Where I am now

After only two months of being on the course (which actually feels like two weeks, it has gone by so fast) I feel as if I have learnt a lot and surprise myself when I can remember the answers to questions I thought I would never know. It is not easy to say exactly where I am as a designer, as I am just starting out, but I can say I am thoroughly enjoying the learning process.

This is the hardest, fastest paced environment I have ever been in and I am growing to love it. At times, when the work seems to be piling up or I get a new assignment, I do think the world will end because I don’t know where to start. But once I begin (and have calmed down), I feel myself easing into it and realise it is not bad at all.

I have had to organise myself so much I feel as if every hour of each day has been accounted for, and I quite like the structure of it all. Self study has been the hardest thing for me to grasp, but I am getting the hang of it, setting myself two days of the week to sit down and concentrate on work is becoming part of my normal routine now. Distractions are becoming annoyances and I am finding myself wanting to stay away from them.

We have been given two new assignments to work on; Interface Design and Typography. Having to learn 54 typefaces is a daunting task. However now I find myself intrigued by posters in shop windows and stand for a while until I have an idea of which typeface it is, then rush home to look it up and find out if I was correct or not.

The Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire was very accurate, I already had a guess at what I thought I would be, and that guess turned out to be correct. I am, as I’m very sure all of my fellow classmates could have guessed, an activist. I had a low preference as a pragmatist, a moderate preference for reflector, a strong preference for theorist and a very strong preference for activist. As an activist, this means that I will learn most easily from activities where new experiences and opportunities are there for me to learn from, there is excitement, things chop and change all the time and I am allowed to learn with other people so I can bounce ideas off them and problem solve with them.

Some styles of learning that we have in the classroom, such as lectures, are supposed to be very hard for me to learn from. But so far, I have found that I have been just fine taking notes and understanding what I am being taught. So maybe I am not all activist and another preference shines through once in a while.

After reading through The Sector Skills Council for Creative Media, it shows what is required of us to be successful in the world, and it is unreal the amount that we will have to learn to get to that point. It is, to say the least, a little scary. I find it very helpful, as it goes into so much detail about what we need to know, be aware of and need to do. It is quite obvious through reading this that I have a long way to go.

We were asked to read an article by Andy Rutledge, titled The Employable Web Designer. Whilst reading the article, all I could think of was how useful the information was, and how knowledgeable he is about this world I am trying to enter. He is a very opinionated man, and I found his list of skills needed to, in his opinion, become employable, very helpful indeed. Some of the skills mentioned in the article I had perhaps overlooked, thinking that there is no way I’d ever need them, such as a basic understanding of human behaviour. I could not get my head around why I may need this skill, but thinking about it afterwards, it becomes apparent that all the skills in his list are ones I will definitely need to posses.

Overall, I know I have a long way to go. The amount I need to learn in this short amount of time is unbelievable, but I’m sure with self-discipline and organisational skills that keep getting better, I’ll be fine.