Day 2 - Exhibition Setup - Saturday

On the Saturday, due to be the opening of the exhibition, I came in around 1pm to find not alot was going on, the morning team had printed off the descriptions for the work and had proceeded to mount them. I was informed that overnight some of the work had fallen down a little probably due to the combination of fishing wire, sellotape and the inside heat so I made it my first task to repair this problem.

I was annoyed however to discover that the morning team had done a poor DIY job on the work, re-taping it using black and blue tape with no regard to the finished appearance which just undermined the clean floating effect of the work. I quickly rectified this problem and put the work back to its correct state.

I discussed the many small issues to do with the day to day running of the exhibition with Sav, especially in the absence of team leaders to which he agreed with me would be a good idea to put up a list of guidelines for whoever was in on that certain day to follow. These tasks included general cleaning and maintenance of the exhibition as well as a few guidelines towards the running of the show daily. We called these the ’10 commandments’ which can be seen in the photos taken for Saturday.

Despite the lack of attendance on the Friday, there was a better turn out on the Saturday to help with the final stages of the setup which by closing time Saturday was almost complete. A few changes were made by myself to improve the exhibition including the hanging of the sheet previously used to cover the sofa, the rectifying of the badly patched work as previously stated and the addition of a few other small touches to improve the overall look.

I stayed late after closing along with Sav to clear up the mess left over from the days finalising of the exhibition layout. During this time Mariana dropped by and helped us solve a few unresolved issues regarding layout and presentation to give the exhibition a more professional look overall. We wrote all the jobs down on a ‘To do’ list and labelled them accordingly in respect to which day each task had to be completed by. As I was not back in until Wednesday and Sav would not be in for the few days to follow, it was important that these tasks were completed.

Day 1 - Exhibition Setup - Photographs

Martin painting the sign for the window showing onlookers the presence of the exhibition

The pencil centrepiece and general layout of the exhibition

The well made centrepiece created by Dan and John

Final constructed work created by myself and Rob ready for hanging

Early morning hard at work

The initial 'square' idea for the work which was a little unstable

Me hanging the work from the roof.......attempting to get it parallel with the floor

Rob......my Polish Assistant for the day.......love this guy

Here I am fixing the paint splats to the carpet

Always be proud of your accomplishments......lesson over

Hard at work..........

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.

Bio - Third stage - Biography

In this stage of production, the biographies have been added for the majority of the group. Each group member was asked to submit 150-200 words about themselves to e displayed alongside their own images. To ensure each person was aware of the submission of a biography, I created an information sheet stating exactly what was required from each member of the group in order to complete this web page. Also on this sheet was information regarding the photo shoot time and location, which was set up to obtain photographs taken in the same setting in order to produce a sense of conformity in the finished web page, with minimal editing needed.

For the initial design the biographies were placed alongside their photographs, which as can be seen from the image below, did seem to work with the design already set in place. The only flaw was that of the quality of the text in the bio seemed to deteriorate when exported for flash. Many solutions were thought of to overcome this including trying to export from Adobe Illustrator.

It also seemed necessary, for space purposes, to remove the ‘end of year show’ title front the head of the page. Although initially a good design idea, the title was just taking up valuable space needed by the biographies.

Bio - Second stage - Script Editing

Once I had decided on the Flash presentation for the display of the biographies, the next step was to create a design which utilised the space available in the most effective way. In order to do this to my satisfaction, I imported all the necessary components of the page into a Photoshop document and arranged them as a reference plate. The smaller images would be along the bottom with the larger ‘Polaroid’ image shown above. The idea for the design was to display the smaller images at all times with the names appearing as subtitles underneath. This enabled the user move freely between the selections of which biographies to read.

A noticeable change to the layout is the addition of a key legend on the left hand side, showing which colours correspond to each of the teams involved in the exhibition. These colours can be referenced to the overlay tint colour of each person’s image. This was created to show a sense of conformity to the exhibition logo colours and also to give the different photographs a common similarity.

The font for ‘end of year’ was also changed to tie in with the script effect of the names written on the base of the Polaroid images which were given a handwritten effect to add a personal feel to each name against the person they represent.

Other small changes include the movement of the logo slightly and the addition of an interactional ‘Back’ button which will be used to navigate to the previous screen when the website goes live. All change and amendments were shown and approved by my team leader, who gave his blessing for future changes as the design progressed.