OUIL603 Extended Practice - Engineer's Colouring Book, Part 6

A Polaroid Zatul asked someone to take. Look how smiley and not terrified we all are.

So once the prototype had been printed up, the books were distributed to the upper management, so that a meeting could be arranged with the University of Leeds staff, Fred & Martell Baines from the Progression & Outreach department (who facilitated the organisation and creation of the original brief) and the Leeds College of Art management.  

The meeting was basically for us to showcase the project, allow us to discuss and talk about our work on the project and also allow for some serious talks about research pedagogies amongst students and staff - and other fun things.

The book was really well received - the upper management were really impressed with how well we had collaborated and how the project had come together. I think what made us work so well as a group, was that we only had to be individually responsible for the work we were assigned (which meant we didn't have to handle the entire project at once) and that organisation and correspondence was place firmly in the hands of one person - which on this project was Adam. 

Having clear boundaries about who was responsible for what, and also having the facebook page allowed everyone to communicate freely and post their ideas regularly. This allowed us to keep tabs on the project throughout, and laid our deadlines out clearly in front of us. 

In real-life book publishing - illustration works the same way, with one person (or a department) working specifically with an illustrator to get work from them. You have clear deadlines to meet at various stages - which is exactly the same as what we had for making the book, which made it a lot easier to complete. 

The other positive outcome of the project was that we all got paid! Which was a nice outcome, I have to say. 

In order to properly assign the amounts we needed to be paid - we had a consultation with Fred, agreeing on our page rates. Based on advice from previous practitioners - it's usually better to go in higher and not undersell yourself (because if you go in too low at the start, it's all you'll ever get!). 

We agreed for a page rate of around £80 per page - so Initially recieved £160 for my two, then a further £80 for the second page. Everyone got varying amounts relative to the work they'd produced, as some had done more than others of provided later services like photography which they needed to be paid for. However - my total pay ended up at about £240 for the project - which may be low in the grand scheme of industry, but I was happy with given the scope of the project.

Once the books were properly prototyped - Kerry sent them off for the final print and we had to start getting ready for the big launch event (which is very exciting!)