Animal Farm- Done.

Having made a profit to go towards our end of year show and received positive feedback from alot of the people who attended, the animal farm print auction can definitely go down as a success. As well as the money made and the good exposure for the course, it was also useful experience for putting on future events.

Personally, I was pretty chuffed to have sold a fair few prints and hear some nice stuff about my work.

Now I have to turn my attention to the next four projects; PPRD, D&AD, the essay and my professional project. I've got next week to finish PPRD and get something together for D&AD, after which I can really begin to put my energy and focus fully into the all important professional project, for which I have begun to put together my proposal.

I presented the idea I have started to formulate in front of the class today and was met with a few confused faces. I'm going to put this down to my presentation skills or lack thereof and the fact that the idea is quite difficult to explain.

Basically, I want to create a book or series of books which aim to teach the reader something through visuals. This obviously doesn't sound like a particularly new concept but the way I aim to go about it is..

If you remember compiling revision notes for exams (one of the massive benefits of art school is that this is a distant memory) you might remember being told to highlight key bits in different colours to create visual distinction amid the sea of samey handwriting and hopefully enable you to retain these coloured bits of information in your visual memory.

my idea is based on this principle and basically aims to break down useful things to know and (provisional ideas I had were how to change a tyre, how to bake bread and basic phrases in foreign languages) make it really easy for the reader to assimilate the key information through a series of vivid and distinctive graphics that carry the key points.

I want the images to really lodge in the mind's eye so to speak as my rationale is that this is one of the most effective ways of learning something. The emphasis is firmly on memorising this information rather than using these books as a manual/cookbook/phrasebook and I am interested in reading up about the psychology of learning and visual memory to get a bit of background into this area as it underpins what I will create.

I know I have to think about it further and refine the idea as whilst writing this I have noticed some flaws but I think it has the potential to be a really interesting project and a good vehicle with which I can create a body of varied and experimental work.