Personal Development Database / Portfolio

On entering my second year, I do feel that a bit too much time was spent in year one recording evidence of research, of ‘being seen to have looked at things’, showing the course leaders that you understand your chosen area of study. I recently got my grades back for the first year, and what revealed was this:

1 - I got far more marks than was necessary to pass my course. I could have passed and done less, meaning I might have been able to spend more time on what I now know to be more important.

2 – My results showed that I got the most marks for ‘Professional Studies’ and the more academic side. I had basically felt like I had too much emphasis on writing my blog, researching the industry and stressed out too much on things lie my critical studies essays. This area I was getting 70-75% area, where something like 45-50% would have been enough. I had personally felt like I didn’t make enough progress on the ‘doing’ or production side of things (by this I mean learning how to do the kind of things I saw in work I admired, getting knowledge with the tools used to make things happen). In other words, on a course which is called simply ‘Digital Media’, this means learning the software so that real creativity becomes viable. My marks for this kind of thing were more like 60%, which is also more then enough to pass, but by a lesser degree.

It has been good to learn about paperwork and stuff like that, and conceptual ideas are essential, but I feel on a course which is set up differently than a BA, where you simply pass or fail, I will spend the next 12 months really concentrating on the practical, production based stuff. I now have direction, and know which areas I wish to work in, so I will happily weigh my time in favour of learning the skills and packages I will need to know on the job. I will still actively research and enjoy looking at the design scene, but I won’t be spending all my time writing about it on my blog! There are only so many hours in the day and I have lots of other commitments such as work and a family to care for.

I plan to go onto one of the BA courses for year. I now know that what I want to do is design and be a ‘designer’. The base area to build on is simply graphic design, then this graphic design foundation is then applied to motion graphics, using Adobe After Effects. The other stuff on my course, such as Flash, CSS, coding/scripting I will not be doing. This means that in a perfect world I would probably be going onto the 3rd year graphic design course rather than a ‘Interactive Multimedia’ course, but the name probably isn’t too important, as I know what I want to learn and fully intend learning what I need to learn. I imagine that if there is an imbalance towards software and production (rather than critical studies and research), this may need to be balanced again better in the BA year (3) to help get a decent grade (I think a 2:1 or better is desirable). I still feel that isn’t as important as the portfolio, but I wouldn’t like to get a poor grade.

I hope in the next year I won’t get too swayed by academic stuff and college politics; this next year I want to simply get my head down and get good at design.