Evaluation

Firstly, the inspiration for this project in which I create an airline from scratch, transpired from the Unit 12 Travel and Tourism Billboard Campaign in which I had to invest time into crafting an assignment complete of information ranging from airlines to aviation billboards as well as overall design elements. This was a project that I enjoyed from different angles like researching information about flight campaigns and the strategies that airlines use to attract attention from the public eye, such as inserting funny jokes or quotes into their design composition and making links to comic destinations. Another aspect I greatly enjoyed in the Unit Travel and Tourism Billboard Campaign was the process of accumulating components to compose three billboard designs in which I had the ability to express myself to a great extent with virtually no limitations with the only rule being having to create these advertisements for a specific airline, in my case being Turkish Airlines. 

The process of searching for an airline to use as the foundation for the designs was a journey in itself because I had to carefully plan out my route to digitisation and had to make sure I had the ability to use the branding of an airline correctly to give life to this marketing aspect of billboards. Unit 12 definitely influenced me to awaken my extended major project into the category of airlines and because of the experience I gathered throughout it, I was able to garner ideas and transition them into my major final piece and produce an accomplished commission.

Throughout my extended major project, I took part in intriguing research on various designers and final pieces of airline designs that were available on websites like Adobe Behance which had a positive impact on my conceptualisation as well as the outlook on building such project. Viewing a variety of interesting work opened my eyes to the many possible journeys I could go on in my project and galvanised me into selecting a colour combination I wouldn't even have thought of or choosing a certain formation to depict my art and in this regard I can say that I did form a link between my work and the work of other creators as I implemented a small slices of their cake into mine. Having resources such as website and tutors to gain inspiration from and bring new concepts to life, was a vast aid for me as it enabled me to establish a unique style in my work.

Next, I now want to discuss the subject matter my project and the overall content present within this project. My extended major project is comprised of constructing an airline with the purpose and desire of achieving an identity that can be recognised as unique. This was an aspiring journey which involved locating a name for the airline, a country to represent, a colour scheme and goals I want to obtain which were not simple to manage and required a careful thought process to ensure the process went as planned and I developed amongst my objectives and design elements along the way. 

Starting off the project, I immediately referred to YouTube for details and intelligence on how to give birth to an airline as YouTube is a great source of knowledge and comes in video format, which for me is a great way to learn new information and I found the video that I researched greatly useful. I focused on essential components within the video such as selecting a business model and being distinct by having cheaper services or bringing a faster service in a certain area of operation for example. Another essential component in the video that I touched on was financing, where in researching this part of the video I discovered that there are in fact miniscule profit margins in airline operations because of factors like fuel costs and maintenance with attention to detail being crucial for any type of success financially. 

As I progressed through the project research, I delved into the specified certificates required for an airline to operate aircraft from the United Kingdom called Air Operator Certificate as well as having a deeper delve into a text written guide on how to start an airline which further augmented my understanding of the aviation business and how they operate. This guide also talks about the planning and infrastructure that takes place within an aviation company especially for passengers, and I believe reading this article was an important step that I took to help me navigate around the concept that my whole project is based on. I also took an interest in key elements of design such as colour theory and typography as well as the logos and details of three airlines: Turkish Airlines, British Airways and Delta Air Lines.  

Approaching the configuration stage of the design process for my airline I wanted to ensure that my notions came to light in the correct way which required me to have a thorough procedure with my thoughts and come to a conclusion about how I was going to represent my airline. I chose my airline to be the official flag carrier of Romania hence giving the name ROAIR for my company, which I feel is a perfect mixture of both an aviation related term and the country's short country code to create a name that is wholly linked to both the nation's identity and the company. I also came to realisations on certain designs that I was going to implement on objects such as business cards, aeroplanes, staff cards as well as virtual things like a phone app and a website. It is during this time where I utilised the internet and obtained inventiveness for my designs from airline company projects that I could find on websites like Adobe Behance, as mentioned before, and brought that creativity to life by heavily inflicting my ideas into the inspiration I visualised.  

During the design process of my project, I did encounter some issues such as time restraints, the process of coming up with new concepts I'm making sure that every piece of work I crafted lived up to my desired standard. I firstly encountered these issues later on in the design process as that's when it got more difficult and I had to be more creative to develop new ideas which then led to final pieces. One example where I faced a problem with time arrived whilst I was designing my website pages but I wasn't quite sure that approach to take, and so I ended up doing more research and websites like Adobe Behance who truly gone as much information as possible regarding website pages and more specifically airline websites. Because of this issue, it required me to spend a little more time on this specific Productions process of my project which I wasn't quite happy about as I wanted to move on further and create more designs as I had a set time in which I wanted to get these designs completed. another issue I faced, consisted of me not being as confident and sure about a certain design I had created as I have a desired standard that I want all my pieces of work to reach. this can be quite frustrating as not only gonna eat up time because I'm having to go back to finished designs and refine them but also because sometimes it can be more of a bad habit and they can do me more harm than good in certain aspects of the design elements.

When it comes to the visual aspect of the work, I gave my best effort to add my own style wherever that be through the manipulation of images all the creation of visuals itself. I chose to have a clear theme for my airline which consisted of colours such as dark blues, red and yellows as well as the typography and the consistency of placements that took place with design elements onto canvases. in my personal opinion, I believe that I have added a great depth of elements within my work as I made sure to Deep dive into any design I crafted and to fully represent what I have visualised. I also believe that my pieces of work have conveyed deep space very well as I don't see any of my designs to appear flat and back this up with their opinions of my peers as well as my tutors. I tried to use as much space as possible so that my work can have that true depth pop out and to not make it look like I have left anything out in any blueprint I gave life to. Moving on to the use of colours, as I mentioned before I strived for every creation of my in this project to be consistent in the way for use colour as well as the way they are represented. The five main colours I applied in all of my pieces of work were made up of blues, reds yellows, whites and blacks. The use of these colours allowed me to create a wide range of contrasts between all my designs which greatly aided me in enabling my work to stand out and be unique. I would say that the tones I have used are a split mix of hot and cold colours which I am happy about as I wanted to find a balance in many key design aspects such as colour theory. 

Talking about the tonal range of my work, I also made some exceptions to the five main colours I used in situations like when I had to create a shadow in the booking tool by using a lighter shade of grey. another place where I created a shadow was for the aeroplane in the Billboard and I did so to create a contrast in tone from the white rectangle on the left hand side of the screen as well as the beach image on the right of the canvas which made sure that the aeroplane stood out. in general, I would say that I have used more middle tones throughout my work compared to darker or lighter tones of colour as I have no purposeful use of very dark shades because I wanted my airline to appear like a pleasant and jolly company with a great environment surrounding it, whereas the lighter tones I did use more than the darker ones in aspects such as designing my website pages or when I crafted my billboard as well as the boarding pass and crew passes. 

Moving on from this, I would say that the composition of my work was once again fairly balanced, with many designs being horizontally based and some vertically based. one example of a horizontal design would be my website pages which I designed for desktops and personal computers and I did so because this is the most common layout when creating websites which only made sense to include in my work. a vertically based piece of work I crafted would be my pilot and crew passes which I designed in a vertical composition to create an ease of readability as well as making them more convenient when used as lanyards. The use of space within the compositions of my designs have been quite busy in the right areas and minimal when needed. For example, when creating the crew passes I intended to have them designed the in a minimalistic style has to be efficient and straight to the point for people to see whether someone is a pilot or a stewardess/steward. Whereas when designing my boarding pass I tried to use as much space as possible by filling it out with information about the flight as it is an important aspect of an airline company which is to give the consumer as much information about their scheduled flight as possible. This highlights a contrast between the two styles of work, as sometimes certain information needs to be kept minimal as such In the case of the crew and pilot passes because that's all that a passenger would need to know about the aeroplane crew, however, in the case of boarding passes a passenger would need to know a plethora of information to be ensured that they are in the hands of professionals requiring a more busy style of design to be implemented.

Next I would like to talk about the typography used as well as the overall appearance but this has within all my designs. The chosen font for my project was a font I discovered on Google Fonts and it caught my eye as I visualised and I deal with in which I could use this typeface to create plenty of Visual work for an airline. I also ensure that this typeface passed my test of the professional style that I wanted to achieve for my pieces of work and I did so by simply typing out my airline's name all in capital letters to see how well it would look as a logo. This font uses a serif style which can be distinguished by the strokes at the end of each letter. It isn't an overly serif font and uses just the right value of weight on each of the stroke added onto the letters which is another reason as to why I chose this one because of its good look and and ease of readability to the human eye. For my logos of both the dark blue and the white versions, I used capital letters to symbolise the airline's name very clearly and to give it an enlarged appearance once again contributing to the sightseeing of this design work. The specific version of this font is in fact in a bold style as I wanted a powerful message being delivered all across the board from my logo, to mottos as well as information.

When specifying the exact ideas and techniques are used to create my whole project, it ranged from a combination of analogue and digital techniques. I firstly used analogue techniques at the start of my project when designing sketches which involved manual drawing of a pencil on pieces of paper with all the concepts coming from my own intellect and not a single use of any source of technology. Secondly, for the rest of the project, I applied a digital technique to the production of my work as it moved to software on the computer and developed from analogue to digital in a smooth manner. digital techniques included using Adobe tools and software to alter my designs and create design pieces of work which was assisted by the sourcing of certain Media materials from websites such as Adobe Behance as inspiration, Unsplash for high resolution images and and Unblast for high quality mock-ups.

Overall, I believe that my ideas and techniques have vastly been differentiated compared to my previous projects I have worked on because this project was an eye opener in many cases and scenarios in aspects such as the way I conducted research, my design methods and how I perceive the work of others gain an advantage for myself by turning the inspiration to implementation. when it comes to designing I would say that there should mostly be a balance of both analogue and digital, however, personally I would lean more towards digital techniques because just like on paper you can still bring concepts to life, but with software you can see them directly with colour already applied or with the composition being easily manipulated for example. If I had the opportunity to start this project again, I would definitely approach the production process a little differently. I would firstly be more attentive to the way I conduct my research in order to preserve time and have a better overall efficiency within aspects such as writing tasks as well as the design assembly. having this time efficiency would also help with getting past hurdles earlier and finding out problems at the right times, instead of meeting them at the latest stage in the project which would cause me a headache. When it comes to the successfulness of my work, I believe this term can be applied to my project for the consistency that I have kept across all the design work in order to create a professional appearance. I managed to do this by using a specific colour scheme consisting of five main colours which I applied to almost every object and detail. Another successful aspect of my work would be its distinctive appearance which is mostly due to good contrasts in the right areas of the canvas across the board. 

In conclusion, this was a very enlightening experience as I discovered new things about myself and also about the methodology of conducting work within a specific time frame. I found that I was quite impatient at times when it came to the process of conceptualisation which restrained me from achieving the highest standard of work I could produce, however, I overcame this by altering certain areas of designs that didn't feel right to me and moved forward from there. To finish off, I thoroughly enjoyed the manufacturing of my extended major Project and was full of adventure being composed of challenges I had to overcome, discovering new information about Airlines and aviation design after conducting research as well as crafting designs that depicted my motif and how I could incorporate that within an airline company.