Day 1 - Exhibition Setup - Friday

It was the first day of the exhibition and I arrived at 9am to find team leaders Sav and Mike already there along with Rob, all ready to start. My first main concern was the lack of attendance by the group as a whole, which to be honest was very disappointing considering the outcome of a successful exhibition which would reflect on us all.

To start the setup, we first needed to decide on the most important aspect of the exhibition which was how to display the work in an effective and unique way in order to make best use of the space provided.

It was pre-decided by Sav that the use of fishing wire would be a suitable platform on which to base the presentation of the work, by using it to hang the work giving the illusion of floating, which not only opens up the space of the exhibition due to the lack of visual restrictions but also provided a cheap way to mass produce the presentation throughout the exhibition.

So with this initial basis, Sav proposed the idea of mounting the work back-to-back which we decided would be OK yet a little flat and so I proposed the idea of putting the A3 pieces of work into a triangular shape so as to present the work at three different angles. I firstly tried to present the work in a squared shape by attaching the work side by side and supporting the backs of each piece with a stuck on piece of polystyrene to give the frame a rigid structure.

At first this seemed to be an effective way to present the work, but due to the hard task of levelling the hangings of a 4-sided structure and the odd number of work we needed to present (45 in all) we decided this was the best way to show all the work and so began the constructing the triangle presentations which can be seen in the photographs.

Overall there were 45 pieces of work which needed to be made into the triangular constructions and despite not having everyone’s work, Rob and I managed to build and hang all the work we had into displays and hang them accordingly in the exhibition.

Other tasks for me on the first day included sticking the paint splats to the carpet, making sure the work hung level to the ground at the correct height and most importantly helping Mike and Sax keep their heads together when it looked like they were coming close to the edge of their sanity.

During the morning setup other members of the group turned up and started work on other areas of the exhibition. For those who did bother to show up, their help was vastly appreciated and I felt we had a successful day with little to be completed in preparation for opening the next day.

Leading up the the exhibition

As the exhibition approached, it was clear that there were still a number of issues in regard to its setup. Although I was not in the exhibition group, I felt a little uneasy about the readiness of the group and the chances of the exhibition actually being a success given the rushed organising.

Despite doubt it was clear to me that I didn’t know all the fact about exactly what was arranged and so just hoped for the best and prepared myself for the setup on the first Friday.

Bio - Fourth stage - Finished Layout

Here is the final layout for the biographies section of the website. The layout remains almost the same as before with the only alteration made to the way the biographies are displayed. After discussions with my team leader, we decided that the test on the wooden effect background just gave the effect of floating information with no real element of belonging to the design of the page.

To overcome this problem, a copy of the post-it note style image used in the back navigation button was added to be placed behind each biography, giving the text a canvas on which to be placed. Once the biography text was skewed, the final effect was the one we were after and visually went well with rest of the design components.

The only problem remained that the text was still a little fuzzy and due to its small size, may be unreadable if viewed on small monitors, but for the sake of time restraints we decided this was a minor problem which could be left alone and still give a successful outcome.

I presented my final creation to my team leader, project leader and the rest of the class who all seemed pleased with the outcome, giving mostly positive feedback about the design so I too was pleased in turn.