Application and Interactions
This week’s lecture was very clear on the difference between self-initiated projects and commercial work. Most of the designers suggest self-initiated projects is to identify and shape who you are as a designer or studio practice. This allows you to explore an area of interest that can help you and your portfolio of work that could attract a certain industry of your interest in your practice. This combination can gain great respect in an industry that is in line with your passion for design and a chosen field of something that is a hobby to you. This clearly can have so much advantage in gaining great work with like-minded people but can be a consequence with budget and time management if not considered carefully through the process of a self-initiated project. One thing I did take from this lecture is there is nothing to lose if you chose to work on projects you like through self-initiated projects. You have to remember to yourself is, consider yourself being the client so you can work towards goals a lot easier and be strict to yourself through the process. Give yourself a brief, tight deadline and a budget that is reasonable and true to you. It was Vince Frost who did say he prefers commercial work as it defines him and his studio to be what it is today for his success. In this, I can see the benefit through this perspective as it can drive you to complete projects to a realistic goal and attitude to succeed. It’s clear people thrive differently in many ways in how design can shape you and identify your direction as a designer or studio practice, which can lead to great work of interest for your future to come.
Further Research
4. Passion projects
This article is a great read by Hilary Archer who talks about breaking that creative rut for an opportunity to experiment with new graphic design projects. The ‘Passion Projects’ article further down the page really took an interest to me as it speaks highly about how designers should pause and reflect on the passion of interest in your design work. Throughout this process up until now is the project I want to deliver is something that’s personal to me and show a passion in my interest in work. The outcome might not be correct or the right choice for this brief but there is some element of interest I wanted out of this and that’s showing the humour side coming through my work. I can really learn a lot from this experience to further this project or future projects in how I should make sure I have a firm structure to my strategy that can lead me to a successful outcome. These projects can truly lead to opportunities that can be your dream job in the near future in creating the right career path.
Try exploring a design project that represents your approach, process or simply something you love about design
People of Print:
Member Showcase: 18 Block Printers
This post by People of Print showcases the talented members of the community print artwork of block and Lino print techniques. These are a great inspiration and achievement design work that helps me see many unique and styles of print that could influence my direction. This gives me a great idea of either creating prints on a larger scale Lino pad and also using a wooden block typeface for my own prints. This really is a great gallery of work to have access to be inspired to move forward from my own experience in this project either if the end result isn’t what I want it to be.
Draw Cut Ink Press
This is a really useful website sharing ideas and thoughts on Lino’s print techniques and inspiration to learn from. This site has plenty of resources that leads to interesting articles on tools, techniques, and a collection of artwork that talks about the success and failure of their creations.
Workshop Challenge
This is my finalised project to date and as I’ve able to get a few testers of the print and one on a roll of toilet paper, I made some mock-ups to show how this would look entirely as a roll.
This was my attempt in printing directly onto the toilet roll which as you can see is not the perfect result I wanted as the design didn’t turn out to how I wanted it to be. Overall it was a great experiment using this technique but feel it wasn’t the correct outcome for the result.
Feedback
The feedback I got from my peers spoke about the confusion of the outcome to the question of my brief, but they also liked the tongue in cheek, playfulness, and experimentation of the outcome. Taking this all into consideration, I completely agree that the answer to the brief is completely not the outcome to live up to the expectation of my project.
The main thing out of this process is learning the failures in my practice that really benefit me in creating this project. As I look back on this, was the question first of all too ambitious for creating something to make a change in people’s behaviour because an event that already happened could possibly not happen again. Ashleigh pointed out that she felt my question for the brief was a rhetorical one to my project and personally I completely agree as this is far too enthusiastic in my approach. I could have made my question to the topic brief based on the research into the behaviour and what can I create to show it to an audience in a witty and humour approach for people to remember those strange times.
I like the direction of using song titles that brings humour through changing certain words that are playful and joyful to those in a pandemic period where people remember the moment toilet paper was flying off the shelves and people’s behaviour was absurd. This could be developed better with a book design or even a social engagement through social media posts to make something that’s a false intense that’s happened in the past to bring back now again. I completely loved the experimentation and playfulness, which it is this process that made it joyful through making in my process for future projects I can carry forward.