Project Evaluation

The aim of this project was to create an online forecasting space for the public in the form of a magazine that explores the upcoming hair and beauty trends for the season ahead.  The online magazine combines high fashion catwalk imagery as well as some of my own interpretations of future trends to bring together an overview of what can be expected within the beauty industry in the season to come.

Throughout the production of my final major project, I have grown as a creative practitioner and developed skills in multiple areas that I would not have comprehended before starting the project.  This project has allowed me to create an online space that explores the future of hair and beauty, through which was possible with extensive research and evaluating, henceforth introducing The Beauty Prophecy.

The final output of this project - an interactive, online, forecasting magazine.  The title The Beauty Prophecy was chosen to represent the element of forecasting in the magazine, as ‘prophecy’ means ‘a prediction that will happen in the future’.  Creating the online magazine single-handedly in three months has been an extremely ambitious and challenging task.  I knew that it would be tough and a lot of work, however I wanted to challenge myself, which the production of this project definitely has done.  From organising photoshoots and trying to find a willing team, to constructing the website for my online space, the production process has not been an easy one, especially as I have done a lot of it by myself due to having been let down by a lot of people.

Through undertaking research, I found that it helped me to gain a good background understanding of my concept and what should be expected of the online magazine.  I began my project by researching into current forecasts for Autumn Winter 16, as well as looking at the catwalk shows that took place in February.  I found that this helped and inspired me, because trends that I had intended to forecast in my magazine had also been seen on the catwalks, backing up my ideas.  The difference between my trends and those from the catwalk is the idea behind them.  For my forecasting magazine, I began by distinguishing an overall trend theme that would run behind and support the creative make-up and hair ideas that I devised.

Successes within my project would have to be the majority of the photoshoots that I undertook to go on my website.  Overall I did seven photoshoots and two still life photoshoots, however not all of them made the cut for the final website.  Each set of images that was created were good and as I had hoped them to be, however when it came to putting the whole magazine together, not all of them fitted together nicely like I had expected them to.  Out of the seven photoshoots for the different looks, I only ended up using five image ranges.  This is because some of the models were a bit awkward in front of the camera, which is something that I should make sure for in the future when I am organising photoshoots.  Also, there were only a few small shots from my still life imagery that I was able to use in my magazine, due to the pictures being quite dark in a lot of them.  I think that this was because I had been let down by my photographer and so had to shoot the products by myself, and I had never shot still life before.  At the time I thought that I was doing well, until I got home and looked at the images in a larger format on my laptop.  This showed up a lot of errors in lighting and positioning of the camera when trying to shoot.

Although there have been some positives in the outcome of creating my magazine, there have also been a lot of things that could have been done better and with more time to spare, which would have resulted in a better final outcome of my project.  Key points of production that stand out to me for improvement are; sticking to my time schedule with better organisation, having reliable team members to help me out with my project, and being sure to achieve everything that I set out to do in the first place.

My organisation is usually not great, but throughout the production of this project it has been even worse than usual.  This can be put down to a number of things, but in my opinion the main reason for me falling so behind so quickly was because dissertation was still ongoing when I started this project.  I also feel that having the reflective blog alongside the major project has been overwhelming, as it is almost like having two projects at once.  I found that once I was slightly behind with my work, trying to catch up got harder and harder as the weeks went on, but my organisation is something that I am trying to improve on.  Similarly to this, I was unable to achieve everything that I had set out to do, due to my lack of organisation.  Examples of missing elements from my project would be the project social media platforms and a page from my website.

Alternatively, trying to organise a team to help me on specific dates has been really difficult.  I have been let down my numerous potential models, and the majority of my imagery has been shot by myself as I have not been able to find reliable, dedicated photographers.  However because of this, I do feel that I have learnt a lot about photography since the start of this project, and I feel a lot more confident taking photos now.  This said, I would still prefer to have the help of a photographer in the future, because they’re a lot more knowledgeable than I am.

The most challenging stage of the project was producing and developing the website that would hold my online magazine.  Originally I tried to get the help of a web designer because I thought that this would help to make my site look more professional.  When my contacting calls did not receive any response, I seeked John’s help with Adobe Muse.  Although Muse has created a lot of boundaries when it came to creating my website, I am proud that I managed to do it by myself, along with some of John’s help.  One of the main problems that I had with Muse was trying to get the navigation menu to scroll with the page as the reader scrolls through the website.  This was so frustrating as it was one of the key features that I wanted to be able to make the website’s pages easily accessible at all times for the viewer.  I had planned to give up and just deal with the fact that my menu was not going to scroll with the page, when John found the solution.  It turned out that I needed to have a fixed width in the version of Muse that I had downloaded, but when we changed the width settings it still did not work due to a glitch in my system.  We discovered that the sticky menu worked if we created a new website plan, so I transferred everything that I had already done into a new document.  This was not ideal, but it meant that I could have my desired scrolling menu, and I am very pleased that I made the decision to do so.

Further improvements could have been made to The Beauty Prophecy, had I allowed myself more time to do so.  I feel that the content of my magazine could have been a lot more detailed and that there could have been a lot more to it.  Although I am happy with what I have managed to produce, I just wish that I had produced more content, which is something that I’d like to explore.  As I am doing a Masters Degree next year, I think that this would be the perfect opportunity for me to continue to work on The Beauty Prophecy, by creating further issues and making the improvements that I wish I had allowed myself the time to do originally.