Final Stages

For my (possibly) final blog post, I’ll be writing about the final stages of creating this project.

Research Book

The research book took the bulk of my time this semester, as well as my stress. It took around 20 rounds of last-minute edits before I felt I could finally send it to print. I was a nervous wreck when it came to printing it out because I knew I didn’t have the time to reprint if it came to that. When I received the final copy, I found that the font was larger than I wished for it to be. I also noticed that a couple of spreads came very close to the inside fold, so it wasn’t the easiest to read the text toward that fold. Overall, I was mainly relieved all the images came out in good quality and that the coloring was how I intended. I took the few issues I came across with a grain of salt and accepted my fate. I didn’t want to stress myself out with minor things like that.

Posters

I made some small edits to my posters this semester and had enough time to even fix a couple of those edits too. I was worried about fixing the posters after I had already printed my research book because the other versions were in the book, so I didn’t want it to look obviously different. After a meeting with some of my classmates and my professor, we agreed that making those tweaks would be fine and, even though they would be different from the posters in the book, the differences wouldn’t be too glaring and hopefully the faculty who’d grade it would understand.

Shirts

When it came to the shirts, the design was easy. The edits I made were slight, such as removing the text on the Sweetgrass shirt, and it seemed like everyone I showed didn’t really have any feedback about them. I originally intended on printing out the shirts physically, but I ran into issues with deciding how best to do this. I specifically wanted them on mineral wash shirts which made it hard to print from someplace like Custom Ink and one of the designs was too complicated to cut out from iron-on paper. After my stress with getting my research book printed, I decided to make my life easier and create mockups of shirts that I liked and print out the pieces of paper to present them.

Website

Designing this website for the campaign came easily. I got some helpful feedback from my classmates about what was working and what wasn’t, and some useful suggestions from my professor. I almost decided last minute to not do this website at all, due to stress with only a few weeks before I graduate since I already had so many parts of this project anyway, but I dedicated some time to it and I liked how it came out in the end.

Overall, this project was an interesting and new process for me. With each part of the campaign, I decided to show what I learned in a different Graphic Design course during my time in college. I’ve been working on Our First People since September 2022 and as April 2023 ends, I’ll be finishing up the project (until I decide to edit some things after graduation). It was an emotional rollercoaster, from research about these tough topics to stress with certain aspects of design to come up with creative ways to accomplish what I set out to do with my Graphic Design thesis project. I’m proud of myself and my work, and that’s all I was hoping for.