A Question of Research

For me this project started off as something that I felt would be completely theory-based, I thought I would end up looking a bit at my past work but not this much. This project quickly turned into something very personal to me as I started to do all these parts of the project I found myself doubting, trying to push past that doubt, doubting again, and then deciding to grow and remind myself that I do know what I am doing.  I am very glad that this project turned into such a personal one as I feel what I learned here will help to improve the way I work and trust myself in the future, I can use the book I made as part of this project (even though we were not tasked to create something) to act as a constant reminder for myself. I think this is probably the strongest part of this entire project, the personal aspect that grew in it I feel it has propelled it into something different for me. This project allowed me to see the way I work in a way that I have never been able to before, I'

To create the book I took the pages for the book and started by creating the background using the water and crepe paper technique to produce it, once this was sorted and dried I then decided that it would be best to create the pages of the book with screen print as I know this best and understand how to use it effectivly. Along with this I decided to have the type in the book to be written with my label maker, firstly because I like the way it looks and I think it connects well to this idea of this being personal as I would be doing this myself rather than having done with type which while written by me it still has this form of disconnect that I dont really like. These are the practice prints I started with for the book, I really like this look of these huge numbers that fill up the page I think it looks really good. This is the final book, the most obvious thing with this book is the big rips in the pages along the numbers, this happened when I put the book in a book press without fu

I now know how I want the book pages to look I now need to work out how I will bind it and produce it as this could quite easily change how I want the design to look. The first way I thought about binding would be with screw posts, I learned about this sort of binding in the third year and I know it's pretty easy to do and not much waiting around for glue to dry straight so this could work quite well. Along with this, it makes quite a nice book however, I think I want to go for more of an interesting look for the book. While this makes it look good I just don't think it's interesting enough nor would it be easy for me to quickly look at. I like this idea of being able to quickly look at all these reminders I've written for myself when I need the reminder, the way I could do this is with something that folds out. So I would be able to flick between the pages and fold it out to see all the reminders/rules in one go, I just think it would look better and work better for th

I know now that I want to create a hand book that I can use in the future that reminds me that its okay to mess up, be doubtful but ultimately that only I know how to create. However I need to first know what this is going to look like and how it will work, like in my other projects I found that sketching out initial designs helped a-lot to first starting thinking about how the design and item is actually going to look like and secondly to start on it otherwise it would take me too long to do this. These sketches were really useful as straight away you could see I was leaning more toward the idea of the type taking up the entire page, filling it with what I need to remind myself is okay. Rather than keeping that important part small and out of the way on the page. I especially like it when the number is large on the page with the type near it, it works pretty well and helps to remind myself that these rules are important for me to remember.   I took this idea of the large number on the

 Because I know I want this handbook to be for myself and to help me understand how I am creative and approach a project I think I need to write down exactly what I want to include in the book as the "rules", I want them to be partially about my way of approaching a project and how I am creative. I also want to include some reminders to myself as I think they will be helpful, throughout this project I've been very doubting of myself and I want to at least remind myself that this is okay and everything I am doing is correct and works for me. Rules for the book 1# Gain a base level of understanding, dissect the problem bit by bit until you understand it.  2# Always use mindmaps of lists to get ideas out and into the open, don't be afraid of an idea. 3# Research in-depth, keep looking deeper and deeper into something until you think you have everything then look again. 4# Take inspiration from anything, look at books, the internet, film, and tv. Anywhere you can find ins

I wanted to create a post for myself that lists all the things that I do automatically when working on a project or producing a piece of design again. I find it ironic that when thinking about what I do automatically the first thing I do is to write a list and I put lists on there, this is something that really helps me and it's become more and more obvious to me the more I do it during this project. Its been so interesting looking at myself like this because I have never done it really nor have I ever noticed all these things I do when working on a project or producing a piece of design, if anything it gives me even more confidence in myself that I felt I lost during this project and have now seemed to regain during this time of looking closer at myself than ever before. I'm glad I decided to do this, as it shows to me how these years have really helped to improve my way of working and how practice can really make a massive difference for someone and help to make them better.

 Looking at both my way of producing a piece of design and looking at my past projects I've found myself more and more aware of the amount of practice I have had over these years, working towards briefs and producing graphic design. It reminded me of the saying "Practice makes Perfect" which really applies to my work and the amount of time I've been working on my designs. Time really does help. Thinking about this I decided to google the theory of practice to see if there has been anything written about this.  This is what I found when searching, it is a diagram that attempts to explain how everyday practices are impacted and impact each over to create the social practices. It's an interesting way of looking at the way in which normal people spend their lives and go about each day, this is definitely something I have never thought about before. This is my practice cycle that I decided to create to attempt to explain my own practice. Within I put Research, Learning

 I decided the next project I would look at would be one I felt was one of my strongest projects to ever produce, this was my Major Project for my third year and was the project where I put in everything I learned over my years in education to build a very strong and competent project. One thing I notice straight away that I do differently is I started responding to my research before at all the projects I have looked at I hadn't done this. I had only responded by saying what I like about it or what I had learned from it, I hadn't responded by drawing next to it this drawing is influenced by the research. This I think is what propelled my research further and improved it, I really like this idea of actually responding to the research rather than just typing something that confirms I understand it. Along with this it's a much more fun way to research so why didn't I do this for my other projects, was it because I just hadn't thought about doing it?

 Instead of just looking back at projects that I really like I need to also look back at projects I am not so proud of, I think this is where I can learn the most about myself and see exactly where I feel I went wrong or maybe where I didn't go wrong. A project that I certainly want to forget is from my second year called Ethical Design, in this project we were tasked with creating something that responded to something we believed in. I want to look back at this project and see where I went wrong and what I feel I could have done differently now. I did before looking at the research folder for this project think that the problem with this project was the research however when looking over it again I'm not sure the research is what let me down, I think the research is pretty strong yes there could have been some more bits added to it but its still pretty good. What I notice again is my affinity for using mindmaps and lists as they littered throughout the project again, this real

 I think while it is important to look at how I actually design something, it is also important to look at how I come to design something. To do this I want to look at some of past projects from university and work out how I get to the designing stage, which includes the research stage, ideation, and the lead-up to the final piece. Even me writing this part about what bits I want to look at is a look into my design process stating with research trying to get a base of knowledge about something and then starting to think about how I will take this knowledge and apply it to my designs. I decided to start with a project that personally I am very proud of, in the latter half of the second year we had a project called " live design brief" we were given the choice to pick a brief from a set of competitions being held that year and while I may not have won anything I still feel this project was where my research and designs shined however looking deeper into this project may show to

Here are the pages of some of the drawings I have been doing slowly over the past few weeks. To be honest with you I didn't do as much of this as I really wanted to, but every time I tried to sit down and draw something I would begin to hate it and ultimately stop because I couldnt put what I saw in my head down onto the page. After doing a bit of searching around for how I felt I stumbled upon the Van Gogh fallacy . The fallacy includes an example where it says "Van Gogh was misunderstood and living in poverty, but later he was recognized as one of the world's greatest artists. I am misunderstood and living in poverty, therefore I will be recognized as one of the greatest artists". This acts as a type of wishful thinking and makes the person think that there is a connection that just does not exist, I think I am doing this in part to myself when it comes to my drawing. I am hopeful it will look a certain way and then when I draw it I feel bad because it does not loo

  This time I tried my hardest to design without a grid, going so far as to focus the design itself on "Disregarding grids", much like with the previous design I at first started designing in a grid even if there wasn't one there. However, I caught myself and pushed myself to break this, putting the type at odd angles and working with it in massive size. Along with this I also didn't have a big block of text to design around and ultimately I feel like this made the design process and design overall much worse, I find it so much better and easier to design around a block of text it allows me to understand how the audience is going to look at the design and how the rest of it will sit. Thinking about how I find it easier to design with a block of text on the page and working to a grid has made me start to think about why I feel I need to stop doing this, what is exactly wrong with it? I think it was much more interesting when I was looking at my own methodologies and wh

  Continuing to investigate my methodologies I decided to make another poster however this time I would try and steer away from using grids, leaning on already comfortable design styles such as swiss design, and just try to push myself further to create a poster in 5 minutes. This is what I created... As you can see I found it very hard to move away from the swiss style of design or even design without a grid, when you watch the video of me designing this you will see that while I didn't first create a grid I feel I still used one, just one that was in my head and forced me to design like this. While I know grids are important and help to make a design more readable and better for the reader I just wanted to see if I was able to do it without and what it would look like. As it turns out I can still design without a grid by creating a grid in my head. I think this is both a good and a bad thing, while I may not be able to let myself go free with my designs at least I know that I hav