personal & professional practice : Reflecting on The past 3 years

Reflecting

First year, was getting into the pattern of working differently...

In first year, I didn’t use the process which I used at college which worked for me as it allowed my brain to scatter ideas everywhere as I’m an over thinker and scatter thoughts all the times. My technique allows my head to do what it needs to do in order to understand concepts more. The Process I followed was research, experimentation, development, and create.

The most important part of the process would be research, I feel in order to have successful outcomes you need a lot of research in to different areas of a subject sometimes even random areas of a subject, the most random areas (but still relevant) can come out with the best unique concepts.

During University, towards second year I realised how digital my practice had turned, and that really off balanced how I work, suddenly we had to use blogger and blog everything we did, and I found that Particularly difficult as for one I struggle with dyslexia and eye strain, but also because I prefer expressing myself using my hands and sketchbooks, I feel prouder of my work when everything’s done by hand until it comes to the last steps. I found it difficult to demonstrate my work using blogger and that's how it's always been until the end of third year.

Research

Third year came around quick, and I still was not proud of the work I had created so far, so I took a step back and had a good think for a couple weeks in how I can combine how I like to work, into the blogging system. I decided to start from scratch, I started using sheets of paper and gluing research down and writing really rough notes, a lot which don't make sense to others, however I understand, but in order for a client to understand, I figured I could also use blogger to create a simplified version of my research and process which would be more suitable for other audiences to view.

Experiments

From the past couple years through projects, essays, talks and feedback, knowledge was gathered into the sense's, taste, sight, touch, smell, sound of physical work, and it was found that most people enjoyed the physical appearance and appreciation of concepts and said it was more intriguing to have a something physical. So then again it, it made more sense to me to create more design sheets which showed my experimentation, rather than it being on a flat screen.

With experimentation, I like to explore as many aspects of the research I found as possible, constantly analysing myself making sure things linked to concept ideas (so I wasn't going off track), using methods such as mono print, screen print, letterpress, digital print, binding etc. Having experimentation sheet's, I feel is so much more interesting.

Development

Developing ideas, can be difficult because you are limiting down the experiments which are more suitable for the concept, however development also lets you analyse over the experiments and helps you relate back to your research in order to get the best outcome.

Final outcomes

Producing the final outcome is probably the easiest part but also the most difficult, because you know what you want to do, it's just how you go about creating it. But if you look back at research, this should be able to guide you into making your final. A weakness of myself would be final outcomes, and making them ready for a client to view, this is something I’m constantly working on, but I'm coming to the conclusion that I’m more of the concept person, who experiments with the ideas and develops the ideas, but not the person who produces as I feel I'm very heavy handed when it comes to larger projects, or if the concepts are small project such as business cards and postcards, there more my strengths.

Working on the quality of my outcomes is something that I will continue to do throughout my practice.

Analysing

With my work, over the past three years, I’m a mixture of proud and disappointed as it’s opened my eyes to the digital age but also made me drift from how I work as a designer, which I think most definitely has affected my final’s and concepts in some of my projects. However, coming to the last few months of university I have realised this, and I’ve gone back to the process I use and have used it for my design practice work, which conceptually is probably some of the better work I’ve done minus the rough mock-ups of the outcomes.

Work which I am proud of

These are some pieces of the work from over the past three years which I feel proud of, this is because pratical sides of these concepts, as they were created using different traditional methods , such as sceen print, scanography, photography, calligraphy and letterpress.

Laze Magazine