 'happy' in Our Happy Place! This also marked the first time that I worked directly and exclusively with a client on a live brief and so it is an important milestone for me. As it was my first time with this sort of work, as well as my first experience of litho printing, there are a number of things that I would edit if I had my time again. There were some issues that were sorted when the proofs came back from the printer, such as a full stop that had jumped, but some slipped through.

One issue that has been raised is the fact that the text is justified left. This was a suggestion by the client, and although we didn't run with her suggestion of centrally justified text, I compromised with left justified. I like the effect that the the lines all start and end evenly, but it has meant that a lot of words are split over two lines and hyphenated. This image shows two lines running where this has happened, which does not look good. If I was able to redo the report I think I would go back to using left aligned lines, although this style above gives the columns a newspaper quality.

All the photographs were sent by the council, and were from many different sources. For this reason, all of the headshots for people involved in the project are in different locations with different lighting. At the time I considered removing the background for each, but some such as Helen Scarrett were photographed in attractive locations so I left them alone. However, in print, the photograph of Neal Murphy from the Two Pennies money advice charity looks very gloomy and I should have edited the contrast on that particular photograph. On the whole it doesn't matter too much but it would have been worth correcting such a basic error.

This page features a snippet from an advertisement for a Who's Who? night where local businesses meet and network. When I cropped the image to fit on the page I found that there wasn't a good place to cut off the poster as any way that I tried you could always see the start of the line below. This has been raised a few times but myself, my tutor and the printer all decided that it was best to run with the report as it was.

I designed 'Volunteer's Hours' badges to display along with the text to show community involvement, and deliberately set them at slight angles to the page as I wanted them to resemble badges that you'd pin on to your coat. However, one student disliked this style when she viewed the work during the peer assessment, but I am happy with the effect myself.