25th Oct 2024 - 8 Jan 2025 / Week 1 - 16
Alana Sofia Othman / 0353451 / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Major Project
INSTRUCTIONS
Final Compilation
Project Ideation
Idea Dumping
Attachment 1 - Project Ideating
From before the semester began, I may not have had an idea of what I
wanted to do for my fyp like some of my friends, but I knew I wanted to
work with an existing client. I could list my many reasons to why I
insisted on that, but I wont because it's not that important. Since I was
working at Mossery, a stationery/notebooks company based in PJ, during the
semester break, I decided to ask them if they would be interested in
letting me do my FYP with them. To which they were happy to allow,
because, free labour?
I thought of a few things I could center my project on for Mossery and
consulted my bosses (a.k.a. my client) and had a few ideas. Idea 1 was my
most preferred to work on. Event branding for their annual event,
MossFest, that acts as an extension of the Mossery brand, promoting
community, creativity and self growth. However, Idea 2 was what my boss
preferred me to work on, and upon consulting Ms Anis and Mr Asrizal, it
was recommended for me to make both ideas as my Major Project.
Project Planning
Attachment 2 - Proposal Deck
I began working on my Proposal Deck by Week 3 to prepare for the pitch presentation happening in Week 7. I regularly consulted Ms Anis, Mr Asrizal and my client/boss to ensure that I covered all necessary bases, which includes the event planning, event marketing , project outcomes & deliverables, etc. Although it is still partially conceptual at this point in time, it was important that everything I planned and suggested to carry out for the project was inline with the brand and would be something achievable for them to execute.
Having had experience with working with Mossery during the MossFest 2024 event, I had some ideas of what worked well, what did not, what could be improved and so on. I went as detailed as possible with planning the event by digging around Mossery's files and folders for MossFest 2024 event planning and post mortems, analysed their social media, questioned and brainstormed with coworkers and more.
Not forgetting about the new product, I sat down with my boss and grilled him on the idea behind the prototype of their Career/Work Journal. I wanted to know the vision, the goals, the target audience and so on, to which he gave sometimes comprehensive answers but some were all over the place. For example, when asked about target audience, he mentioned "anyone and everyone who wants to grow in their career but we will distribute it to medium to large organisations because thats easiest way to make it profitable. The idea is to market it to businesses for their employees to aligning themselves with their organisation". Thinking critically and realistically, as a fellow employee, an everyday employee would get the impression that this journal is for them to put in the extra work to meet their company at their standards, which is to be better slaves to the organisation. Which is not something I stand by, so after more back and forth with my boss, we came to a middle ground of altering it's positioning and language a little to be more consumer friendly, thus the new objective, purpose and target audience.
Design Development & Final Submission Reflection
*no designs or visuals will be posted here due to confidentiality agreement signed, this includes final deck slides as well, allowing it to remain partially private shared only for submission of assignment. So instead of describing and going through my designs and deliverables, I'll instead share a reflection of what I went through during these stages of the project.
This aspect of the project was quite complicated and tedious, as designing usually is, as working with my boss to reach a final design direction was quite challenging. His style and preference tends to vary from mine. As an employee working on other projects for Mossery, taking in his comments and working towards his vision is a known and expected, something I do by hook or by crook. However, for this project, it was after all still my final year project. This made final decisions a little more blurry as it should also be based on my own beliefs, preferences, timeline, abilities and so on. It especially does not benefit me to follow everything he wanted as we have different timelines in our heads, mine following my assignment deadline while his following the fact that the actual event is only happening in August 2025, giving him the idea of plenty of time for design exploration and trial & error.
Many times throughout the project, he liked the direction the designs were heading but had bigger ideas and dreams for it, wanting me to go above and beyond with certain things and take it to a more extreme level, such as him suggesting to create a typeface of both a chunky font and a thinner outline font variation to fit the design direction. Which of course, is not realistic for me to work on and achieve in only a few weeks before submission. Despite his big dreams, I consistently worked to reach a middle ground with him on design direction, grateful for his constructive feedback that helped me move forward with design direction and development.
Although there are certain aspects of my design outcomes that I feel and know could be improved on, for the time being, I am mediocrely satisfied with my outcome. I say this as an objective designer as I believe there is room for improvement but the struggling designer in me that was trying to balance expectations, feedback and preferences all within a timeline that felt as if the clock was put on 2x speed, knows that this was the best I could do at the moment. Despite all the struggle, I continued to work hard on it and put care, effort and thought into it, trying my best to not cut corners eventhough I was behind schedule. I was able to focus on the important items needed to complete the project and still make it my own all while ensuring it was satisfactory enough for my client/boss and myself.
FEEDBACK
Weekly Feedback Notes
REFLECTION
Experience
As I write this at the end of my Major Project, it marks the end of my degree. A beautiful and exciting moment that I've been waiting for. Working on this project was quite difficult for me as I was also working part time with Mossery simultaneously. Working a part time job that felt like a full time job while also trying to attend classes, do assignments and work on Major Project really drained alot of my energy and time, I do not recommend it to the faint of heart or anyone in their right mind.
Observations
I know that I did not spend as much time as I shoulve and wanted to on this project. Progress was consistently slow and behind schedule because I spent too much time and energy doing actual paid work instead of working on my unpaying student assignments.
Findings
I cant honestly say 'if I could turn back time, I would spend more time on it' because realistically my priority will still be my paying job. However, if given the opportunity by Mossery to take this project and make it real with them in the future, I would hope to be able to achieve a better executed design direction and reach it's full potential as I still feel there was alot that could be done for this project.
FURTHER READING
Levdikova, T. (2022) Event attendee journey: map a customer journey for events (+template) [Online] UXPressia. Available at: https://uxpressia.com/blog/event-attendee-journey-template
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