Presentation, QR Codes & Self Initiated Briefs

Friday was presentation day for my Poster brief. I'm now becoming more confident standing up in front of everyone, probably because I know a lot more people now. I do find the presentations to be long winded and would work better in smaller groups where the tutors could be more critical.

My presentation went really well. The only criticism I had was to move a line of type (the website address) to the bottom section of the poster to bring the two separate sections together. Immediately I changed this and even though I cant resubmit it, I know I should act on these comments as it could very well become a portfolio piece.

My focus now for the rest of the week is to crack on with the Blue Coat gallery video. The deadline for submission is a month or so off, however, I'd like to put mine in the gallery so this Friday is the deadline for that. I'm working with the idea of using the QR code as the basis of my video. I'm going to explore and play with the pixel like sections of the QR code and look into grids, pixel art and other things similar. I may even create a massive version of a QR code out of post-its or something and photograph that.

I want to really have fun with this idea so I'm really going to just play about and hope something good comes out of it!

I have decided I am now going to start initiating my own, made up briefs outside of the university projects. I feel that not only will it give me even more opportunity to design, but also prepare me for my next year which I can guarantee will be a lot tougher and more intense. I'm going to start two briefs, one with particular importance.

The first will be self branding. I want to create a logo, stationary and a blog/website for myself for freelancing purposes. If I can brand myself early on, it will allow me to look for live work for real clients in the second year and give me the edge when it comes to placements. I've yet to write the brief but I know the logo has to really say something about what I'm like as a person and as a designer. Luckily, the first university project I did is going to be great in helping out seeing as I've already explored myself once this year.

The second brief will be an old D&AD brief, and hopefully the next few briefs after that will be too. The idea behind this is I want an existing brief which will challenge me (and I've heard these briefs are challenging) and also give me experience with the competition so when I enter the real thing next year I know exactly what to expect.

To finish off, I just wanted to post a link to this blog.
http://blog.iso50.com/author/alex/

I stumbled across it yesterday and it was this that's inspired me to start doing my own briefs. In his posts, he outlines his design process for briefs he's done and to me there is something really inspiring about seeing peoples working process from start to finish. I really loved his Playboy re-branding (an exercise I would love to try out) and thought his final logo had a brilliant idea behind it. It looks very classy and shows a new Playboy. However, the negative space in the fox is rather distracting.