Nice is not a design term!!!

My Level 1 DVC group were working on their analysis notes today. They have to include analysis of the work with all of their design developments and this is the hard part for them. We get around that by putting all the design developments up on the Level 1 Google Plus community (Link here),  and everyone makes comments on each other's design work. The rules are : - one positive comment and one supportive improvement comment. There is also the rule that "nice" is not a design description!!!
We have already had practice by analysing existing poster designs, and we talked about layout, colour, font choice, use of white space, focus of attention etc....
What we did then was start to take these comments and use them in their own work.
All of the students have Google sites for their project work. This will develop into a design portfolio over time.
They have their design developments saved out of Adobe Illustrator as image files and embedded onto their sites. We were then putting a table under each one, with columns for "what is good about this design" and "what can I  improve in this design". The comments from the community were used and reworded for this table.

Our next step is to make a plan for the final design based on what was said by everyone here.

The standard for this work is AS91069 Promote an organised body of design work to an audience using visual communication techniques.

To aim for excellence at this, the description is :-

Effectively promote an organised body of design work to an audience using visual communication techniques involves: 

• selecting and presenting the features of an organised body of work to an audience.

• purposefully selecting and applying techniques to ensure layout, composition and visual impact are appropriate to the context of the brief and audience.

• communicating a high quality presentation that is convincing, shows accuracy of layout, visual impact, and precise execution of techniques.

They are analysing the visual communication, layout and composition of the other members of the class. They are actually doing more analysing of work doing it this way as they have to write comments on all three developments of the whole class, but as they find it easier to analyse the work of others than their own, they don't seem to notice that they are doing a lot more of it!!

This year, I think i will get them to put a link to the Level 1 Google Plus community on their own sites, so the examiner / moderator can see the work that they do there too, even though that is not the part that gets marked in the end, it was part of the process.

4 credits before the end of term, here we come!!