Self evaluation

Self evaluation

From a personal standpoint, I believe that the strengths of my current practice is that I have built a style within my designs and am beginning to explore this with more confidence and interesting techniques; this helps me push my concepts as a designer, as well as making my work unique to my ethos. I feel like my Oripeau project outcome embodied my style, and was the first module where I felt pretty confident in my work (Fig.1). Despite this, my weaknesses definitely lie in the design process of combining type and image; I work in a much more image heavy approach to design, which limits me from taking more risks with typography. I would like to improve my skill set within type design, as it will help my work become more rounded. 

My approach to briefs has changed massively since the beginning of the course; I put way more time into the conceptual/ research side of the design process, which strengthens the ideas behind my work. I also invest more effort into proactively experimenting (and not just for the sake of it); some of my best work has come from this ethos of playing around with visuals in unorthodox ways. 

In regards to considerations when designing, I strongly believe in the importance of being open minded; it pushes one to take risks in their work, and generates the most interesting concepts in a project. Just simply being playful in my design process has helped me build confidence and embrace mistakes within my work; it also helps my outcomes to feel more organic and personal to my style. 

Regarding this approach to design, I’d like to continue being a playful designer and embodying this ethos of not taking my work too seriously. As well as this, this year has also highlighted the importance of witty thinking in design, which I definitely am going to integrate into the work I produce. I really want to master the balance between strong conceptualisation and a strong style; both should go hand in hand, which prevents one from being too reliant on visuals/ aesthetics. 

The main stage of the design process that I find difficult is probably the explanation of my ideas throughout modules; this mainly stems from the fact that my designs tend to progress into quite abstract concepts. Due to this, it is often hard to pinpoint or summarise my ideas into black and white concepts; I think I like to play with abstract ideas so much so that my final outcomes end up being very allusive to audiences. I found this quite difficult within the Penguin book cover project (Fig.2), as my concept was very general. Consequently, to some extent I should spend more time explaining concepts and making sure my outcomes have a solid meaning. 

In order to achieve my potential as a designer, I think I just need to be constantly stimulated with new ways of working and inspiration; I mainly find this by just looking through my instagram at interesting stuff. I would like to be pushed to use different methods and approaches to design; things like 3D design programmes. 

As previously mentioned, the main skill I want to improve is my type design; it would be cool to be able to even produce type only stuff, as currently I don’t think my type design is strong enough to speak for itself. It would help me become way more versatile as a designer, which I think is massively crucial within the industry. However, I am trying to be proactive in this aim, by spending a lot more time on type design in the 406 module (album covers); I’ve developed a few typefaces that I feel more happy with (Fig.3).

Some new skills I’d like to learn are working physically more; to embody the playfulness into my concepts, learning ceramics could be interesting, or 3D rendering as previously mentioned. I haven’t had much chance to do so this year, apart from making stickers (Fig.4), due to lockdown, so hopefully all will change next year.