End of module evaluation

This year proved to be a challenge from the start. Having to write 10 initial briefs and a statement of intent to define who we are as designers was a struggle to begin with. As someone who finds it difficult to make decisions and hate's to make any commitments, this process took much longer than expected, I found it quite difficult to put things down to define who am as a designer especially as I felt that I wanted to pretty much do everything. The process of prioritising the things I wanted to focus on really helped clarify what I wanted to do a lot more, helping me define the types of briefs I wanted to work and what I aimed to achieve from this module.

My main focus for this module was to really explore and develop both my design and practical skills as a designer and produce some high quality work that would contribute towards my portfolio. I really wanted to experiment a bit more with print processes whilst developing my type and layout abilities, which I felt my selection of briefs really worked well towards. When it actually came down to the design practice, I did struggle a bit to make a start in the beginning. I managed to keep up with my schedule and produced the work for the crits on time, but wasn't entirely satisfied with the work I had produced. For the majority of the time I was undecided on several different design directions which stalled the process a bit and left myself in a negative mood to move onto other briefs. Inevitably, this left me a few days behind from an early stage, I felt that my work wasn't developing how I wanted to so decided to pick up the newsletter brief to allow myself to work on fresh material while I postponed the other one for a few days. I managed to complete the newsletter in a day and was selected for the final 3 to be reviewed, which gave me some confidence back. At this point I realised that I felt more comfortable working on subject matters that I did not select myself, which made me have second thoughts on my other briefs.

Moving on, I continued to work on my briefs with my doubts about the subject matters that I had picked. Some of the more successful briefs I worked on were the Dimsum and Ocon briefs, both were towards the end of the module. Due to the pressure of getting things completed, I didn't have as much time as I had planned to explore as many different routes as I had wanted. My design practice and the pace that I was working on changed midway through the module due to the time I had planned myself. It was comparable to the pace that I was working at during my placements over the summer, simply developing initial ideas within a day and moving on quite quickly to resolve certain briefs. This wasn't the ideal design process that I wanted to work for, but possibly the ones that I had produced the strongest work out of, which challenged my work ethics and preconception on how I should work.

My main weaknesses of this brief were probably the project management side of things, it was definitely a challenge to juggle several briefs at the same time, especially as I was also tempted to revise past briefs once I had resolved them. I aimed to work on 6-7 briefs for this module, these were a selection of long and short briefs with the intention to pick up a few live ones aswell so that I would have a variety of live, commercial and more culturally driven work to go towards my portfolio. Unfortunately, due to the poor judgement on durations for each brief, I was unable to pick up the competition briefs that I aimed to work on. I found myself constantly putting dates back due to printing and bad timing with events happening during this period, which didn't help, eventually leaving little time to start a further brief. In the end I decided to spend the time revising existing briefs rather than making a start to another small project.

The whole module has been a massive challenge for me as a designer, it really gave me taste of potentially what it would be like to become a freelance graphic designer minus all the admin jobs. For the next module and towards the next few months, I'd aim to really stick to my action plans and make more realistic schedules, considering things like printing time etc. Although I did enjoy the module, I was not satisfied with the quality of work I had produced. Looking back, I don't think the briefs I had written were particularly strong to begin with, I felt that my resolutions were viable design solutions for each brief, but lacked the flare that I was looking for in my work. In the next few weeks and coming up towards my FMP, I will aim to discuss with other professionals in regards to getting some advice on writing briefs that I would like to work on myself. I will also be looking out for more live briefs that I could engage in some form of a dialogue with, which I believe would add to my professional and design practice.