For the first time during my three years at university so far with one more year to go, I have not been plagued by problems causing a need for an extension for a single assignment, to be honest it was a great feeling.

From September to December and then February to May I have been working flat out getting my work done, going over it, creating iteration after iteration and changing my mind for the better throughout the process. It may have only been a week since I handed in all my work and gave my self branding presentation today due to staff shortages due to illness, but I have already seen and witnessed how far I have come along, normally it takes a few weeks for the lessons to sink in but this time they formed in time to create a nice tidy evaluation at the end of each assignment.

Talking of assignments I can proudly display a collaborative project, as three weeks ago it no longer needed to be a secret from the rest of the class (part of the brief). The past three weeks have been a craze of filling in forms and dragging and dropping images, write ups and basically putting all the loose bits and bobs into a nicely presented digital sketchbook.
I won’t pretend that the collaboration was easy, far from, in truth it was the most stressful university related thing I have done. I say university related because it comes now where near close to the other stresses of previous semesters and years, anyhow I digress. Collaboration woes, our team had issues, out of five a collaboration occurred in mainly three members though two of these changed as the project developed, the early stages included a concept artist but not a three-dimensional designer, later in the development they switched places.

Management of time from the team became an issue as did ensuring that everyone was effectively on the same page as one another with respects to what was happening with the design, in essence we had a communication breakdown.

The collaborative breif was to create and brand a sleeping pod, no stipulations were given on shape, size or interiors, just a £50 budget to purchase everything we needed to create the pod.

Displayed here is the letter headed paper I designed using a logo developed by one team member  Lacey and reformatted by myself into a vector (scaleable) graphic and the flowers which were drawn by Emma Rhodes and again formatted into a vector graphic and copied to create the delicate corner frame.

I also developed a business card and a website design for the pod, made a woven basket, a sleep mask and helped put up the pod, some of which can be seen on my portfolio page, though my plastering skills are atrocious.

However the project came off a success albeit a stressful one, fortunately grading is not being based on the team as a whole but on how we worked in a team and how much we have learnt about the approaches of other design disciplines.

Previous semesters saw me hand in two or more boxes of creations, needing

my fiancés help to ca

rry everything into the building to be marked, yet this time all I needed were disks and one folder, it’s a bit of an alien concept to me, yet somehow my small home was still covered in uni work. Don’t ask how that happened, I don’t have a clue.

The trouble with trends, they don’t tend to have a long shelf life, granted swiss style is still in and has been for quite some time. but many who try to mimic it fail simply because they are not aware of the predefined rules applied to such styles.

I won’t pretend that I know all about swiss style I don’t, but I do respect it’s graciousness and subtleness.

Using a trend in advertising is fine so long as you give it a fresh approach, something which makes it more unique to you and what you are selling after all you don’t want your message to be mistaken for a competitors.

Simply copying a trend makes you just that a clearly prescribed copy cat, do it more than once and your client base who pay attention to adverts are likely to start deserting you, it also fails to push your brand further into the arms of other would be clients.

Take this example, the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, great for building up optimism during times of need, but the concept is now being over run with quirky remodels by simply altering the text.

As more of these wacky posters began emerging altering the original message but doing little to develop it further I found myself simply becoming bored of the posters. Seeing the original “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters leave my sighing at the thought of seeing another one.

The strangest thing is I can never remember these out there versions of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

As I said trends for advertising fine so long as they are unique and memorable, but to use a trend in your logo would be different. A logo is not something you upgrade on a whim, it is meant to stand for something, to promote you and your message, it is a part of your branding personality.

Imagine the cost of modifying your logo each and every time a new trend arrived, not only do I believe using trends in logo design means unnecessary work but also the cost of additional resources.

A logo just like your brand should be timeless, yes they evolve over time, but the changes are subtle and don’t scare the customers often they are not even noticeable. Starbucks for example gradually modified their logo which meant that clients still related to them. This is the dream redesign for both the company and the designers.

This short animated piece is based upon the poem The Enchanted Isle by Anon

The first version with no sound

Untitled from Sadie Ingoldby on Vimeo.

Made for Lightworks (external link opens in new tab)

The full version including the poem

Out of the three sessions I wanted to go to I could attend only two as the other was fully booked unfortunately.

The first seminar was ‘working in the design industry’, our speaker was from a company called energy cell who work in digital, design and marketing.

Personally I found this presentation highly informative and it helped me realise that I was on the right track learning the skills to also work on web based projects. Plus I also gained ample other important information that will assist me for my career after university.

Onto today’s seminar held by firecracker-uk on how to be creative!

Much of the time we believe we are born with this ability, whilst as children we always have our imaginary play these skills tend to be forgotten as we get older. Today’s session helped in finding new ways to consider other ideas through brainstorming guided by using external factors to inspire the more obscure thoughts preventing a rehash of other ideas.

From both sessions I have taken notes and have found ways in which they can further assist the development of my skill set by improving and gaining.

Even my home is undergoing an organisational phase. With paperwork being added to the ever growing to burn pile which now has a box ready to be used in the summer break as I look forward to relaxing in the back garden around a chimnea burning away all the security information.

Christmas in our household was relaxed though didn’t feel in the slightest bit festive as I dashed from handing in work for last semester straight into organising myself for another season of good will.
In truth it only felt like Christmas the day after I tool all the decorations down and stored them away for another year.

I have learnt many life lessons over this period, the biggest is to be more organised and start plans for events where you know you are going to be busy at a time when all is quite.

Maybe it sounds like I am complaining about my lack or organisational skills which are slowly improving and a lack of time to enjoy and relax. But speaking honestly I have enjoyed the hectic lifestyle it brought and have found myself wondering partially what to do.

A project that said on the box takes a weekend to complete was finished in one night.

I guess I am finding relaxing a little too difficult after having a few years of forced relaxation due to attempting to manage a disability which I still have but I am slowly finding more things I can do whilst in pain albeit a little slower than normal.

So because I have not yet got round to it happy new year.

This back up site will have a different design and will have a note attached explaining the use of the site. This secondly site has an advantage of being quick to update though has the difficulty of not being so search engine friendly. Therefore in the next few hours the back up site will be visible. This site means that you the viewer can still see everything whilst updates to the site are in progress.

Full explanation is in the video.

Trawling through my twitter feed, regularly I see something that catches my eye, sometimes I favourite them just so I have a better image than that my blackberry can provide and secondly I’m normally around friends and don’t want to be overtly rude.  I know it’s not particularly great to be on twitter when being sociable but there are times when I just have to e.g footballs on the tv (I’m not a footy fan).  So I let it slide in these occasions.

Before I digress too much, here is my plan, follow some online tutorials provided by crazy leaf design, that will hopefully teach me a few more things in photoshop, I’ll also be trawling the web looking for illustrator tutorials, as I’m only just coming to grips with the software and need more practice to refine the skills I have learnt and also learn some new techniques.

It’s all well and good me gaining all of this home learnt experience but I still don’t have any real life experience yet, so I’ll be investigating some entry level design jobs and you the designer has provided me with some great starting points.

Alongside this a friend wants to make an outfit for halloween, I know it’s ages away, but its a victorian dress with the undergarments so I’m relieved that she has asked for my help now and not a few weeks or a month before halloween especially as I will be back at uni at that time and so will be busy working on my assignments again.

My final assignment for this academic year was only handed in on friday and I’m already thinking about going back and working on another assignment. I think I need a holiday.

*Addition*

PSD to HTML Guide posted page of tutorials for creating vector images