Part 5: Research Task - Working with a Client

Retrospective sample brief:

Client: Family Member

Brief: An illustration of the brides floral bouquet to be featured on all wedding stationery. Day and evening invitations, menu card, order of service cover page, RSVP's.

Deadline: 8 weeks from initial consultation.

This brief is one I recently undertook for my Brother's wedding. It was a gift and I will further discuss how this unfolded below and what I learnt through SWOT analysis.

Strengths:

This project was an opportunity to use my interest in nature to create a beautiful illustration of the brides floral bouquet in my own art style, without any restrictions with the exception of it reflecting the wedding theme colours, which happen to be colours I enjoy working with anyway.

Weaknesses:

This project was a gift to my Brother for his wedding and therefore the time I spent was my own time out of work hours. I did not agree any limits on the number of revisions nor did I factor in the time it would take in total. In addition I did not set myself a limit on how long I would spend designing the stationery. I had very little knowledge of working with CMYK colour profiles.

Opportunities:

This was an opportunity to see how my illustrations could work on wedding stationery and was a test of my graphic design skills using Adobe Photoshop and Procreate produced by Savage Interactive. I was also working with a professional print company using CMYK profiles, which is fairly new to me and so this gave me the opportunity to learn how to work with the print company to get the best results.

Threats:

My perfectionism really ramped up for this project, I wanted to do my very best work as I would with any client. This resulted in me taking too long on each stage which ate into my work time, taking me away from paying work. I did complete by the deadline but because I hadn't set any limitations I ended up frustrated with myself and stressed about everything looking 'perfect' and printing correctly.

Reflection:

This project was a good test of my skills as an illustrator and also tested my design skills and working practice. The end results came out beautifully and both Bride and Groom were very happy with the end results.

I am proud of how everything turned out, the invitations were exactly as I hoped they would be and I did enjoy doing the illustration of the bouquet.

This project taught me a lot about how not to approach a project. Firstly, I did it for free because it was a wedding gift for my Brother. I would not normally work for free but this was an exception. I did not set any limits for myself in terms of how long I would spend putting them all together, nor did I set any limits for revisions (which turned out to be lots of little ones, that added on extra time) and I did not manage my stress levels well during this project either. The conversion to CMYK unsettled me because I am not used to working in those colour profiles and so things had to be changed last minute to be correct for the print company. This added further stress in order to meet the deadline.

Some of my stress was due to lack of experience and I am sure the more I work with CMYK the less stressful it will be. I definitely need to work on my confidence levels as I was worried the stationery wouldn't be good enough and they would not like it. Looking back I was very disorganised for this project. I thought initially I had collected enough information from them, in terms of deadline, specifically what items they needed, layout and written information, design ideas etc but I neglected to outline the revisions limits and also decide in advance how much time I had available to work on this. As this was for a family member I was too laid back about these details and it ended up costing me in time, energy and stress. This was my own fault for not being prepared enough and not setting my own limits.

If I was to do this again I would make sure I worked out these details for my own sake and stuck to them in order to avoid stressing myself out so much and eating up work hours time that should have been spent on paid work.

Overall this project has taught me a lot about myself, the way I work and what needs to be improved. I will take these lessons on board and make sure from now on that I not only think about the clients needs but also my own.