Brief two for Contemporary practice based around the them of process and tasks me with thinking about my own process and how I work as a designer. This is interesting to me because it allows me to think about how I work and how I can improve upon my own practice. The brief also scare me, because much like the previous brief, It is a task that is quite personal and invasive towards me and my work, and I am not sure if I am 100% comfortable with that yet, but what the hell lets go for it. First question though ‘WHAT THE BLOODY HELL IS MY PROCESS’ I don’t have a process, I just do it!
Starting Point
As an initial starting point to this brief, I started to think about a range of skills and techniques that a designer has access to in this day and age. These are more technical skills that as a designer needs to have in order to stay ahead in the game. These start from the simple creativity to the more advanced such as motion design. Going through this, I started to make notes on the things that I can do and then the things that I need to work on. Within this list, the highlighted are things that I think I am more competent in, where as the things on the list that are more scribbled around are things that I think I need to work on. In this case the more intense the scribble, the more I think that I need to work on because I cannot do it.
By going through this process, I was able to think about my skills and any gaps within my skill set. This task was valuable for me to be able to see where I think I need to work on my skills and see what I can do to fix any cracks in my knowledge.
Initial idea
This is an illustration of a skills tree. A skill tree is commonly found in video games where you generally play through the main game and gain experience points to spend developing your character by upgrading certain attributes and increasing the overall ability of the character. When I was looking at process models this idea stood out to me and Instantly made me think about how this idea could be approached and adapted to the world of design. After all I am on a journey to upgrade my skills and develop my own character throughout.
From that small bit of research, I started to think about how I could adapt a skill tree to suit me and the idea of skills for design. I tried to split Graphic Design into core areas that could be broken down into smaller chunks. The problem with doing this is the core areas of design are and can be their own singular entities and when broken down are absolutely huge in their own right. So I realised that this design would need to be a lot bigger and it was suggested that I try a ‘London Underground Map style approach to this design and see how that could be broken up. But this ended up looking more like a computer chip and less like a creative diagram. So I went back and tried the skills tree.
So I took the skill tree into the digital space. I tried to see if I could break design into the core values and push it down further. I then tried to rank myself based on my competency within that value. The design was huge and was starting to get really confusing. I ABSOLUTELY HATE THIS DESIGN! It doesn’t feel like me. The design is too clean and it is a complete mess of a layout that it actually hurts to look at it. So from this point, I abandoned ship and went back to the drawing board…
Research part 2
From the previous attempt at a process model, I decided to go back and have a look at some inspiration to how I work. I found that how I work is quite chaotic and if I am being honest can be seen as quite unconventional. I tend to scribble and doodle and screw things up a lot and throw a lot of things together on a page to see what happens. Part of the inspiration, I found an Instagram account that I had followed for some time, that goes by the name of DanteType. This creative Instagram page showcases a range of collage style work that uses typography as its primary source. They are really good at creating a very mixed media approach to design and producing chaotic but visually stimulating designs. Looking at this, I have been able to see a lot of my own process and how I work and I think that this has been valuable inspiration for my own practice.
After spending some time researching on Instagram for some visual inspiration, I found that the work of DanteType was very similar to methods used by David Carson and the approach that he takes to Design. Whilst researching, I found a book on Carson called ‘Trek’ In which it shows a collection of Carson’s work and how the different ranges and styles of work. One of the pages that I was drawn to within this book was this page where he has started with a bounding box and then layered type into the box and allowed it to expand further outside of the box. This has then included a bit of hand drawn comments and over-layered an image that is of some relevance to Carson but not to the design. I love how he treats his designs as visual piece for him to show, but then also as a bit of a diary for him at the same time. Within the design community, Carson is known to be quite a rule breaker and goes by the rule of ‘you have to learn the basics and develop the skills in order to break those rules’. And I think that this is the exact mentality I need for designing a piece of work on how I work as a designer.
Design Process take 2
From the research on Carson and the Visual Inspiration of DanteType, I decided that I would have a go at producing a physical piece of design. This is something that I don’t do very often so I has this revelation that I would have a go at it and see how it went. I started off with this process of writing down everything that I do when I go through the process of designing. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings when I design. Some of them positive, some of them negitive, but I try and work through it to completing. The bounding box was the first thing on the page, then the scribbles started to take over. I then went in and tried contextualising this piece by adding in a famous quote by Einstein about madness is developed through repetition..
To push the process further, I decided to go in with a red pen and make comments from a third person approach to the things that I have said I can and can’t do within the design. These comments are to give feedback to myself, but some of these comments are more sarcastic and in some cases are added into to give my work a bit of humour. This allowed my work to have a second dimension to my process and made me think more about how I work and where I can improve.
After going in with the red pen, I decided to blow up the original design onto an A3 paper and copied it several times. This allowed me to then go in and produce a collage style of work and break the design further. I wanted to instil more chaos into the process. My own process to an outsider looks like I am struggling a lot, but to me I am not struggling. I’m actually filtering out ideas and critically evaluating the effectiveness of ideas through the chaos. This collage approach allowed me to get more hands on and experience with the design and experience more creative freedom by showing carnage within my own design.
Once I was at a point of being happy with the collage, I decided to take the design to the ultimate level of chaos. I decided to treat the design as though I was working through my process. I put the paper through a series of processes. The first step was screw the paper up. This was symbolic to me filtering out my ideas and screwing up the bad ideas so that they never see daylight again. This then got thrown about as a ball and played with. This process helps me visualise and see ideas in a different view when I am trying to work out or produce new idea. Finally, it went through the process of being ripped and torn in certain areas. The ideas that make it normally end up being put in my bag and normally travel around with me until I get around to actioning them, which in most occasions means that they end up at the bottom of my bag and crushed, ripped and become quite fragile bits of paper. By putting this designed piece of work through that same process, I have given it the same process and shown it the absolute carnage that is my way of working.
I know that my way of working is very messy and is quite chaotic. But the thing is, it is MY process and without working this way, design doesn’t make sense to me and I wouldn’t be able to produce the same ideas and get out all of the thoughts from my head in any other way.
Final Outcome
The final step I took in creating a piece of work that shows my process was to take the photos I took and merge some together. I did this by going onto Photoshop and playing around with tone and exposure, and then adjusting the blending modes until the layers worked together and looked as one cohesive piece of work. This is the final outcome of this brief that shows the process in which I work as a designer. Going into this brief, I thought that the idea of a process model was going to have to be quite clean and structured very much like a flow diagram, but I think that by looking and re-evaluating that first design, I have been able to show the true and realistic way in which I design and show who I really am as a person. I am quite clean when it comes to my environment in which I work, but my design space is so much chaos and it helps me to think and work as a designer and I truly think that this is the only way for me to work. I have been doing this process of working for a long time now and it has never let me down, so why fix something that isn’t even slightly broken.
LSJ DESIGNS 
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