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Trying to find a third portfolio visit this year was a nightmare. I contacted many agencies in Berlin and in Manchester and only managed to get two visits. Not only is it frustrating when agencies don't respond to your emails, it knocks my confidence as well. I felt like I had tried so hard trying to get in contacting them, I did a back up emails for some of the agencies who didn't get back to me the first time round, but I still didn't hear anything from them. I was so adamant that I would have done all my portfolio visits done by the end of November and it was looking that way the week before I went to Berlin, I felt like I had achieved one of my aims before even going on the visits. I keep thinking back to the visit I missed in Berlin because I couldn't get there. I thought to myself maybe its the way I am portraying myself through an email. Then I thought if this is the case then why did I get responses from Germany but not Manchester. I think the reason why I heard back from agencies in Berlin and not in Manchester is because in Berlin their agencies don't get visited much by students, so to them its something new and exciting when people want to come to see their work. Manchester based agencies seem to not have much time to see people they don't consider a priority.
For next year I want to visit agencies in London I want push myself more and not just focus on agencies in manchester because when I have graduated I hope to move down there as I think that it is one of the best cities for design.

The Apprentice

The apprentice has been a big influence to me. It recently finished for this year but it was on BBC1 every wednesday at 9.00pm. The programme is set up into two teams each team has a different project manager each week. They are set different task each week in the show and the team who collects the least amount of money loses and one person from that group gets fired.

The programme is very relevant to the line of work im going to be doing when I have graduated. The task involves advertising, packaging, selling and buying etc. From watching the programme for so long you see how people work together, how they communicate with each other, there organising skills how they work under pressure, giving presentations and coming up with the final product. This is what I experience most days on this course. I see how the groups of people on the show make mistakes and I question it e.g where did it go wrong, how they could have done it better.

Working outside of the 'box'

This has been a problem for me since the start of the course. Sometimes I feel reluctant to really push myself. This isn't because I don't want to, I fear that that the outcome won't be impressive. I think from the start of the course, to where I'm at now my style of working has changed.
Graphic designers that influence me such as Carson, Brody and Rand all have there own style of working and are quite rebellious when it comes to their work. So it makes me question why I don't follow their risk taking. The piece of work that I am proud of this year is the envelope security pattern I created. This is a brief that I was passionate about and I never got bored with,I have shown this in the outcome. I tried to make this brief more about my personality, instead of just following the brief. I really need to take more risks because as a designer it will make me stand out from the crowd.

Deadlines

I don't think I have ever handed a piece of work in past the deadline I always seem to stick to them. It just working to the deadline which can sometimes be tricky. Sometimes i feel like i have got longer than I actually have to complete a piece of work. So this is why I seem to be in a panic the last week up to the deadline. This has got a lot to do with time management if i organised myself better i wouldn't be in such a panic. What I tend to do a lot is spend so much time on the research and the idea aspect of projects then sort of lose myself at the last hurdle when it comes to producing the final piece.

Objectives for creating a stress free bulid up to a future deadline

Plan

Prepare

Produce.

Surroundings

Over the last couple of months I have been inspired more by my surroundings, than I have by designers and their work. I think its always good to acknowledge designers and incorporate their style into my work, but I think my work should be more about what I am about. Before starting this course I didn't do that much research into designers I did my work based more on what I thought looked right or made sense to me . The key thing to me is communication. I don't agree when people say 'that design doesn't communicate'. I believe everything communicates something even if its not communicated well. When I talk about my surroundings I mean things that interest me e.g signage, labels, editorials, posters at the bustop billboards, road signs, cd covers, leaflets etc. They are all created for a purpose whether its visually or for reading purposes.

As a designer there is always going to be a group of people that are not going to understand what Iam about but that is what makes designers and design interesting.

Time management

My time management this year hasn't been its best. I think this maybe due to the fact that as soon as I started the 3rd year the work had been piling up within the first and second week. Plus during the last month or so the work load has been immense. I think its all about getting the control and balance right. I know I have been putting the hours into my work. I just feel that I may have spent more time on one thing and less time on other things. For next year I want to set up a timetable to enable me to spend an adequate amount of time on each stage of my final major project e.g do research for a week or two then start on ideas...

Creative Review

Creative review is a visual communication magazine, It first launched in London 1980. The aim of the magazine is to inspire advertisers, photographers, graphic designers and illustrators around the the world.
I would like to say I buy the magzine just for reading purposes, but that isn't true. I keep buying this magazine for inspiration and also to look at the layout on each page, layouts fascinate me. I look for how type or an image sits on a page and the use of space. When looking through creative review magazines there is a mixture of layouts which makes the magazine stand out. Some layouts just use text and some image some pages are created in newspaper style (this is usually interview pages) I have incorporated this style in my recent projects.

Working in a pair...

This I found that it is a lot harder to work in a pair than it is working on my own. I find it a good experience working in a pair but I prefer to work on my own. I worked in a pair for the body shop brief that I have just completed. The biggest problem was being able to meet up to show each other what we had done and how we could improve on ideas. There was days that Stacey wasn't free and I was. However we did keep in contact through phone when we couldn't meet up, but you can't show visuals down a phone. When we first paired up I felt we were really organised each week we would come together with different ideas, but as the project was coming to an end we started to struggle. I can't speak for stacey but I felt that we had a really good idea, but it was quite difficult to execute it.