Extended practice has been daunting and rewarding. It's certainly been a challenge to organise, manage and produce solutions for 10 different briefs but I've enjoyed the opportunity to tailor my practice to what I like doing. There were some briefs such a GF Smith, Penguin and Secret 7 which felt more intuitive and I could work through freely expressing a more creative or illustrative or loose response. And I jumped on the opporunity to just create things that I liked the final result to, in some ways, mostly from a creative point of view these were my favourite briefs. Although I equally enjoyed the structured client based briefs such as Smart Grid Consultancy (SGC), You be You or Armadilla. Although at the beginning of the year I was looking forwards to these briefs the least I found them pleasant to work on and I feel my responses are professional and suitable. In fact I enjoyed this kind of brief so much I'm determined to continue extending it way beyond the deadline- hopefully in a more professional context.
My time management was a very mixed bag and varied from brief to brief. In projects such as the charity brief I pushed my deadline so far back that I wasn't able to complete anywhere near as much practical work as I had hoped to, with certain elements of my submission failing to arrive in time. The charity brief frustrated me the most because I started out with such determination and I achieved a lot in the first term; research, statements of intent, development work, and unfortunately they didn't amount to very much- not for submission at least. I do have a strong brief to continue outside of university and develop fully with more relaxed time constraints, still I wish I could've done more. In opposition to this though, briefs such as my presidential campaign, armadilla and SGC I was able to get an awful lot done in such a short space of time. With my campaign I was able to produce research, generate and fully develop ideas, and print final designs in less than a week- something I had doubts I would be able to do. In fact with SGC and Armadilla I was using up my last few days- plus printing my response for the charity brief.
If I were to do this entire year again I would organise myself a lot better. Even if it meant creating a calendar for the whole year's work, just so I could visualise exactly how much time I had to spend on each project. I would also pick my briefs a lot more carefully- with some of my choices such as the Christmas paper I did them simply because I wanted to. Though the whole brief took an incredible amount of time- time that could've been spent on more useful projects and more design specific projects. There are a lot of things I wanted to do at the start of this year and I wish I had considered the reality of choosing the projects I did so I wish I had considered what briefs I wanted to do and how similar some of them were.
Though overall I am pleased with my results and the sheer amount of work I've managed to produce. I find it impressive that I was able to create all that I have done and it's certainly made for a lot of good portfolio items. Not only portfolio fillers this year had supplied briefs I can continue after the deadlines and hopefully use to forge my career.
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