1. What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
I tried to continue with the same work ethics as Part One of this module. I learnt a lot by working with Anand and it has a considerable effect on my design development. I have stopped going off at tangents and running away from the brief. I think this means I am able to concentrate on the strong ideas I have and take them through til the end. I tried to apply myself to briefs, which would develop on what I want to do and have an interest in. These were mainly illustrative briefs, but I think I picked a series of briefs that applied my interests in different mediums. Colour was also an area of development for me. Instead of picking colours just because they looked good, I spent hours flicking back and forth between different colour palettes and shades.
My main objective at the start of this brief was to improve my visualisation skills. Over the course of this brief, I definitely spent more time on developing and producing imagery that I feel I improved drastically, compared to the scrappy; small images that I was producing last year and at the beginning of this year. I think one downfall was I over ran on one of my briefs because I just wasn’t happy with the illustrations for my Hugo brief. This is a level of commitment I wouldn’t have had last year. So definitely some improvement made.
I wanted to really increase the size of my screen print portfolio but delays and mistakes within my timetabling made it impossible. Something to thing about next time round; especially since I’m approaching my third year. But I’m going to screen print them in between now and the end of the show.
2. What approaches to generating work and solutions to problems have you developed and how have they helped?
I got straight into the designing with these briefs. I decided to do all the research and initial ideas for each brief in the first few days. This got the boring bit out of the way. My life has, over the course of this module, become more scheduled and planned out. Which isn’t me. However, this has helped me achieve goals I set for myself at the end of each week. Some compromises were made and I had to rejig something about, but overall I was able to complete my work on time and I think to good effect. I had two timetables, which sounds confusing but basically I used my yellow planner as a rough guide of what I would do over the following week. I would then create week planners and fill them in at the beginning of each day, this enabled me to organised and filter through what I needed to do and what I really needed to do.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
I think there is a level of consistency within my work across this module. On previous briefs my work was inconsistent and didn’t really have a strong focus running throughout. I’ve gone down an illustrative road with this module and have developed in my eyes a more capable ability of hand drawn visualizing. I did undertake one type-based brief, in which I explored hand drawn type, this was unsuccessful to say the least, but I learnt something from it. 3 days 4 hours sleep does not make a competent designer.
My design sheets have become neater and more legible. I’ve also been able to cut the bullshit and decide early on when an idea isn’t working. This is why something’s are scrapped as I decided they weren’t working and moved on. I think I finally learnt how to turn my brain off and stopped working on ideas, when I had one that I thought was working. Before I’d be still running ideas through until the week of submission.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how could you exploit these more fully?
A week after every brief, I get to a point where I don’t really like the work I’ve produced and think of more weakness than when writing the evaluation.
I think my weakness came with my timetabling. I planned to have a buggeration week, incase I ran over with any briefs. This ended up being the thing that messed up with my work, as I felt I had to rush through one brief. Luckily I already knew exactly what I wanted to do with this brief and turned it around. Perhaps with less worrying I’ll be able to work more effectively next year and get all the things I want to do done. I’m gunna go back and screen print some of my work, as I want to have something screen printed to add to my portfolio; as I’ve already said.
I think another weakness would be the Skype brief. I spent so long on hand drawing them to not be able to line them back up. This definitely set me back. Lesson learnt: hand drawing everything is ok when you have loads of time.
This brief I didn’t really explore different stocks, which is something I usually do. However, I did explore different ways of producing my work. When producing the illustrations for the Hugo brief I explored different hand crafted illustrations aswell as photoshop generated imagery.
5. Identify five things that you will do different next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?
1) Not worry about running into a buggeration week
2) Try and improve visualisations skills more and explore different methods of production.
3) Spend more time on my longest brief. Skype was supposed to be a 3 week brief, which I only worked on for a week and a bit.
4) I want to photograph my work in the lighting studio for my portfolio.
5) Produce a more polished visual for my short 1 day briefs.
6.How would you grade yourself on the following areas: (please indicate using an ‘x’) 5= excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good, 2 = average, 1 = poor
Attendance 5
Punctuality 4
Motivation 4
Commitment 4
Quantity of work produced 3
