Hectic

After slogging away for the whole weekend on the visual mapping task (our brief was to visually describe a journey in a new environment) for our Monday morning critique I was optimistic that there might be some respite this week. Instead I was confronted with a reminder of the plethora of tasks which are imminently due. There is a definite air of urgency, even panic among our group over the amount we have going on. It's not solely a case of the workload that seems to be causing this, I think we've coped all with similar amounts before, I definitely have whilst taking my A-levels, it's the different tasks for different tutors which have different deadlines and are within different units requiring different skills and different students hearing (and telling you) different things about these. However, I've learned that spending time moaning, stressing and chatting about it is not conducive to getting any of it done, instead its better to step back, calm down, prioritise each task and simply work. Our upcoming tasks include:

-3 editorial illustrations to convey our experiences of the Poole trip
-A series of photos of typography in the public environment (vernacular typography)
-Letterpress workshops
-Refining and developing my 'drift' task
-Making a a book complete with photo montage centre-fold and a cover design featuring a piece of experimental typography
-Making another book detailing our journey through the course so far
-A 2000 word essay on an image
-An 800 word self evaluation of my progress in the theory unit
-A 500 word evaluation of progress through text and image
-And an 800 word critique of an object from the museum of design in plastics.
-Ongoing general research, reading (general as well as academic) and self-reflection

This week I am going to: refine my drift project, build up some more research for the editorial illustrations, get the vernacular typography task out of the way and begin reading/get some library books out to support my essay, I also need to try and procure the photos of my group's typeface made with tape.

Writing out all my tasks like this definitely has a kind of therapeutic effect, just by compiling the above list I instantly feel more relaxed, they all seem more tangible now, I don't feel like I'm in danger of forgetting any of them.

As I mentioned above, I have been working all weekend on the visual mapping or 'drift project where I had to document a journey through a new environment. I used a group trip to see a talk by influential film-credit designer Kyle Cooper London as my inspiration for the image. What I initially set out to convey was the distinct character of each area of London I walked through. One of the main devices which I intended to achieve this was the use of the black railings which are really prevalent in London- I noticed they changed from area to area, with affluent places like Holborn having very ornamental, decorative railings and areas like Tower Hamlets, which are generally less wealthy having basic, functional designs. The railings were meant to be a constant which signified London, with the slight differences in their appearances portraying the differences in the visual landscape of each area. After a draft copy of my image I realised that the railings idea wasn't very communicative due to the other elements of the montage image which attract more focus and the image of the railings alone was quite crude and didn't convey any of the other aspects of my journey (buildings, people etc) so I chose to make them smaller and overlay a jagged line in order to detract focus from them and amplify the idea of direction and also convey the pace of my journey (it was quite fast and chaotic). I don't think I've successfully conveyed what I wanted to as of yet so I will be refining the image but i'll post the draft up on here anyway.