OUGD401 - Study Task 2

In our first Seminar with Richard we began by having a look at our Love/Hate Posts and had a good laugh about the 'bad' design and moments of appreciation towards the 'good' graphic design.
Soon after we moved on with Leeds College of Art's new prospectus in hand.

Richard explained to us that we were going to spend some time observing the new prospectus the marketing department had designed and we were going to form a critique on the book in groups.

We all got into groups and started flicking through the little book... Expecting a remarkable design of the prospectus once again (the year before's were fantastic) we were proved wrong.

• To begin with, we decided the first page wasn't very welcoming at all, it had a boring typeface and very bad composition in our personal opinions. It just didn't say "Leeds College of Art" in our thoughts whatsoever, if anything just a specialised art college without standards and the amazing results throughout.

• Our main pet-peeve over this book was the spacing, layout and entire composition of the book in general. It was all over the place and had no flow or direction. Just random, spontaneous and generally awful!

• My opinion on the photography used in the book was stunning, I really appreciate good photos but for the reasons they were there.. they were bad. "Too arty" as someone from another group said after our analysis, this described it perfectly. All of the photos were composed in a way to visually please, but not communicate. An example would be a section on the staff information... with a photograph above it of a ceiling.

• As we flicked through the book, we realised there was a variety of different paper weights and stocks. We just couldn't understand this at all, what is the point in changing the paper stocks throughout the book!? I made a joke about them running out of money half way through and having to downgrade to a different paper stock purely because we couldn't figure out any other reason.

• After going through the first few pages it became the same. It became repetitive, overwhelming, boring and badly designed. If I was a new student looking to study here, the prospectus would put me right off the institution as a whole, just because as a college of art, you'd expect something outstanding from their prospectus.

There is my criticism on the new prospectus, so yeah... hopefully it will change for the new students as I fear it will put some amazing artists off of the institution which will lower the standards of the university!