During this project I have pushed myself to try new things on the media and improve my skills in something that I felt I wasn’t great at the first time to prove to myself I could do it and that is what I used this project to do more than anything.

At the beginning of this project I was not confident in talking to other people about my work and having input, both negative a positive, that could change my work for the better and that’s something I have learnt to be more open to in the future I have found getting feedback at every opportunity possible meant I could cater what I was doing to people around me and not just relying on my research to produce a final product.

Because of these things I am happy with my final outcome. There are flaws throughout my project however given the time period and the fact I pushed myself to make my visualisation something I wasn’t too comfortable and confident doing, I couldn’t have done anymore at this stage. Also, being able to research a topic in many different areas has shown me there is so much more to creating a project than meets the eye and recording every stage of a project helped me to understand where I was maybe lacking information and allowed me to backtrack all my work to find flaws in ideas meaning I didn’t need to start again at any stage.

To expand on this project, I would want to create the app which is referenced though out my work and make something else that could make the project more digital as all I managed to accomplish was a promotion video on something primarily analogue meaning I was not able to fully produce something that solved the problem of young people not being taught life skills in school, just explain a solution in a digital form. I only presented what the app would look like in a vector graphic in my animation so if I had more time I would design multiple app pages for the app and make a prototype in Adobe XD which would allow me to practice more skills and work toward the brief a bit more.

I am pleased with the stylisation of the company turned out and how I could apply the colour scheme to all aspects of the project. This was the part of the project I enjoyed the most and I could see myself doing more branding in the future whether it be for a digital or flat presentation. Overall, I have been able to identify the area of the media I would want to focus on for future projects and gained skills that can be used in any sector I decide to go in to.

Smart skills are a company that dedicated its working to solving the ongoing issue of important life skills not being taught to young people in a satisfactory manner. They aim to improve the educational system by travelling around the UK to as many schools as possible to teach young people things that are not on either the school or national curriculum allowing them to leave school and enter independent living and the working world knowing as much about challenges they will face as possible.

Smart Skills approach to solving this problem is straight forward and is something that has been done before in other areas of education so just must follow the same pattern to make their project a success. However, as it has been done before, this project is not that unique in its techniques and may not be revolutionary way of solving an education problem. This also may prevent Smart Skills from succeeding as schools are already hiring companies to put on workshops for their students meaning they may not hire anymore and will stick to what they know even though the information they would be providing young people is different.

This is where the idea of an app to go along side these talks and workshops may benefit smart skills and make it more successful than another project to help teach young people more life skills. With this project being aimed at young people, technology plays a big part in their lives so a learning platform that can be downloaded onto a phone could encourage the target audience to engage with the project in hopes it would benefit them.

The animated promotional video lets an audience know the basics of the many and what Smart Skills does, however, it doesn’t expand on the exact approach they would take in a school environment and just how useful the workshops would be for young people. Also, as it is to go alongside the crowdfunded, it fails to prove any information on where the money would be spent if they managed to reach the fundraising goal apart form the vague statement of ‘the money would be spent on equipment’ This is not enough information to give someone who is donating/investing money to a cause and may affect how much a project would raise. So o be a successful project Smart Skills needs to define their goals throughout their work to show they know exactly what they want and their passion to drive the project forward.

This project does follow the brief given of identifying and researching a problem in the world and finding the most suitable solution for specific target audience It uses a wide variety of software and skills including Adobe Illustrator, InDesign. Premier Pro and After Effects, a blog platform, Adobe spark. Knowing how to develop something in these ways are common in the media industry and can be transferred to a wide range of other projects and areas in the media.

To give the audience an idea what Smart Skills would do and what it would offer I decided to create a motion graphic with a little story at the beginning to give a scenario where life skills would be useful and then end with what Smart Skills offers with pop up images.

I started this process by creating all the graphics in Adobe Illustrator, referring to my colour palette and keeping it all in the same style to create a consistent and strong brand for the project. After this I moved them all to Adobe After Effects and created quite a basic motion graphic that I wanted to represent the project. When I had done as much as possible to make the graphic as entertaining and visual as possible I added text and sound in Adobe Premier Pro.

A girl walks down a street on her way to work and is faced with situation that could be more pleasant if she were to have learnt life skills, for example, she misses her bus showing that learning time management is vital or she walks into work and gets fired showing a lack of job skills. After the scenario has been stated, it goes on to show skills that smart skills would teach at schools and a bit about the app allowing me to be more creative with the idea of making an application without making it.

As research for my crowdfunding page, I explored and took notes on these existing sites available for everyone.

1) https://www.justgiving.com

2) https://www.patreon.com/

3) http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk

I found that there are many common components  that make up the average crowdfunding page. This includes:

– Name of the project and summary of the company and situation
– Amount of money need to fund the project and how many days left to achieve this
– How much the project has raised and its backers
– A promotional video or image that represents the project and encourages people to back the project.
– A section that explains what the money raised will be used for
– Rewards for backers

All of these sites have a clear layout that makes it easy to navigate around and all the important information is given to allow people to back a project they know all the details about. The sections most important for a backer to know is usually in a banner at the top of the page in a creative way to attract people to certain projects.

STEMettes- teaching grid to code their own mobile app

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/stemettes

HYLI- Teach every child in Cornwall the skills they need for life #fund4lifeskills

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/fund4lifeskills/

Surrey-wide casualty reduction theatre education project targeted at secondary schools.

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/casualty-reduction-theatre-workshops

I chose all of these examples because they are either about life skills or a project that are supporting schools to provide workshops for their student which is what Smart Skills is all about. I will take inspiration from all of these when creating my own crowdfunding page.

This week, after deciding exactly how I wanted to solve the issue of young people not being taught enough life skills in school, I started thinking about how i wanted to present this. I bounced around a few ideas for names for the company including Think Forward, Forward Thinking and Live Ahead all of which show the company is all about education that can take you further ahead in life. After doing a quick google on some of these I found most of the already exist as company names and tend to have a similar concept of teaching a specific audience different skills. After some time I decided on the name Smart Skills as I felt it was relevant and to the point.

   

After finalising what the company was to be called and creating a quick sketch of what i wanted the logo to look like. The design I went with is a light bulb (which is commonly associated with an idea and being bright/smart) with a spanner for the inside as the light (to represent skills).  I opened Adobe Illustrator and created different variations of the initial idea. I tried different line weights and changed small details that could effect the way consumers saw the company. I decided in the design in the bottom left hand corner as I thought the lines indicating light on the last two of each line was too much detail and unnecessary for the representation of the company and decided the lines to represent a screw bulb gave a more professional look to the logo and something I could see to my advantage later on when doing my visual representation for this project.

When starting to think about the solution for the problem this project is based on, I knew I wanted to keep what ever I designed towards this sophisticated yet colourful. So when I designed the logo, I started to play around with colour and created a couple colour palettes that I though would work well with the theme of the project and also the target audience. I wanted basic primary colours so made pallets of variations of reds, blues and yellows. However, when I asked for a peers opinion of colour selection they said they associated the colour green to education so I decided to Incorporated green and also orange (this made the colours work better together and means I have more to be creative with) to the colours to my primary colour and adjusted them to complement each other. The final palette is shown on my style guide.

 

Deciding on a font to use in the branding of the company took some time and a lot of trial and error. In the end I decided on the typeface Raleway as I feel it will work well for all occasions whether used in 12pt for a paragraph of text or as a title or logo, its versatile and has many font variations with in it which will give me much more room to be creative yet keeping the style of the company cohesive and it also works well with the theme and logo. I also tried different variations of how to layout the logo, where to place the main logo in correlation to the name of the company. I decided on 3 different ways the logo can be used and how colour can be incorporated with each one.