Visioning - 9.11.18

6B2

A picture of what success looks like at a particular point in the future, described with enough richness of detail so that you know when you've arrived.

Inspiring, detailed, documented, communicated and a little scary. Your vision allows you to inform you actions and to define success on your terms.

'A vision without execution is a hallucination' - Thomas Edison 

You can break a vision, however big, into smaller, meaningful actions and tasks.

1. 5-10 years in the future.
2. Start by date
3. Present tense
4. Ideal life
5. Professional and personal life
6. Everything that defines success

Visioning Statement

The date is 2023 and I am living in my own house, with a potential partner and a cat. We have a two bed house with large windows and a big garden which I work in weekly. All of my crockery is mismatched and from charity shops. I have a cat which has a happy life. For dinner we cook vegetarian meals and I've finally figured out how to cook tofu.

I am living in a creative city with lots of green spaces and I have a job branding museums and galleries and coming up with creative solutions for getting people involved with the exhibitions. Sometimes I take freelance work from creatives around the city and I am selective with the work I take on. I am living off a reasonable wage that means I can go on holiday occasionally.

I am proficient in Photoshop at this point (which has previously been a weakness) although I have branched away from Adobe and have investigated other, more affordable graphics software. I am an advocate for some other type of independent program.

I have also written my own novel and it's being published by a well known publishing house. In addition to this I have also made several fairly successful storybooks which I have illustrated too.

Planning:

• Every day counts - even days off are to recharge.
• Needs: 3 priorities for the day, 3 for the week and 3 wins for the week.
• Adding a monetary value to work to bank it in.
• It's very difficult to ingrain something as a habbit.
• Simplicity and consistency = productivity  
• Don't try to change everything overnight.
• Annual Goals.
• Prioritising the right things.

Focus Techniques:

• Hold app and 52/17 app
• Pomodoro - 25 minute burst, 5 min break, each 4th cycle takes a 15 min break.
• Eat the frog, start the day with the most daunting task.
• Marinara - Chrome plugin 

Task - The 4 stage plan:

1. Annual Goals (end of year)
2. Set goals for each term
3. Create an hourly plan for next week.
4. A productivity tool to help focus.

1. Annual Goals

• Get a 1st.
• Have a portfolio I'm proud of.
• Have a job lined up to go into.

2. Term Goals

• Finish my cop project within reasonable time.
• Look into internships.
• Complete a personal zine.

3. Weekly goals

• Cop essay introduction.
• 2 x magazines researched
• Update blog.

Make Your Own Experience - 2.11.18

6B2

Dan Cooper - Nomadic Designer

• Would offer two days of free work in a studio for one day of mentoring back.
• Easy to turn heroes into collaborators.
• Find alternative ways of collaborating and connecting with heroes. 

The Cool Bus

• Mobile graphic design studio.
• Served as small internships.
• People were intrigued and interested by the mystique of it. 
• Has more personality and stands out from the crowd.

Snask

• Every time they were asked to do a talk they played a gig.

'When you do something no one hates, no one loves it...' - Tibon Kalman

Søren Danielson 

• Started off as a graphic designer but go into motion graphics.
• Made a promo video stating he was searching for an internship. This was put on Facebook and on a specific Reddit motion graphics forum, who gave him strong critique. 
• He got lots of freelance work and internships offered to him because of this.

 The Pop Up Agency

• Would offer to solve any creative brief in 48hrs.
• 15 briefs, 15 cities, 15 weeks.
• They no longer go in to find the 'solution' they go in to teach creative strategies and how everyone can be creative. They have worked with clients like Apple.
• Team of 5 went down to 2.

If you're going to take risks make sure the rewards are worth it.

Kate Darby

• Places to get work - UpWork, Fiverr and 99 Designs but they didn't solve the problem. 
• Created app called Dovetail X. This was to help creative and tech freelancers to team up to get work. Can set up a profile, show work and get contacted through it. 

In order to be successful must tap into passions and make use of the university to experiment.

Precarity Pilot - a good website offering advice for undergraduates finding careers.
http://precaritypilot.net/from-university-to-work/ 

OUGD602 - Briefing

6A2 - Doing research into people who have a similar practice, different studios and professionals.
6B2 - Are you good at networking? Plans for time after uni. Skills picked up, workflow, planning, contacting professionals with different approaches.
6C2 - Professional branding, how it is being disseminated. LinkedIn, social media, contacted people about placements, footer of emails showing self branding. Key preparation and strategy.
6D2 - Appropriate communication methods, good social media, professional emails (some overlap with 6C2.

Each post should outline the relevant learning outcomes.

Brief 1 - Personal Branding - who are you? what do you do?

Brief 2 - Design strategy - every interaction with the professional sphere that helps to progress and establish my career.

What I did, why, what I learned.

Tasks:

• Build a website
• Get some online press
• Send real mail

Events:

• Week of visiting professionals 
• We will be branding  
• Potential design conference.

Professional Worries Session 26.10.18

6D2  

This session was about discussing our fears and worries about entering the graphic design industry and how these might be solved creatively. Initially we had to write down personal concerns about the industry, some of mine included:

• Sending out many emails without reply.
• Not having job security.
• Work not being at a professional enough standard.
• Not finding the opportunities in the place I want to live. 
• Not earning enough to sustain living - the doing what you love or paying the bills dilemma. 

Doing this allowed me to organise my thoughts and think about each one with scrutiny. Each one is fairly rational but can be avoided by perseverance and compromise.

We were then asked to focus on the most prevalent worry and write about it for the group to analyse. We then traveled round in a circle annotating this worry, with similar concerns or advice for the future. It was interesting to see people's ideas and perspectives which I hadn't really considered before. Mine was 'wanting a creative job but living in a place that doesn't have many available. Then having to become an art teacher.' The most interesting piece of advice I got was that becoming a teacher doesn't mean having to give up your practice. In many ways the two can be balanced hand in hand.

We then developed the most common worry within the group, discussing potential ideas and solutions surrounding it. Ours was the fear that lack of skills and experience could effect our employability. Some of the solutions we came up with were to continue to practice design skills in our own time and take chances and put ourselves into situations where we will be pushed but to our best ability, i.e. a bird being pushed out of the nest.

We then discussed how we could make a podcast that encourages people to push themselves to try new things within design. These could be short creative challenges like 'make a picture out of the resources on your desk' or 'do a digital drawing only using the colour orange'.

After that we produced a tweet mission statement for the #pushyourself podcast.
'Tune into our new, weekly podcast. New creative challenge each week. Break the boundries of design. Spread your wings and learn how to fly (in design) #highflyers #pushyourself'

We also created an emoji sentence to convey our mission statement, representing a bird being pushed out of the nest.