Personal & Professional Practice: January 2017

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Linkedin & Other Platforms

Today John emphasised the importance of setting up a page on Linkedin - a sort of Facebook for professionals that allows you to connect with other people who are interested in the same areas as you, as well as being able to upload your experience and look for jobs. An essential part of our jobs now and in the future is to push our work out there and get people talking about you - resulting in people wanting to work with you. The site can also be used to get feedback from projects are working on and chat to people about similar work.

Other platforms can be used to share and promote your work such as Behance which is run by Adobe and allows you to connect your creative cloud to share projects and gain feedback and responses.

As well as these professional websites a lot of designers also use Instagram and Tumblr to share their identity as a designer online.

I use my instagram to showcase work that I have produced, both design work and photography. As well as following a lot of inspirational accounts and saving anything I really admire.

I use tumblr more for inspiration as you can see I have posted some of my work and tagged them into specific categories which you can find on the links, however it is primarily used to gather inspo - a visual mind map.

Another website I have work on is flickr however I wouldn't relate this so much to design, however it is still relevant as I like to use photography in my work.

The final website I use often is pinterest - I don't upload any of my own work to this site but use it a lot to gain inspiration and ideas from work similar to what I want to produce - or on the topic I am working on.

Wednesday, 18 January 2017

A Brief Description

As cliched as it sounds I have wanted to study graphic design since looking for courses and universities in year 9 before choosing my GCSE options, with that career path in mind I took GCSE graphic products and ict as they were the most relevant to get me onto my a levels. I then took product design, ict and photography a levels along with english and RS. Whilst looking around universities in sixth form I was advised to take a foundation year in art and design to develop my skills and way of working - as from a levels would be too much of a jump. I am glad I did this year as it was my first proper experience of using sketch books and conducting a lot of research as well as developing ideas a lot more before coming to a final design - I didn't do this much before.

Starting the course in September I definitely had some concerns that I wouldn't be good enough, but the tutors made us all feel capable of the initial tasks they set and we had a lot of support through software inductions and presentations in class. Looking back to the work I initially did I have certainly improved a lot and the course is just as good as I would have imagined if not better, I am very happy with the progress I have made this year in my physical work and how I go about a brief - I am a lot more confident in starting a project now and finding inspiration as this was something I struggled with to begin with - making a start and initial ideas.

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

Inspiration Sharing

Today in class we shared with each other what we like to use for inspiration, things we admire and how we get our minds working. Some of the sites and methods I use and some I picked up are down below:

collaging