What I Have Learnt About Myself

Professionally

1) I can be lazy. In terms of design process. I have a tendency to take easy routes to the final design now and again, especially if I feel pressed for time. This is something I am ashamed about because I want nothing more than to be motivated for everything that I do. 

2) I have found a love for simple swiss-style typography. This is something I never really understood growing up but I have become more appreciative of this already. I supose this came through a combination of learning about modernism and applying this to my practice.

3) I have began to view Graphic Design as the thinking man's/ woman's creative pursuit. I have grown a lot of respect for the ability of graphic designers to become experts in something new with every brief, and to use intelligent methods to communicate their ideas effectively.

4) I have also learnt that I am pretty good at drawing up layouts for magazine and newspapers. I think that I use the space fairly well and have got to a stage where I know the rules and can start to break them.

5) I have learnt that I can never be 100% happy with any single design. There is always something to improve, things to add and things to take away. No design is perfect.

6) I don't like collaboration but I know it results in better design. Collaboration projects so far have been fairly non-stressfull but seeing someone take your designs away to change them is always going to be difficult to accept, however I fully understand that this is necessary now to achieve the best final product.

7) A Computer is a tool. I've found that a pen and paper should be used to design, then a computer can be used to realise it. Computers can limit me with boundaries or open up a whole world of possibility but it still cant express ideas in a quickfire manner.

8) Listening to others is the most important thing to do. I suffer from a very short attention span so this has been a difficulty in my life, professional and personal. The feedback I have received from my friends and peers has been really rewarding, I know I can learn from them because they will all be important designers in the future.

9) Following on from this point I have learnt to appreciate the people around me in the studio. It is an incredibly rewarding environment to be in when everybody has similar interests and, at the end of the day, goals.

10) I have found a passion for unofficial games and movie design. This is mostly in the form of cult-film poster design by professionals who have fallen in love with a genre or particular individual film. This is something I became interested in when Drive came out.


Personally
1) The internet is my best friend and my worst enemy. I could be searching for something important, stumble into you tube and be distracted for hours.

2) I cant stop gaming. I thought gaming is something that I would grow out of, but as I got older games became focused at an older audience and also became very mainstream. As the most valuable entertainment sector today I would definitely be excited to get into the industry as a graphic designer.


3) I enjoy being busy. At times I become used to spending evenings working and have started to find hard work rewarding, if its got anything to do with college or not. I have taken up roles that are outside college to keep myself busy including writing for Daily Gaming Network with Abbas.

4) Hypocritically, I also enjoy taking time off way too much, I guess I still haven't found a good balance. At the moment I feel like I'm either working all the time or doing nothing at all. On a positive (or negative) side when im not working I feel incredibly guilty, but have a lot of fun anyway.

5) I have a very easy life. This isn't new to me but from experience, as much as I complain, I know that I live in a safe place and my 'work' is something I love. What I have discovered this year is how lucky I am to have found something that I enjoy, and can hopefully make a living off.


6) I can be tragically unorganised, I lose things, forget things, If I write something down I sometimes forget where I wrote it or lose the paper I wrote it on. This isn't all the time but I affects me in many different situations. But there is hope! I've been actively exploring new ways to deal with the problem instead of passively ignoring them until they take over.

7) I have become more independent this year. Everybody says "I have become more independent" but I realised when my parents asked if I had looked at any houses yet and I realised I hadn't told them but I'd already got one two weeks before. I've also started cooking healthy meals this year, and generally looking after myself.  

8) I have realised that Graphic design is everywhere. I knew this before but the more I study it the more I realise that graphic design in some ways dictates nearly everything we do today as a civilisation; in terms of gathering information,you cant do it without some sort of graphical interface, and without information, what the hell would we do??

9) I have decided that (for now) making money is important. Money is more important that loosely argued ideals about 'not being a sell out'. At the end of the day I want to get paid and enjoy doing it. Saying that there are obviously organisations I would still not work for if the opportunity arose in the future; multinationals or governments with poor ethical standards, racist, sexist, homophobic or religious organisations etc.

10) Following on from this I suppose this year has been a year were I have become more involved with the issues of morality in my own time. If I have any free time at the moment but im stuck indoors I've started researching lots about religion and politics, or more specifically dirty religion and politics and the detrimental effects of media outlets that let those associated voice their opinions. I suppose this does link in with graphic design because at the end of the day we are communicators and while spoken work has some impact on a few people its people like us that can really spread information to the masses.

OUGD 405 Self Evaluation

1.  What skills have you developed through this module and how effectively do you think you have applied them?
I have an increased knowledge of Photoshop and illustrator, which I used for all of the design briefs in this module. I have also applied some of the techniques and theory’s we have been taught in other modules to this one, for example which layout is correct as well as some colour theory and the correct use of type. In most cases I have applied the skills I have learnt as best I can. In some mock up pieces I used tools in illustrator for example to get work done very quickly and when I went to finish I worked into the designs until they were much more desirable. This is evident in the posters for the 100 things brief, were the posters all started looking very messy and gradually progressed.
2. What approaches to/methods of design production have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?
In this module, especially on the 100 things brief I carried out huge amount of research that meant that when I went to design the work I full understood what I was saying. I found that I could write body copy on the subject fluently and did not need to double check facts online. I felt that I fully understood the topic, although it is not black and white and there is no conclusion. I also developed more on the system of designing in illustrator. For the products I made were mostly text based with vector graphics images. The How To brief really tested my ability to produce work quickly and work as a team which is a skill I definitely think I have improved on since the start of the year even.
3. What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?
I think I have become less afraid to produce more experimental work and not follow a pre-existing style as closely as I used to. In the future I would love to break free from conventional design for a module, although saying that I love design that follows the rules too. I also think I have worked out some good colour theory, in most products I would like to think that the colours are all suitable for each other and none of them clash. This is a skill I could develop further however, I feel that although I know what colours wont go together, I don’t yet fully understand which colours do.
4. What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?
Weaknesses I have is that I feel slightly like I have become obsessed with illustrator and have become tied to its limitations. For the next module I would like to leave Illustrator for some experimental work in a different medium. I also think I made some design errors on one of two of my designs, for example the Dark side to Diamonds poster, which has a terrible drop-shadow effect on it. There is a message here that the effects in illustrator are to be avoided at all costs. I also started using high resolution images in illustrator, which was a huge mistake because it crashed the program on Macs, even my Pc struggled a bit. In the future I need to edit the images in photoshop and rasterise them until they are a low enough resolution that they will not crash illustrator.
5. Identify five things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these? 1)    Create some design sheets and sketch more designs, I except that this will allow me to explore more ideas. In a way at the moment, I experiment in illustrator, but of course the limitations here are huge. 2)    I need to document the design process more clearly, at the moment I tend to design things in illustrator and neglect any form of documentation because I feel that if I stop designing I will fall off the horse. I expect this will allow me to get better grades. 3)    I should listen to good criticism early on and change my designs. I Did change my designs because of suggestions this time but after I printed  and ran out of other opportunities to print people still pointed things out to me they would like changed, in the future I should print things cheaply and ask for help during the designing instead of after the final prints. This would obviously allow me to change my designs while I still have a chance. 4)    I should manage my time better. In this project I found that although the designs were all spaced out I did somehow end up blogging at about midnight or in the early hours of the morning. This is because dinner, washing, socialising with the people I live with can fill a gap between getting home and working on projects. I desperately need to find a good balance and stop cooking meals that dig into work time I guess. This should give me more time to document the days work and generally be a better designer. 5)    I need to learn how to prepare designs for print better. I went several times to print out stuff for this module and although most of the settings were ok, because I had lots of double sided, things got a bit confusing and the alignment was rarely correct. There are lots of reasons for this, mainly my set up, then I found out that paper from the library is cut to the wrong dimensions. In the future I could go and talk to James about prints and then go and buy the paper and set up the files. This would allow the print process to go smoother and take up less time.
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
	1	2	3	4	5
Attendance					x
Punctuality					x
Motivation				x
Commitment			x
Quantity of work produced			x
Quality of work produced			x
Contribution to the group				x