The Handmaid's Tale Project Reflection

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On reflection, I enjoyed working on the Handmaid’s Tale graphic. I struggled at first with the project concept as I wasn’t familiar with the source material. Once I started watching clips from the TV series, I began to understand the synopsis and core themes of the Handmaid’s Tale. Taking these motifs and creating a design for the ballet adaptation was challenging. Firstly, the deadline was originally November 24th, which did not allow too much time to ‘think outside of the box’ due to other deadlines. Therefore, I created a design quickly using the assets provided. Although I created a poster which looked professional, there wasn’t much depth behind its meaning. After the deadline was moved to January, this gave me more time to think laterally and how I could incorporate the ballet element into this. 

Photographing the ballet shoes for my concept was interesting. I’m not professionally trained in this field but thought this would be the best way to create original content. As I was photographing, I noticed that the lighting was not fantastic in my apartment, so I used the flashlight on my phone to provide this. In future, I would like to learn how to achieve this using industry standard lighting and equipment. I am pleased with my final result, but it took a while to discover what was the best lighting, angle and composition for my photograph. This project has developed my knowledge further as I will have a better process next time. 

I would have liked to travel to the London Coliseum to take some photographs of the building, the London Underground and Bus Shelters for my project mock-up’s. Original photography in my opinion, is much better than sourcing images online. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic this was not possible, however in future I will be taking my camera with me, to take photographs for mock-ups.

As with the lemon project, I felt short on time and could have added more blog posts about the development of my project. Nevertheless, I still managed to create a professional result and supply all deliverables. 

In future, if I am designing for a concept, I feel I would need to watch both the TV series, ballet adaptation and perhaps read the book in order to gain a more detailed understanding of the source material. A deeper understanding may have led me to make different design decisions. Next time, I would like to experiment more with my design. A popular motif of The Handmaid’s Tale is the Handmaid’s uniform. The signature red and white is displayed in many of its advertising. It would have been good to play around with the colour of the ballet shoes more for theming. Having red ballet shoes and white ribbons for example, could have been an interesting concept.

Working on this project, has taught me more software skills in both Photoshop and InDesign. I believe this will be a great portfolio piece as it showcases these skills.

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