The summer is fast approaching. The academic year is reaching it’s end. Sure, student timetables are out of whack now, but it’s important to keep going. I need to set myself goals over the summer months to keep my creativity and interest in design up. I’m looking back at a project not long since handed in, and I know that I want to revise elements of it already.
I handed in my responsive project – a live brief outcome from the UN and the World Health Organisation. I will admit that I swayed the brief to suit my own emotional and mental-wellbeing, from ‘raising awareness of Covid-19 to prevent the spread’ to ‘coping with the pandemic through activities’. The thing is, I had to write a proposal, so I found justification in the angle I ‘tackled’ the brief. In modifying the brief, I could focus more on subjects that would help me cope, while being – theoretically – more productive.
Essentially, to address the problem of Covid-19, I chose to design for a child audience, and ‘market’ an activity that would be cultivating inside-grown plants from mail-order seed packets. The real drive for the project being to give kids more structure and short-term goals at home when schools were closed. I wanted to include two mini zines (8 pages each) with information and facts on the types of plants that can be grown from the seeds, and garden insects that are beneficial to outdoor plant growth.
I explored a couple of different illustration routes to see what could suit seed packet design and little booklets, but it was a lot to take on in such a short space of time. I only got as far as making mockups of the basic layout for a proposed packet design, and one zine. I made many illustrations, but I don’t think they’ll go to waste. This project included my first tries at creating digital collage.
Although it’s far more time-consuming than I had thought – I still felt a lot of gratification upon finishing any insect collages. I am very happy with how some of them turned out.
I wish I had shared more of my development work as I was working on the responsive project. I shared a little over some Microsoft Teams DMs and Discord, and got some interesting insights into other’s thoughts on paper collage. I realised the variety of the papers I could use – the ‘paper’ being digital – were bigger than I thought. Newsprint and even photographs can be utilised for different textures and to suggest different patterns.
I’d like to make more bug collages over the summer, and fill a whole printed, colour booklet. I want to finish the black and white zine full of line garden insect drawings I started for my responsive brief, too. I’d want to make the hand-drawn illustration version downloadable, printable, so that folding it and colouring it is an activity on top of learning bug facts.
There’s a lot go milage in my proposal as it’s not explicitly Covid-19 specific, it can exist outside of the initial brief timeframe, which lends the ideas longevity. That’s why it’d be worth returning to the project in my own time.
One of the last modules of the academic year is a ‘personal project’. Again, I have full reign over how I want to approach design. It can be anything. ANYTHING! Naturally, I generated a number of ideas that I can’t possibly address within the soon-approaching deadline. Some ideas probably aren’t worth looking at closer than I already have. But the ideas that I can’t address in the meantime are worth looking at in the future. I can set myself goals to achieve some of these projects.
Some routes I was interested in were stationary sets – letter-writing sets… sticker design – health and wellbeing product packaging, spotters guides, and the good old bestiary. Here are a few notes I took in my sketchbook while musing over spotters guides and bestiaries:
Books full of creatures from folk tales, or video game monster indexes have always interested me. There’s definitely fun to be had in illustrating (and writing for) such things. So I can see myself making images for some variation of a bestiary myself.
Whatever routes I can venture down, it’s all an excuse to make illustration that I can put my heart into. Digital or analogue; I don’t think it matters much which I use, but the medium would probably change in relation to the illustration style I most want to dive into.
… But I chose what I had thought to be the quickest and most useful route to myself, thinking about the near-future. I’ll be looking at packaging design. I’ve worked on some before. I’ll put to the test the knowledge I’ve learned in the past!
Planning out projects during the summer months and staying up-to-date in wold design news is vital as to not lose the heart I need to find work in the creative industry. It’s also important to keep up my blog; write about any design I find of interest, show any development of interest, and so on. The next logical step… is to finish all of the modules I have already! But then… then I can work out a schedule for the summer. And meet unrealised goals.
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