Vis Com in Context

I'm relieved to have got everything done and handed in this unit. Although I keep remembering little things I should have explained or included in my sketchbook and improvements I could have made to my final pieces Im generally pretty happy with what I produced. I think the strongest part of my work in this unit was my ideas generation. The outcomes of the four projects were not spectacular or groundbreaking concepts but I felt they were quite neat, quirky ideas which fulfilled the requirements of the briefs. I also learned alot in the unit by not just using illustration by default for every piece of work but trying more graphic work (the business papers and sound project were mostly typographic whilst the mushy pea packaging was designed around the net of the package). I've learned alot of software stuff on indesign and illustrator and found I really enjoyed designing and making 3d packaging.

I fell down on my time management, my final presentation posters and also my sketchbook, all of which were interlinked as they were the last things I did. I tried not to get too hung up on the sketchbook as there was not a lot of time to keep one with such short sharp projects as the main emphasis was on getting the outcomes sorted and I feel trying to present all my ideas in a nice aesthetic way as I go can slow me down and can stifle ideas as I'm constantly second-guessing myself as to whether the idea is stupid. This worked well when I was working. I had a small notebook I could quickly and spontaneously scribble ideas down in which was conducive to the process of ideas generation. However, when I came to compile this into something which would communicate my ideas clearly at the 11th hour it became quite difficult to do retrospectively and resulted in a quite scrappy and hastily put together thing which doesn't show the amount of thought I put into the project. My presentation posters were also a quite last minute thing and kind of looked it. To stop my work from suffering from this rush I am going to make a pact with myself to try and have everything done and ready to print a week before the deadline in future projects and printed 2 days before the deadline giving me 2 days to write rationales and create display boards. I'm really going to try and keep to this as the stress of rushing at the last minute and depriving myself of sleep to get stuff done is not really a sustainable way to work, it takes too much out of you.