Hopes, Fears and Opportunities

In this post I will discuss my hopes, fears and opportunities of this year so far, my final semester and beyond finishing my degree as a qualified surface designer.

Hopes:

By the end of my final year of studying for my degree I have many hopes that I wish to have achieved. My first hope is to have gained more photoshop and illustrator skills which can help me create surface design patterns in a sophisticated and interesting way. I hope to carry on experimenting with drawings and texture the way I do in my sketchbooks but to also come out of them and play around more on a large scale so I have more to work with. I hope to take these experiments and learn to bring them together with my digital work by fusing the two together through scanning them in and playing around with them on photoshop. This way I feel I can get the best of both worlds but also I am learning to make my experiments progress further into designs and not keeping them hidden away in my sketchbooks as my experimental work is usually what people comment on as my strongest pieces of work. A final hope that I have is to get my work up to a professional standard as I feel this is an important skill to learn and a direction which my work is heading in but isn't quite there yet. I am hoping to achieve this by devoting a day a week to researching product design and visiting exhibitions and shops to see how designers display their work in a professional manner.  I feel that studying things like packaging and creating visualisations of my patterns on products could give my work that extra edge that people need to see when looking through a portfolio. By the time that my final major project is to put up I would like to have taken this even further and have real products with my work printed onto them so that people don't just see a visualisation but can see it in the flesh.

 Fears:

My first fear as a surface designer for this year is not being able to manage my time effectively in order to complete all of my work on time. Time management is something that I really began to struggle with at the end of last year as I feel that sometimes I can spend to long on worrying about things that can be solved quickly if I don't fret about them. I would like to help solve this potential problem by buying a diary and calendar and making myself a times table which I must stick to in order to get things done. If I follow the timetable and it gets to a point where my time period for something is up I will have to make sure that I stick to my plan and move on to the next stage and then perhaps if I have time at the end I can return to the part which was overlapping in time. My second fear is leaving this course and not feeling that I have achieved all that I could of. I will have to make sure that I push myself and work to my full potential in order to complete everything and feel I have achieved all my aims of the year. My final fear is that I will leave the course and not progress into the design world by not getting a job in surface design. This is a growing fear that I feel the only way to solve is to try and think positively and apply for as many jobs or work experience opportunities as I can just before I leave and after.

Opportunities:

The opportunities that I see this course has to offer for this year are being able to work on a theme / idea that I have always wanted to in my final major project. I would like to use this year as an opportunity to investigate the story of sacred geometry and explore it in my own creative ways that will give me many outcomes that I can then develop further to be used as designs for surface design.