Assessment

For my assessment submission I'd bought a portfolio box to put my A4 images into. My learning log is online in blog form and the portfolio box was to include a contents sheet, the images, assignments and tutor reports. This was pretty much all I had intended to include.

Then my tutor suggested a phone discussion with regards to how I was going to prepare for submission. We covered a number of areas from presentation to context and also the need to highlight the most relevant posts in my blog to show my critical reasoning, research and analysis of photography.

I came away thinking I needed to put a lot more work into my submission. For the blog I am going to use the very last post to try to signpost my learning by linking to what I hope are the most relevant posts that I have made during the past year.

Luckily I had left plenty of time before the submission deadline to deal with the presentational side and spent a couple of weeks thinking about how I wanted to show my work and try out ideas. I have documented the process as I went along as can be seen below.

I decided to put the assignments into individual cardboard sleeves with cover artwork for each one. I drew a sketch in my notebook of what I was trying to achieve.

Then I disassembled a cardboard DVD box so that I could scale it up to A4 size and use as a template.

This was my mock up of the sleeve. It turned out to be quite fiddly with all the gluing required.

This was the thinnest I could make it and most of the assignments had far less images than this one. It became apparent that five sleeves of this thickness would not easily fit into the portfolio box. Back to the drawing board.

I then made a cut-down version of my sleeves that only partially wrapped around. This was so that the spines could be made with varying thicknesses to accommodate the different assignments. All seemed to be going well until I tried to feed them through my printer for the cover images. The folded flaps confused the printer and it would error and not pick up the sleeve in the mechanism correctly. My patience was becoming very thin at this point...

Determined not to be beaten I looked at the problem from the other end. If the folded sleeves would not go through the printer then the solution was to print my image onto a single piece of A4 card that would. Then I needed to devise a way to incorporate the printed card into my new sleeve. The simplest way was cut an aperture in the sleeve and place the printed card into it. This would double the thickness but as some of the assignments were quite thin I had some leeway to play with.

Here are the cover images printed onto card and inserted into the sleeves. To make them sit flush I used double-sided tape to stop the two pieces of card from separating and leaving gaps.

I've also created a navigation booklet to go with the presentation. This consisted of a cover letter explaining the contents and how my blog could be navigated. It also included a visual diagram showing how the contents of the portfolio was made up.

Finally, my submission is completed, collated, and ready to go in the post tomorrow.

The contents of assignment 4 to show the layout - An assignment header sheet with course title, name and student number. The essay, tutor report, the images, a response to feedback and amendments sheet, and any images submitted as amendments at the end.