Sunday 19 April 2015

OUGD406 - Studio Brief 4 - Initial Ideas

What have I learned through each module at university?  

OUGD401
- Learnt about the history of art and design
- Learnt about art movements
- Learnt that graphic design really can affect peoples opinions
      
OUGD402
- Explore all aspects of the creative world
- Don't be afraid to be yourself
- Look at things that inspire you everyday to keep yourself motivated
- Most importantly I have learnt through PPP to take challenges and to do what I want while I have the facilities

OUGD403
- Learnt about type terminology and anatomy
- Started to do critiques and learnt how helpful they can be
- Read Massimo Vignelli's canon
- Taught myself how to use InDesign

OUGD404
- Learnt more creative terminology and skills
- Learnt how to work within groups effectively
- Learnt a lot about creating books and further improved my InDesign skills

OUGD405 
- Learnt the importance of time management due to short briefs
- I also learnt to think about target audiences and how to aim your designs at certain audiences

OUGD406
- Learned how to think conceptually and contextually
- Further improved my group working skills
- Additionally I learnt that not everyone works in the same way as me, we all have our own ways of coming up with designs and ideas  


Struggles?
Overall through this year I think I have learnt a lot in terms of personal organisation skills, maybe more so than skills within graphic design. I have to admit I have struggled with writing about everything on the blog and keeping up to date with all my blog posts. The same applies to writing about my work on design boards. I have also had occasions where my organisation or time management has gone out of the window and I have missed important things, since then I started using my planner a lot more which helped me out a lot.

If I was to talk to myself at the start of this course I would probably say something along the lines of:
"Don't rush into things before setting out deadlines and planning your time. You can get carried away doing something and therefore lose time doing other things. Challenge yourself but don't be over ambitious."

From this I did a mind map of ideas of what could help a first year both in University and out of it. 



I feel like most of the advise I could give is to be organised and not to worry about things as I think this is what I have done well this year. So things like having a guide to meditation and how to cope with stress would reflect that. I also thought about doing some things to do with my personal life away from Uni as this year I have struggled with some of the people I have lived with. I had a silly idea of creating a box of little pre written notes to stick around the house saying passive aggressive things like: " Dishes are like boyfriends, your room-mate shouldn't be doing yours ". Although this is a silly idea and it will most likely make people laugh I don't think it's really that helpful to new first years. My favourite ideas from this mind map, and the ones that would probably be most helpful to new first years, are the week to week planner - combining something to encourage people to do more PPP, an academic calendar with terminology/history for every month and the thumbnail sketchbook, giving people somewhere to draw all their thumbnails and keep them in one place.



I did some thumbnail sketches of these ideas and I think after thinking it through and asking my peers which they think is most appropriate I will choose my last idea - the thumbnail sketchbook - as I always hate having to draw rectangles for my thumbnails so having guides as well as the ability to keep them all together rather than having loose sheets would have really helped me I think. While sketching it I thought of more that I could do with it. You could have one of these sketchbooks per brief, writing all your notes and ideas in one place. This would be great as once again it would mean no loose sheets that get lost easily and one could be handed in per brief to see all your traditional developmental work. It could represent the process that I have developed through out the course on how to tackle a new brief. To analyse the brief itself, then work on some initial ideas in the form of a mind map, then create thumbnail sketches and finalise them to one final idea, get feedback and then move onto the computer. I feel that this would encourage people to work traditionally to start with and not go straight to the macs like many of my peers do. I often find that some of my best ideas come from thumbnails that I have drawn rather than from digital development.




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