Finally Wrapping Things Up

I'm so glad to be finally done with that group project!  I wish we did it earlier in the semester, but my group managed to finish strong and come up with a great idea and a fantastic presentation.  I also have to say that I grew to like my role in the project as well.  I started out thinking Research Director was just a filler role with little importance, but I think the work I did really helped shape our project.  I experimented with the kiosk in the welcome center to get an idea of how it worked, and that changed our orientation of the Corkboard from a vertical plane to an inclined one.  I also did my own "user testing" experiments on my roommates.  They gave me a lot of useful feedback, but were mainly disappointed that the project was not intended for actual use.  Looking around now, I really do wish we could have something, if not a kiosk than at least an app to tell us what's going on.  I passed two concerts/festivals at my school in the past week and not one of my friends knew about them ahead of time.
As the PR person and newly elected Art Coordinator of FOCUS (my awesome club), I realize the difficulty in advertising for an event.  I designed the FOCUS posters seen across campus and tried to make them as eye-catching and colorful as possible.  Sadly, as seen in our video presentation, that was not enough to make them noticeable.  The wind kept blowing and tearing our fliers and it curled them up so no one could read them.  Also, some sorority kept putting their fliers over ours.  Our app/kiosk would stop those incidents and interferences from happening altogether, which is why I believe it is so necessary.  My team ended up going door to door handing out fliers and we even stood outside of Oscars the night before our show to pass out more.  Luckily, our show was a success and it had a great turnout, but think of how easy it would have been if we could just send a jpeg to the SA and they could put it up on the Corkboard.  An app/kiosk like that would make our lives so much easier, and I could focus on making the flier look pretty instead of trying to jam as much information as possible on it.

Overall, I'm glad that this was our final project.  I liked working in a group and I am so thankful I was put in an excellent group with amazing people.  I am generally a quiet person, so I'm glad I wasn't paired with someone loud and bossy who would drown out me and my ideas.  I did try to speak up more with this project and I think that became easier as I got to know everyone in the group.  This was a great opportunity to see how the graphic design BFA students work and I loved seeing how they could push our ideas into physical designs.