The first year of my course it’s coming to an end. I have been asked to summarize my experience as a design student, using my blog as a starting point. I think that’s quite a good idea since I can see that exist certain parallelism in the way I first approached both activities.
When we first started the Fda, we were asked to write a blog. I felt pretty excited with the idea. I had a blog before and I had enjoyed writing about my life, experiences and thoughts. But, as soon as I chose the blog’s name and did the design considerations for its layout, I realized that, even when I had lots of interesting things to share with the world, I couldn’t find my voice.
I was lost for words, I had never tried to write as a designer before, I knew what I liked but I didn’t know how to explain why without sounding dull, boring and less than brilliant. I developed a white page syndrome that pushed me to post mainly about things that where in my comfort zone. A good example to illustrate this could be my very first post. I watched a Spanish advert for an Alzheimer awareness campaign, it was great and effective, but its main characteristic was the simplicity of the idea and its execution. I was already familiar with a principle of design known as KISS (Keep it simple stupid) and I chose to post the advert mainly because I thought I could write something up to standard about it.
In another hand I was reluctant to show my work, I didn’t want to put out there pieces that didn’t represent me as the great designer or creative person that I wanted to become. I was being so cantered in what I didn’t want, and feeling so self-conscious about my writing skills, that my blog became a duty.
Luckily for me I had a tutorial with Paul (one of my teachers) that helped me to figure out that I needed to chill a bit and just try to show who I am, what I’m interested in, what I like, and what I think about anything related to visual culture, and be less concern about how other people was going to perceive me or to become the new Michael Bailey.
From that point I started to feel freer about my posting, and Ole! improved. I posted my collages and my street photography. As I was becoming aware of how important it’s to know what’s going on in the industry, I researched creative agencies based in London and their work. I had the opportunity to visit a few of them and the experience made me change my mind about my professional future. I always thought I wanted to become a freelance designer but after that day I knew that to be part of a creative team, working together, sounded much more exiting, enriching and fulfilling. I have dedicated posts to some of the agencies that I would love to work with such as Poke, Airside (who I had the honour to do a university project with), Digit, LBi, ODD, BBH and Mother London.
It has been a year with lots of out and about, enjoying London’s cultural offer, looking for inspiration and techniques, as well as feeding my soul. I visited numerous exhibitions and museums and I wrote about some of them. Most of them were good, but I think that if I have to choose one that especially touched me I have to talk here about the Francesca Woodman exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery.
I had always liked photography but her images blew me away. I felt so inspired that I got myself into a shoot of portraits that I posted in Ole! under the title CAN I BE AN ARTIST?
We have been encouraged as well to look at other designers work, it seems still difficult to know who is who just by looking at their work, but there is one designer’s work that I have got to know quite well. I was brave enough to crash into one of the Masters lecture where a guy from Creative Review (my monthly Bible) came to talk about why we like things. He showed us a short documentary where Tony Brook from Spin, was talking about his passion for Wim Crouwel’s work. After seeing his posters I wanted to know everything about him. I chose Wim Crouwel as my subject to develop a time line in my VCT class that I posted in my blog. His work and design philosophy has definitely influenced how I approach my work, embracing functionality and aesthetics while taking away my fear for simplicity.
But Ole has really started to work to perfection for me, mainly in the last month. For the whole year I have been struggling quite a bit with time management. I have been so overwhelmed by projects that the last thing in my list of to dos was to post something. However, when I was doing the schedule for the development of my Final Major Project I decided that non of my workshops would be finished until they were posted in the blog. The result of this technique has been that I’m on schedule and that Ole! have had more visits in the last 30 days that in the previous seven months. With a record set by the film “Time is evil”, more than a hundred visits in five days.
Time is evil is the result of a collaboration with Carla Houston, the experience have reassured me in my decision to avoid to work on my own. I’m much more creative when I’m working with someone else, and right know, after my first year as a graphic design student, I think that my future is in Art or Creative Direction and that’s what I’m willing to explore when looking for my work experience in the next few weeks. I know it’s not going to be easy but, nothing that’s worthwhile is ever easy, isn’t it?
Ole!
