Capstone Advisory Report 2

Following my Flowerseed capstone project, we also were given the opportunity to meet with a professional designer to provide us with guidance and advice for making our projects even better. The advisor I met with is Mandy Pflantz from Pheonix Creative.

After presenting my capstone project again to Mandy with some new additions, she made several helpful suggestions to me. Looking at the storefront advertisements I made for Flowerseed, she suggested some small changes that will be helpful for readability. I also produced a booklet showing the different seed blends that may be embedded into the paper, and what kind of paper you can buy per blend. I also mocked up 4 different stationary packages as well as a package design to represent the bundle packs you could buy for wildflower seed blend, native flower seed blend, herb seed blend, and vegetable seed blend.

Making Adjustments

Mandy made really helpful suggestions to improve my products. Other suggestions I will be implementing into my final projects are:

• Using the same monochromatic color scheme for different seed blends throughout my booklet and stationary mockups
• Utilizing negative space in my advertisements
• Inserting elements that I used previously like illustrations and flowers throughout my package design

When presenting my ideas to Mandy, I felt prepared with the amount of work I had prepared leading up to the presentation. I was able to set a stable foundation for my brand that is visually presentable in a way that felt real enough. Getting feedback from Mandy about how she felt my brand was on a good path and strong in its beginning stages felt great to know that I have continued to implement my brand identity throughout all my projects effectively.

Future Presentations

When presenting in the future, I want to try to think more about each slide and what topics of discussion I want to fit in per slide. In the moment of presentation it is bound for things to slip, so having a simple note guide for talking points would be good to have on hand if needed.

When designing presentation slides, I also want to take more time to make the descriptive text smaller and the imagery bigger. It is natural for me to want to put all of my information down and then design around it. Often I have to go back and edit it all out to make my presentation light and easy to run through. For viewers, I want my presentations to be intuitive. I don’t want them to have to read through a paragraph of my descriptive text that takes away from my actual work, the star of the show.