After doing the collaborative year review with Charlie, I thought it would be good to individually review how my year has gone and what I have learnt and done this year. This will also help me in preparing for my individual presentation.
I first reviewed what we did in the first PPP sessions where we chose 10 things that we wanted to improve on/do this year.
The 10 things I want to do/improve on this year
- Continue to develop my skills and use of digital software; Photoshop, Illustrator & Indesign
- Learn how to create websites and experiment in this media
- Create work in a variety of different media, such as screen printing, drawing & use of the laser cutter.
- Begin to incorporate different processes on the same piece of work instead of sticking to one media throughout. Perhaps combing drawing and digital etc.
- Experiment with scale, particularly large scale.
- Spend more time on research in briefs to get a fuller understanding in my outcome and the reasons for it. Expand on my methods of collecting research.
- Start to use hand-rendered design work instead of relying solely on digital all the time
- Continue to develop my interest in editorial work and book binding.
- Gain a fuller understanding into the history of graphic design, particularly in typeface design and history.
- Work of essay writing.
Reading over these ten, I would say that I have accomplished quite a few of them, and there are others that I wanted to accomplish that I haven't yet.
I do definitely think I have developed my skills in digital software this year as this has always been a large part of my responses to briefs. At the beginning of the year I was quite reluctant to creating illustrations on Illustrator and experimenting with this, however I do think that I have started to work on this through the year and am much more confident in my ability to use it Illustrator, and the other two softwares. On top of this I have started developing my skills in Dreamweaver, which is always a good skill to have.
Something which I haven't done is start to use hand-rendered design work in my work. While I have experimented with hand-rendered print processes etc, I haven't really included them into my final pieces of work for briefs. However I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. I thick that it's just down to the direction I am going as a designer. I'm someone who's much more into creating a large amount of outcomes instead of individual ones which are hand-rendered. It's just the sort of designer I am, so I'm not too disheartened by not accomplishing this goal.
I have definitely spent much more time this year on research, and I think it does show on my blog and in my practice. I used to come up with my ideas and start the work before researching into other designers or the context of everything, which was the wrong way of doing things. Now I am much more inclined to see what's out there, been done before, and possible before starting my design work.
I don't know if I have particularly got a fuller understanding in the history of graphic design, but I have definitely got a greater understanding of the subject as a whole, and feel that I am more confident in my ability to speak about it and know what I'm talking about and why I'm doing something. With this, I definitely think my essay writing skills have improved as well. I do think that I went the right way about my essay this year and didn't leave it to the last minute like I did last year, and because of this, I feel that I have a much better understanding of the subject on a while and went more in depth and found it easier to get sources and information on the subject as I have improved my researching skills overall.
I then thought about everything practically that I had learnt this year. The first is obviously Dreamweaver. The sessions we did definitely helped, and I also did research myself into some of the simple coding I could do to make my website really do what I wanted it to do, and how to make it change for each page. I actually really enjoyed the Design For Web brief where this was used. I think that my designing skills for web definitely need to improve, but coding is something I found relatively easy to get my head around and do quickly.
When it comes to the practical skills I have learnt this year, I have done a lot of work in learning new hand rendered skills:
These are all definitely useful skills for me to have and to have experimented in. Doing them has given me a very clear idea into what I want to use and take forward. Doing these processes definitely gave me an appreciation for the considerations that need to be make when it comes to printing, from stock to colour, scale and printing method.
One skill I have learnt this year and have been happy to work on is book binding. While I knew how to Japanese bind confidently, I didn't really know any other kind of binding methods. I knew of them, but not how to go about doing them. With this, I did the induction to do the basic ones, and then have researched into other binding techniques which I would like to be able to use in the future. The most recent binding technique I have learnt is
perfect binding. This is something I learnt for my research booklet for Studio Brief 1 of 505. I found that because I already have good experience with book binding, it was easy to learn a new bind and be able to set it up well enough to do well on my first attempt at this. I am now at a point where I have done this bind a good eight or none times and I really do feel confident in my ability to do this, so much to the point that I taught a couple of other people how to do this successfully without the use of a huge amount of tools. I am now moving forward with this and teaching myself to case bind books with this technique as the techniques to do this are ones that I already know. It's just about putting them together well, which I hope to do and use in the future.
A binding technique that I would like to learn is coptic binding. This is something that I always find to be visually fantastic and something that I really want to know how to do. While I don't know if I will use it in my professional practice, having the skills to do it is a gain to me as a designer and means that I could potentially use it whenever I wanted.
Looking back to the practical work I have done over the year, I definitely feel there is a progression and it very clearly shows from the earlier work on the year to the work that I am doing now. While I am currently in the middle of projects and not yet with all my complete pieces, I do think that my work has got a much more professional appearance and feel to it than it did at the beginning of the year.
In terms of problems/failures to the year, there have been a couple of disappointing projects to me now that I look back at them. While at the time I was sort of happy with them, I definitely now think I could do them so much better now as I have a larger understanding in the subject. I think that the two projects that show this the most are my first two of the year, Design For Print & Design For Web. While I am happy with the final outcome of my Web brief, I spent a long time working on a design which I changed pretty much last minute. This was to do with the fact I was having trouble with the designs, and then Numiko came and did a talk, and I redesigned it while listening to them speak the way they do about web design. I just feel it is a shame that it took me so long to change it and left me with not much time to develop the idea. However I do think that it was a learning curve for me as it made me realise that sometimes it's good to take a step back and look over everything to decide what I really need to do to answer a brief and that my first design development might not be the right one for the brief.
My Design For Print brief was a real eyeopener into life as a second year and how big the difference was from third year. I was completely out of my depth in this brief and probably should have asked for a bit more guidance. When I did ask, I was thrown a million questions instead of answers as such, so that did put me off asking for guidance, but now I see that it was all to make me think and create my response independently instead of following a brief completely.
The main success of this year, I feel has been the Responsive module 503. I think that this module has been the best in terms of how I went about briefs and thinking about responses to those briefs. This is mainly because this module was all about live or competition briefs instead of university set briefs. This means I was working for a client, for their needs and wants instead of for university work. I felt that there were as many failures as successes in this module, and it definitely helped me become the designer I am right now because of it. It made me grow very quickly and see what clients are like and how some of them are completely adamant on their visual ideas instead of listening to designers. I thoroughly enjoyed doing my Domino's Pizza YCN brief. Initially when I picked the brief I was unsure of how I wanted to go about it, but once I got a concept I was happy with, I really felt I created a good response around it, and I feel I got a lot out of the brief. While I don't think I necessarily gave a strong concept, I think my response to the concept I created was strong, and I spent a lot of time making the work look like it would really belong in Domino's, so this is something I am proud of. While I would love to get some kind of recognition for this from YCN, I don't think I will, but I think the brief was completely worth doing.
I think the PPP module has helped me immensely in the idea of setting up a business. I have always had the ambition to set up my own design company eventually, but never really knew how to go about it until this year. The collaboration brief to this module is definitely something that I will count as one of the most important of this year. Learning all the information and knowing what needs to be considered and carried out to start up a business is something that I am glad to know at this point. I think learning it next year might have been a bit too late as now I have the chance to build on everything within the next year so I have a good base and have a good idea into what I want to do and how I can go about it realistically. I think that working in the group this way was good as well. I have previously not liked working in a large group, but this went well and I think we worked very well as a group in coming up with everything we did and making it work to the point where we all agreed it'd not be a half bad idea to go through with it in the future.
At this point in the year, I am actually a bit disappointed in myself for not getting in contact with a lot of studios or designers. I know that this is generally down to my lack of confidence in approaching new people, and especially people in the industry. First impressions are so important these days and I do worry about them a lot so this is definitely what has help me back, however now I have a list of studios that I would like to visit and talk to, I would hope that over the summer I will be going to visit these and send out promotional packs to these places. With this in mind, I would definitely like to start making an active decision in developing my personal branding over the summer to something that really does represent me as a designer, starting with this self branding brief for this module. While I haven't got much time to complete this for the deadline, I want to use this as a starting point to develop myself an identity and create a strong image for myself as a designer in printed ephemera and on the web. While I have a Behance, I am considering getting a Behance ProSite as this will give me much more free reign of how I want everything to be displayed. Or I could even try set up a Cargo Collective account. I don't know what that entails at the minute, but it is something I will explore and see what happens.
I do think I have made a considerable amount of progress throughout this year and am already looking back at projects I only completed a few months ago with an entirely different perspective on them and thinking about how I could improve/redo these to something that is much more professional. Throughout the third year I will be working to make myself a much more professional designer and continue to work at the areas of design that I enjoy, which at this point in time is Branding, Editorial and Promotion. While these all obviously need constant work, these are the areas I really enjoy working in and I would like to continue to move forward in these areas.
