My second rotation I went through was Visual Communication. Overall I must admit that I didn’t enjoy it very much as it just didn’t seem to click with me. I’m used to doing most of my work digitally or simply with a pencil in my sketchbook, however Vis Com seemed to be very hands on with lots of cutting, sticking and physical manipulation of images, which I don’t have much experience with. When you’re working digitally if you make a mistake you can simply undo it, whereas when you’re physically cutting out images there’s very little room for error. I think this hindered my creativity a bit as I was really cautious about the work that I was creating.
The research I carried out at the start of the rotation was somewhat helpful. I chose to study Robert Massin, a graphic designer active from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Whilst I did find his works very interesting and did enjoy learning more about him, I struggled to adapt elements of his works into mine, although this was mainly due to time restraints. The research we conducted as an overall class where we explored all of the different possibilities of books that we could create was very helpful, as it really opened my eyes to the wide variety of possible outcomes that my project could have.
The designing and construction of my product all ended up happening very close together, mainly due to poor time management on my part. I ended up designing portions of my book as I went along during the last day as I was constructing it, as I hadn’t left myself enough time earlier on in the week to properly plan out every aspect of the card. Unfortunately this meant that I ran out of time on the last day and didn’t manage to include the typography that I had created earlier on in the week in my book – This meant that when my work was being critiqued and shown to my peers the message wasn’t as clear and several people ended up not understanding the themes of my book, which i personally class as a failure – My book failed to perform the main function that it was designed for.
Overall I didn’t enjoy Vis Com week very much. I was still catching up with work from 3DD week, meaning that I ended up falling behind and this in turn hindered my progress in Visual Communication. The main bulk of the week was focused on Typography and Graphic Design, which is something that I learned did not interest me much by the end of the week. I have yet to be swayed from Moving Image!
Harri Smyth - UCA Farnham Foundation Student 