It's Been A Long Ride.

Around about this time last year, I was almost ready to go to university and study Games Design. I was all set to go into what I thought was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Let's just say thank the heavens that I saw that poster for this course up at Wakefield College.

Like I said in my first ever post to this blog, web design has always been something that has interested me. I made my first website (I hand-coded it again in 2006 for a bit of practice) when I was about 15ish, and I loved the whole process. Ever since then I've been fascinated, but I never saw it as a valid career. Now I do, and it's essentially 8 months that's changed my whole idea and practically changed my whole life.

If there's one major thing that's changed in the last 8 months, it's been my outlook on my career path that's changed the most. In my first post I mentioned that it was important to me to advance both my journalistic skills and design skills alongside each other to allow me to be a more attractive offer to employers. The whole games journalism side of things has almost vanished now, mainly because I've been so wrapped up in design. When I first started the course it was clear to me that some people had a lot more experience at this design malarkey than me, so I set out to make sure I caught up. Since then I've been lapping up every aspect of design that I could, basically living, eating and breathing it. At the end of the day, if you're serious about going into web design it's pretty much the only way you'll gain any experience if you really enjoy every aspect of it.

When I do look back at my first week though, it's hard to believe how much I've changed since then. Our first assignment was to create a web plan and a screen design, and I almost burned out at the prospect of just doing that. I was so hopeless at time planning anything and even more poorly disciplined that I found it very difficult to organise myself properly. And that's even before I got to the screen design, which was awful. I made a pledge that my next design would be a lot better, and my time planning would improve. I think the main reason I produced the design that I did was because my idea generation skills were pretty poor to say the least, and I just wasn't being creative enough.

After what in my eyes was an atrocity of a first assignment, we started with two more. We had two assignments to plan over two days, with the first one being another web plan, and the second one being a series of portfolio pieces including two essays and two pieces of design. My time planning did go a lot better in these two assignments, partly because I made a pledge on my blog to improve the amount I did each week before it got too late.

My page design was a massive improvement over my original, which was something I was very glad of. My banners were the first banners I'd ever designed before as well, and I was happy with the finished product that I produced. Looking back now the web page design looks dated and a bit nasty, but that was my pagemaker document. When I did make it proper it looked almost exactly like the design I came up with, and I left it like that for a couple of weeks. There was something about it that I didn't like though, and when I made my final effort I really liked what I came up with, and I still think to this day it's a clean and pleasant looking site. The one thing I still wasn't happy with at the end of this assignment however was my timeplanning, and I once again endeavored to improve it by making my own timeplanning document.

The next two assignments we did was the building of the aforementioned site, and a series of timed tasks that tested our design skills. At this point, it was the most enjoyable assignment we'd done so far and I was determined yet again to improve my design skills a bit more. This was the first time also that I started being a bit more creative with my sketchbook ideas and I used some other idea generation techniques that I'd not tried before. They worked really well, and it was something that I intend to carry on improving on. The range of work that I produced I thought was once again better than any previous works, and I was happy with the final results once again. I think it was testament to my improved ideas generation that my designs were better, because it wasn't that I lacked technical skills it was that when it came to coming up with ideas I was lacking creativity. I think this assignment improved on that once again.

Our final assignment of the year - The Fax of Life - has undoubtedly gone more smoothly than any of my previous assignments, which has been testament to my much-improved time planning skills. I now no longer feel that it is a problem to accurately time plan things, and I feel that I know myself quite well as a worker and my pace sufficiently enough to time plan quite effectively. Creatively, this assignment has shown that this is another skill that I've improved a lot on. I believe that I've created a logo that's original and memorable, and once again that was testament to my improved design skills and ideas generation skills. I think my CD cover that I created has been my best piece of work I've ever created, and accurately shows just where I am about now with regards to my design skills. I also dabbled in photography for the CD cover, which is something that I've never done before.

So where does that leave me now?

To say I started the course with practically no experience designing anything, I think I've managed to make quite an improvement in 8 months. My time planning skills have lead to me being a lot more of a disciplined human being in general, and I also feel a lot more mature and clued-up to the design world. My ideas generation skills have improved a lot as well, and I think the only part of that I've left on the way-side and not improved as much as I would have liked is sticking in inspirational pieces of design. It's something that I've done in bursts instead of consistently. I do think I've done quite well on my sketchbook assignment though other than the inspirational work part of it.

So what's left to improve?

Everything. I'm far from the finished article, and it's arguable if I'll ever be. I don't think it's possible to ever stop learning new design techniques, so this is one part that I hope to keep improving on. If I keep a conscious eye in each design piece that I do on the course and make a conscious effort to improve on each new assignment, then I can't see this being too much of a problem. If I could continue to improve my design skills as much as I have in the first year of the second year then I would be extremely happy. And not just to the end of the course, all the way past the course too. To measure this, at the end of every assignment from now on I will assess whether I feel my design work has improved. I will look at the assignment before it, and make a qualitative statement as to whether I feel I have improved in my opinion.

Ideas generation. This is another area I want to improve on in the second year and over summer. Over summer I intend on still keeping a sketchbook to record any design I do, and also a second sketchbook to collect inspirational pieces of work. That way I'll be able to see a record of my continued improvement over summer. To improve this, I intend to take out some self-initiated design briefs, and I'll keep you updated on my progress over the summer. To summarise this down into a goal, my goal for next year will be to use at least three different ideas generation techniques in every assignment that requires creative work.

Presentation skills. Although I didn't mention this in the main part of my blog, I did feel that my presentation skills were somewhat lacking over the first year. I didn't do awfully, but this is something I desperately want to improve upon in the second year, before I get to my final end of year presentation. Hopefully the presentations next week will give me an indicator of what to expect. To assess whether I have achieved this goal, I will make a qualitative statement at the end of each presentation as to whether I feel I have improved over my last effort. This will be contrasted with previous presentations.

Time planning. I do feel that my skills have improved a lot over the year, but I still don't think they're perfect. I want to try and be a bit more precise with my time recording in the second year, and this is something I will be working on over summer to improve. To be able to assess whether I have achieved this, I will summarise this into a goal: To produce a working macro time planning document and to use this on a weekly basis. If I find that I am not using it on a weekly basis as a secondary document to my weekly time plans, then I have failed this goal. I do feel capable enough of being able to plan out 3 other people's work in the second year though...

Grades. I've missed out on the elusive Distinction grade in the first year, which I think was more or less unattainable for me in the first year anyway. I'm setting a goal to get a Disctinction, so here goes: To achieve at least one Distinction in Year 2.

These goals will be reviewed on a 2 monthly basis.

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