This year for me has been the most demanding and rewarding year, as a graphic designer, especially with regards to my own design practice. This year has been highly beneficial to me because I now have a focus and specific design area I want to improve. I have also been given a lot of opportunities to develop my skills as well as learn new ones. I think the skill that I have most improved on has to be in-design. Working in this software has helped along my design practice and has become integral to the style of work I produce. I can now confidently say that the work I produce will evolve around type, branding, editorial and packaging. I managed to settle on this after having a long and in-depth talk with Fred just after the end of the animation module. I think this discussion was imperative to me and my design practice because it really highlighted where I was going wrong and most importantly it really showed what I was passionate about. Working with type became apparent and this was defiantly due to my work produced in the type module. It made me realise that I really enjoyed knowing the intricacies of type, learning all that knowledge then being able to execute it within my work. I really learnt some valuable skills and guidelines within that module, which has built up my confidence with working with type. I feel I established my idea for my design practice at just the right time because the modules that followed; the collaborative brief and the product range and distribution brief, really gave me the opportunities to test my new skills and push my design practice and also give myself a taste of what I want to do next year.
I know that my work is not perfect, but I now have the focus I have been looking for from the start of this degree, and specific areas I will now push myself in. through the process of evaluation and analysis I can now see a stark difference from the beginning of the year to now. By giving myself more of a specific area to centre my design ideas and research around has allowed me to put forward a focussed dissertation proposal which links directly to my design practice.
Throughout this year there has been a variety of different challenges, some good, some bad. All of these have helped me realise where my weaknesses lye and how I can go about improving them. I think one of the main weaknesses I have realised is that I try to do too much, not necessarily within the briefs we’ve done, but I try to do too much in disciplines I’m really not that good at. For example I have come to realise working with illustration isn’t necessarily my strong point and that I may have to leave that to other experts in our year. However, this does open doors to working collaboratively next year, either within my year or across the university. I came to realise that throwing everything at a brief isn’t really the right way to go about it, but instead focus the brief down to what I can do most appropriately for it. I think another weakness that I have been trying to tackle is being more specific about what I can produce in the time available. By forcing myself to take a step back and re-evaluate what I have and what I can produce, has really helped me break down the brief in a more specific and controlled way. I tried very hard to do this with the last module, product, range and distribution. And it actually benefitted me so much because I now have a feeling I can do more for this brief over summer, which I fully intended to do. This will help my push my skills and my design practice through the summer break. I also realised through module feedback and crits that my idea generation wasn’t as strong as it should have been, and that due to this I was loosing valuable experience trying and testing things. With the last module I really tried to rectify this and I felt I have, because I made myself experiment more and develop my ideas more which led to me coming out with products that I am really happy with.
I think one of the main things that I have been trying to achieve this year is a design practice that I feel comfortable with. Realising that I now have this, well the foundations at least, I am beginning to feel more confident in myself as a designer. I think that confidence is something that only comes with time and skill, but now I have a practice I can focus in I feel my confidence will improve a lot over the next year. At the beginning of this year there were a lot of things I wanted to achieve; a professional standard of work and working method, improved skills in areas I enjoy, become more informed about areas of graphic design that interests me, improved blogging skill and organisation. And then by the end of the year I wanted; contacts within the design industry, thorough knowledge of the industry and processes relating to graphic design, a clear and professional portfolio that reflects aspects of me and my design interests, a greater understanding of who I am as a graphic designer and my design practice, a small client base to work with and lastly a website to promote myself. I was very surprised, when it came to evaluating my year and looking back at these because I have actually achieved everything I set out to do. What is also good is that I have also achieved more than I thought I was going to, with one of the biggest improvements lying in critical studies. For me writing has never been my strongest point, and its something I’ve had to work on. But this year I really pushed myself in it and also tried to relate to me as much as possible and for this I was awarded highly. This in turn has really boosted my confidence in an area I never thought I was going to be strong in.
I think one area that I have really learnt to respect more is organisation and time management. Organisation for me this year has been really important, not just because of the amount of work, because it has meant I have been able to delegate more time in certain areas, eg. Idea generation. So now I am getting more from the time allowed then I previously was.
As I had already mentioned it was important to me at the beginning of the year for me to have secured some form of industry contacts and a small client base to work with. I think this was probably the most daunting task I faced this year. Initially when I was first drafting up a list of contacts I still wasn’t too sure about my own design practice, so I was looking at general design companies that I could maybe have the chance to dabble in everything. So when I first sent out my emails they were a broad range of companies. The responses I got weren’t great as a lot of the companies weren’t looking to be very helpful at all and some I didn’t even hear back from, even though I followed up with phone-calls. So I decided to go down a different route and use contacts I already had. Through this I have managed to secure myself a placement with a design studio in London called Popcorn. This will be for two weeks from the beginning of July, and depending on how it goes a possibility of it extending to a month. This design studio is perfect for me because it encompasses everything I have now focussed my new design practice around; type, branding, packaging and editorial design. The designers in the studio are still quite young, which really appealed to me because I want to be a part of a fresh and innovative design team, hopefully with it being quite a small design studio I will get the experience I really want. Whilst I am living in London I also hope to visit some other studios such as gravy designs and satellite creative. I also intend to visit the type museum and design museum to help me get some primary research for my dissertation. I want to get as much out of this experience as I possibly can.
As well as sorting out industry experience for the summer I have also secured some short-term work for some clients local to me. Firstly there is local bar called the Periwig wanting promotional goods designed for hem, such as t-shirts, flyers and posters. I am very lucky to have got this as a client because the owner owns the majority of bars and restaurants in and around my area and I am hoping to do more work for him in the future. As well as this I am doing some work for a local charity near me, which I did some work for last year. The Evergreen care trust is holding a charity Summer Ball and hopefully I will be designing their invitations and menu’s.
All of this that I have managed to secure means not only am I gaining experience within the industry but I am also gaining confidence as a designer because ultimately this all means people trust me to produce work for them, which has really boosted my confidence.
I am really looking forward to this summer and next year as I finally feel like I have direction for my design practice and that I am really improving as a designer. Looking at the third years now it’s quite daunting to think that in a year’s time I will be in their position. However, as daunting as it may seem I do feel more confident in myself and I am looking forward to utilising my third year to push my design practice in type, branding, editorial and packaging.
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