COMMUNICATION IS A VIRUS EVALUATION

For the brief communication is a virus, I was in a group with 5 other people, I think working in a big group can sometimes be difficult as everyone has idea's that they want to incorporate and everyone has different tastes. 

However I think that my group worked really well together. We came up with our concept really quickly and we were all really enthusiastic about the project which made the experience more enjoyable. 

Working within this group enabled us to network with professional practitioners such as graduates from LCA and freelance designers. I found by doing this it was not only really interesting but beneficial for future projects because we have learnt how to approach people for advice and interviews.

During group work I would have liked to take on a bigger role when designing the magazine. Although I did like the networking and designing the online side of things, due to the time it took for us to get all the designing of the magazine done the website couldn't be updated. I then thought that the website looked reallly unprofessional and plain but we did recieved a lot of activity on the website which then proved that our message was getting noticed.

In regards to other roles in the group we assigned each person a task in the group, however I felt that we were still quite disorganised, an example of this would be that each person who interviewed and artist had to create their own double page spread, but when it came to looking at them all together there was no visual continuity. I think if we set specific style guidelines aside from the font style,  the production of the magazine would have been quicker.

When it came to piecing the design together we faced quite a few problems with the stock and sizing, there was a lot of pages that were cut wrongly and a few spelling mistakes that we noticed after we mass printed. In future group work projects I think we should of all had a thorough read before printing.

I also thought that due to the magazine being produced so lately we didn't have the chance to distribute to all of the places we intended and didn't have enough time to receive a lot of feedback on what they thought about the magazine. The majority of the interactions that we received from the project was through the social networking sites I produced were I updated the progress of what we was doing for '5'. In doing this I got a message from a bar manager who wanted to create a launch party for our magazine. When getting this email we as a group thought we could expand the project even further, which was exciting. However due to all of us having our own personal work to do, we decided to end the project after the brief. I think if we carried the magazine on it would have been interesting and possibly beneficial to see how far we could of gone. This group work has aught me that in order to get a message communicated you have to interact with people and the right audience to make the message spread.

I think as a group member I worked really well to make sure that whatever tasks I was given were produced on time. I also though that I really took charge of the communication side on the project which enabled our message to get spread. However I think to benefit from my next group work I would like to take on a slightly bigger role in the print design side of things.