Final Major Project: June 2011

This module has been a massive learning and development process; it has challenged my design practice, theoretical understanding, and ability to work with other people towards improving my skills in general to becoming a better graphic designer. From my original rationale, I had set out to challenge myself and work on a wider range of briefs whether they are live or not; I just wanted to work on a variety of different projects that would allow be to develop the way I work and to clarify what I would like to do after the course. Ultimately I wanted to experience a range of different projects and to really push my ability to manage several projects at the same time of different requirements and to be able to deliver high standard and effective design solutions.

My main focus for this module was to develop a strong range of portfolio pieces that reflects my practice and what I’m a bout as a designer whilst improving the way I work independently and with other people. I tried not to be too selective about the types of briefs I wanted to work on as I believe that any brief can be made interesting; it just depends how you read the brief and what you do with it that makes it different. The 1st one being a collaborative brief for the Fine Art yearbook, this was relavent to my practice as it was a collaboration and that it was a publication brief that had a client to supply the content to. This brief along with the other 2 collaborations with David Gasi and Ross Stanton has made me realise that I am able to work quite efficiently and effectively with other people and towards a live brief where there is a client on the other end to response and to meet the standards of. Within a team, I see myself as working as a designer’s position in a way that I seem to be able to easily produce or negotiate ideas and develop them within a group where it is often much more difficult to make your opinions heard, this has reinforced my initial thoughts on working within a small scaled design studios. Although I prefer the idea of working independently as it offers me the full freedom of designing what I believe is the right answer, I really appreciate the benefits of working as a team and enjoy the collaborative practice, my ability to work with other people and to have an influence on how the project develops has justified my ability as a designer.

During this module, the majority of my briefs were either live or competition briefs, again I struggled with making a decision on which brief so ended up just taking up any that came across and were relevant and appropriate to my original rationale. The branding and promotional materials for Laura Stubbs, was a brief that I had originally planned to spend a week on, but escalated into one of my main briefs. Although in my rationale, I had planned to focus on working on and developing my design skills towards publication designs, most the time wasn’t actually spent on the publication. Infact the part I enjoyed about this was the branding and defining the design direction and brand guidelines that would fit across the range of materials. As it was a live brief, I worked quite closely with the client to discuss ideas and to define what her brand is about, which dictated my decisions. The final results for this brief although did not have a huge range of materials, is one of my most consistent projects to date. The majority of the time was spent trying to nail the design direction, the specification with the typography, colour scheme and design direction. This is something that I have not had so much focus on before, the emphasis on consistency and awareness of developing a much more rounded and refined outcome as opposed to just having an aesthetically driven outcome is something that I feel is defining my practice a lot more.

My strengths seem to lie within the contextual awareness and ability to develop work to answer a brief that is driven by the core value and message of what the brief or the client asks for, whilst being technically and theoretically experienced to execute an idea to a good standard. This probably explains my initial obsession with research driven briefs, as I seem to enjoy the process of gathering information and developing a response to that based on the content. This is probably evident in most of the briefs I have worked on throughout this module, but primarily the Stubburban brief, design context and the yearbooks are the ones I feel have a grounded concept and execution to it. In comparison I struggled a lot more trying to work on the ISTD Fakery brief, eventhough it was a competition with a written brief and defined specification requirements etc, there wasn’t a client or a particular functional objective to respond to.

I wasted a lot of time at the beginning of this module trying to resolve the Fakery brief, I found it difficult, as it was purely conceptual and was a completely open brief. Ironically I chose to work on that brief because of that reason but through experimenting and working on the brief, it has made me realise that my way or working is a lot more suited to a more conventional studio practice where there is a designer – client relationship. On certain projects, I failed to push the development and the range that the briefs had the potential to, this was party due to my practice of not fully experimenting before making a design decision and also the issue with timetabling myself unrealistic schedules as usual. Looking back at a few of the briefs, I definitely feel that a lot more change and developing more range could have been made, but on a realistic industry situation, I would have possibly done a similar thing as I feel that I only made the decision based on whether I felt further development work was required towards answering the brief.

Referring back to my rationale and the course of the past 3 years, I feel that I have fulfilled the majority of what I have set out to do, mainly developing my design practice, work on a range of projects independently and collaboratively, and having some sort of focus on publication design with a specialist in the use of typography. The main thing as mentioned earlier is my design practice; I definitely feel that I am working to a more professional level, being able to fulfil the brief and meet deadlines whilst also producing interesting work that considers the use of type/image, production specification and limitations and ultimate what the client wants, which this course has taught me. Based on the amount of time I have spent on this module, I am quite satisfied with what I have produced, I am aware that they’re aren’t perfect and improvements can be made, but more importantly the time that I have spent on this module has helped shape who I have become as a designer. I definitely feel a lot more prepared for tackling the real world and have a greater sense of where and how I would go upon taking my first steps into the professional industry.