This piece of writing is all about sharing my experiences of Core Concepts and my Graphic Design journey from the past 2 years studying with the OCA but also most importantly to reflect back on my learning, development and progress in my level 1 journey. This is the (lengthy!) original version of the script I used for my reflection video for my formal assessment of my work.

Two years ago I applied to study and design with the OCA. I was working 2 jobs at the time I applied; full time days and very late evenings. I lived alone, I was working non-stop, I had no money and I felt I had really messed my life up. I was working purely to survive. Sick and tired of hearing “I don’t know how you work 2 jobs!” and “You are wasting your talents” I decided my full time job as a Design Technology Technician was no longer enough to satisfy the creativity within. I wanted to achieve better. Spurred on by friends, family and encouraging colleagues I Sent the application off to study with the OCA. It is probably one of the bravest things I have done. It was spontaneous and I had no idea of what to expect from the course, I was worried I would fail and be kicked off the course, I was worried I would let people down and mostly I was worried that my lack of knowledge with Adobe software would hold me back.

I told myself one thing – You can’t grow in a comfort zone and that even if I passed my degree and it didn’t grant me an amazing job to go to at the end, I would just be glad that I owed it to myself to have a second chance with no regrets, no “what might have beens” and that I had the courage to learn, develop and achieve it. The luxury of having a portfolio of amazing work which I am proud of and have achieved all by myself matters most to me.

I had no idea of what I was doing when I started the course. I felt I had gone in way over my head. I found myself looking endlessly at other peoples learning blogs and comparing how much my design knowledge was lacking compared to all the amazing work I was seeing! There was one particular student whose work I was in awe at; I sat and studied his work to try and work out how he had created it and constantly beat myself up over the fact I would never be that good. I had no idea what hierarchy was, what a layout was? How on earth was space so important? – What does negative space even mean and why is it negative? Working to a grid..? What was that all about? How do you even know what kind of grid to create and how do you know when you are doing it right and how to create one? It just looked to me like a lot of lines randomly placed on a page! I came across David Carson’s work and was inspired by the fact he is so successful but never formally trained. Carson famously does not work a layout to a grid, which I massively approved of at the time- I had no knowledge of the grid! Little did I know back then that the grid would become my best friend by part 4 of Core Concepts and I would be willingly throwing myself at a Fibonacci grid!

At the time I started the course I even doubted myself creating sketchbooks; something I always thought I was strong at! I thought that I was doing it completely wrong! I was also massively confused at the difference between a learning log sketchbook and an online learning blog. I had no idea how to create my wordpress blog and it absolutely petrified me! I think it took me 3 months of sitting for hours on end to finally get Pink Angeleno or “Graphically Pink” as I called it back then up and running! I realised afterwards that there is an OCA template for beginners to make it easy! -Too late! I did however feel a sense of pride that I had created it entirely from scratch!

My first assignment although it excited me, scared me! The assignment was based upon “Who am i? – Introduce yourself!” At the time I did not honestly know! I felt completely lost and in a really vague stage in my life which is something I played on for my final designs! I therefore based that whole assignment on what I did know; my beliefs, my likes/dislikes and how I thought people perceived me! – (A whole lotta pink and blonde!) It was a very personal and raw assignment for me. It allowed me to express a lot of my vulnerability and feelings at the time in a creative outlet.  I clung onto that assignment for 6 months before I plucked up courage to facetime my tutor Bee Wiley. I think it took me even longer to pluck up the courage to submit it! I wanted to ask Bee in that first FaceTime if I had potential to be good and to move forward in my studies or whether I was wasting my own time. Her words still echo and stay with me: “Why have you waited this long to get in touch? You think you are behind everyone when actually they could all learn a lot from you!”  My confidence started to creep slowly back. My thorough and methodical research will always be my strongest point. For me I cannot design without firstly exhausting the research process. Research is the backbone of what is expected in a successful design. Without first knowing what or who we are designing for, we cannot design. Assignment 1 will always be a piece of work I am proud of, despite how now looking back I would change a lot of things. Again, Bee told me that I was developing in the practise of becoming a Graphic Designer by finding improvements in my work looking back at it. Perfectionism also slowed me down on this assignment; something I still fight with and have to work on daily. My time management was not good because I was constantly changing, adapting and improving my outcomes. Perfectionism is a double edged sword for me; it allows me to massively take pride in my work and develop ideas but it also eats massive chunks out of my time and deadlines.

By the end of Assignment 1 I had a much better knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator. I had become much more confident and created unknowingly from assignment 1 what is now my design brand – Pink Angeleno!  I also created it using Adobe software which is something I never thought I would be able to achieve or teach myself….BUT I still had a long way to go… At the time of completing assignment 1 I lacked the basic understanding of file formats and how to export files ready for print and I stayed up until 2am one morning frustratingly trying to understand why I was uploading a really low resolution Jpeg to my Instagram from my emails!  I had no idea of the 300 dpi recommended print resolution, I did not really know the difference between CMYK and RGB and when it came to presenting my work at the end of Assignment 1 I had no idea what a mock-up was! – I ended up visiting B&Q and collecting some really colour- clashing sample wallpaper to photograph my printed postcards on! Assignment 1 was a good starting point to build up my confidence and to welcome me back into studying. It was a good place to grow and develop from….

I feel like my biggest growing phase on my course was the stage between assignment 1 and the end of assignment 2. I really put a lot of time and effort into learning the basic principles of Graphic Design. I watched TED talks, I researched Designers, I read a lot of influential design books and I visited exhibitions and listened to podcasts. I joined Skillshare which is where I learned a lot of digital techniques and I found the courage to share what I had created online. After assignment 1 I decided to share my learning blog website (pinkangeleno.com) to the outside world for critique. It was a massive, nerve wracking, daunting step for me and it took me a while to hit that “share” button. I knew it was another fear I needed to overcome to develop in my learning experience. How could I learn and improve my work when I hide it away from the world? I followed this up with creating my Pink Angeleno Instagram account to share my content with other Graphic Designers and OCA Graphic Design students, to see what other students were producing and to be more social but most importantly to use it as an online portfolio to share my work. This has worked very well since. I have connected and made friends with a lot of OCA students and learned tips, tricks and useful digital processes from them.

There is one person though who I credit for most of my learning of Graphic design knowledge and that is Chris Do. Chris Do is an American Graphic Designer and teacher whose YouTube channel (The Futur) has been invaluable in my learning and development on my course.

One of my favourite pieces in my portfolio is the book cover design exercise from Part 2 of Core Concept; designing a series of covers for 3 HG Wells book titles. At this stage in the course I was still learning and grasping digital technology. I had ideas in my head of what I wanted my designs to look like but had no idea how to achieve that in digital. I had always produced traditional hand drawn designs which always seemed old fashioned and an outdated approach to design. It had become my personal style I wanted to push myself to find a way to keep my signature hand drawn look but bring it up to date in the modern digital age. I feel like this is what I managed to achieve with my finished book covers. I used a Skillshare class to help me achieve a modern duotone effect on all 3 of my covers to create a modern/classic look but in keeping with the old, traditional style of HG Wells. I also uploaded and shared my finished piece with the class on Skillshare which showed how much I had grown in confidence. I also started experimenting with layout, hierarchy and type legibility. I struggled with the legibility on the cover for “The Time Machine” as I chose a very pale yellow colour for the title. The yellow tied in best with the theme of the flowers and the aged look of the paper on the cover and I was torn between aesthetics and legibility.

At this stage I was trying to teach myself the basics of Typography. The only knowledge of typography I had at the time was that Helvetica was the choice of typeface for most designers. At the time though I didn’t really understand why? I struggled to come to terms with how a very plain and boring looking typeface was so relevant in design. I was starting to learn the basics of layouts, hierarchy and negative space. I also learned about the importance of contrast within a design; whether it be colour or in typography. Although I was still influenced by Carson; which would show in the exercise Photomontage where RayGun hugely inspired the end result.. I was now inspired by a new designer called Roy Cranston. His work encapsulates old design principles with new, modern approaches and he is very much inspired by Swiss Graphic Design. This was the first time I dipped my feet into Swiss Graphic Design and had heard about the International Swiss style. For the remainder of Core Concepts Swiss Graphic Design would be a massive influence in my work.

“Too much or not enough information” was the turning point and my biggest growth spurt. This was the exercise that really showed off all that I had learned so far with layout and hierarchy in particular and show how much I had developed. It was also a massive confidence leap in the fact I studied a massively controversial group for the design. I am very proud of this piece. I was still using traditional mixed media but manipulating it in digital by this stage. I was feeling very confident that I had a good digital understanding and I was developing as a designer by how I had the instinctive intuition to know instantly how best to design the hierarchy and layout. I had laid the foundation for the rest of my future exercises and assignments.

Part 3 of Core Concepts brought about Abstract Cities… This was the exercise that I seemed to hear the most about over student forums and group emails. Everyone seemed to hit a brick wall with it. It had got itself a name as “the infamous Abstract Cities”

Abstract Cities takes no prisoners; It took me 3 long months to conquer it – but conquer I believe I did!

The exercise had so much depth to it; Researching the countries, researching abstract art, researching existing travel guides, researching book design and the intensive sketchbook work from initial ideas right through to finished developed designs. The main objective of the brief was to understand what colours to use and how to use them in my designs. I started off with extensive research on each of the 10 cities; the culture, colours, landscapes, architecture, food, religion… most students work I had seen focussed around the architecture of the countries but I initially decided I wanted to take a different approach. I wanted the travel guides to be based around the colours, aromas, atmosphere and excitement around the food and drink of the countries. I sketched ideas, I problem solved until I was blue in the face; I could not seem to make the abstract blocks of food be representative and recognisable to its country. I could not make the subject of food work effectively with the abstract brief. I had never struggled for inspiration and ideas before but this exercise really pushed and challenged me. There were many times I felt I had hit a wall with it. Perseverance and hard work pays off though! -I ended up finally having to go down the route of architecture which again took weeks and weeks of problem solving. The abstract part of the brief was the hardest fight to battle. How to make a front cover represent a city and for something to be recognisable without actually showing the physical thing. How could I make the architecture look like the country it belongs to without making it look like the actual building itself? I decided to choose a recognisable building from each city and search for a clear photograph of it to draw from and to strip it down to its simplest most recognisable form. I wanted clean, functional, recognisable, simplistic designs for all of my 10 covers. By this exercise I had learned the importance of negative space and how it is very much 50% of the design itself. This was really prominent in this exercise. I was also starting to show further advanced knowledge and experimentation in typography and hierarchy. Once I had conquered and successfully completed one design, the 9 others swiftly followed suit. My perfectionism massively came out to play in this exercise; I desperately wanted to push myself to come up with the best possible outcomes. I would come up with an idea, I would design, develop and exhaust it but then still try and find a better outcome. In industry this is something that would not be factored into strict deadlines with time constrictions so is something that I need to still work on.

By this stage of my studies I was massively behind my time schedule, I was working full time but also every night in my second evening job. My evening job kept me in my house and paying my bills so there was no way I could afford to give it up but it was frustrating me at the sacrifice I was having to make with my course to try and catch myself up. I was working at full steam and to full capacity.

Part 4 of the course focussed around Typography. This is the area which I have always considered my weakest, I was very apprehensive and nervous for it. I had never been able to get my head around how typography could be used creatively in design. To me type had always been very black and white, rigid, inexpressive and emotionless. Type was just type, I never really knew a way to make it look good as part of a design. A memory kept coming back to me of a critique in my old university days where one of the lecturers ridiculed me in front of everyone suggesting the “typography police” needed to be called for one of my designs. That old fear of failure and creating seemingly criminal work kept alarming in my head. I however had grown, I was becoming a completely different designer to the one I had been before and through shear dread I still confidently dived straight into Typography and I didn’t disappoint myself. I thought Typography would be my weakest link but it actually turned out to be one of my finest hours on this course in my opinion. It is the area I enjoyed the most and it is the subject that I learned and developed the most. It was also the moment of my studies where I was financially able to give up my second job. I still had part 5 of Core Concepts to complete in a months’ time before my course deadline was up and the panic was well and truly on. I knew that it would not be easy to try and get it all completed and finished to a good standard.

The anatomy of type was fascinating and really helped me to understand how much work, time and design goes into making typefaces. The once “black and white, rigid, inexpressive, emotionless” type was slowly starting to gain colour and a personality. I learned how type affects our moods and emotions, I learned how type reflects the subject it is talking about. I researched and learned extensively about the typographers; and not because I had to but because I wanted to.  Knowing the history and the stories behind the designers really helped create a narrative for who and what the typeface was designed for.

My favourite exercise in part 4 and one of my favourite pieces to date is “If the face fits” where I created a type specimen book for typefaces that I could use within my future work. I had a newfound love for typography and I had already discovered that I liked book design so this was an exercise that I threw myself into quite confidently. My dislike and lack of understanding of the grid system from the beginning of my course had totally gone by this stage of my studies. I had an understanding now of hierarchy and the importance of the placement of elements on a design. I was now aware of how to manipulate the characteristics on a layout. Where I placed elements on my pages influenced how well the design naturally flowed. I looked into this design principle more by experimenting with a Fibonacci grid. In keeping with the Swiss typography, this grid is very mathematical and allows visual appealing proportions. It allows harmony to the overall design. I used this grid layout for all of the pages of my type specimen book.

From studying designers such as Roy Cranston I had become familiar with designers who had influenced his work such as Wolfgang (vine-gart) Weignart, Josef Muller Brockmann and Chris Ashworth. It was from these influences that I broadened my knowledge of Swiss typography and found a link between the strict, methodical, mathematical, “form follows function” ideals of Swiss typography from the 1950s/60s to the modern “Swiss grit” from the likes of Chris Ashworth that is very popular today. This exercise also allowed me to show experimentation in mixed media within my typography and then to further edit and manipulate using digital software. “In the face fits” I chose a handful of popular Swiss sans-serif typefaces to study and design for, I was able to use my extensive knowledge of Swiss Typography to strongly influence my design ideas and development. From researching the designers and the function of the typefaces I was able to create a specimen book which reflected the typefaces themselves, the era of the typeface and the designers. As part of the exercise I also had to research and design for serif, script and decorative typefaces. This is something which once again pushed me out of my comfort zone. My knowledge up until that point was believing all great typography was purely Sans-serif and that fun, “gimmicky” typefaces were frowned upon. I used this to my advantage though by picking typefaces that didn’t take themselves too seriously and which I could create fun, quirky “tongue-in-cheek” designs for. It all worked out well and the final book in my proud opinion is a stunning collection of typography.

I departed part 4 with assignment 4. This was a chance for me to experiment further with layout, hierarchy and typography in an area which I enjoy. I was quite intimidated by this assignment though and the amount of work that I felt I needed to do for it in the very little time that I had. The assignment was to create a typeface for a magazine called “Type” and to then write an article for it drawing upon all of my knowledge of Typography. The idea of designing a typeface and all the work involved with designing one from scratch made me anxious. From the research I had done at the beginning of part 4 I knew how much research, work and time goes into designing a typeface. This was extensive work for such the limited time I had, (I had a month left on my course at this point).

I threw myself in to this assignment with a new found confidence from the successful completion of part 4 Typography. I spent a solid few days immersed in tracing paper, a box of pencils and many variations of sketches of my typeface I had designed. Botanical illustrations, photographs and colours influenced my typeface that would be called “Vine”. I watched a tutorial with Chris Do on how to create your typeface into a fully, working, downloadable typeface using software called Fontself. When I downloaded Vine onto my laptop and was able to use it as a working typeface I really felt like I had achieved something great. Although it is with its flaws, it is a great starting introduction and foundation for creating a typeface in the future.

I had 2 weeks to finish the last unit of my course. Working 2 jobs had finally caught up with me! I persevered with gritted teeth and pulled “all nighters” to complete the course. I honestly did not think I would make the deadline. I massively had to work on my perfectionism in this unit… when I designed an outcome that met the brief I simply had to stop; there was no time to strive for perfection and for further improvements or development. From practising this on all the briefs in the last unit I feel that moving forward in my degree I will be able to better manage my time and know that “perfect” is an unobtainable goal.

I am very proud of what I have achieved in Core Concepts. I started the course with only a basic understanding of Graphic Design from what I had learned in my studies in my earlier life and I have finished this course with extensive knowledge of the subject.

I have learned colour theory, I have a good knowledge of typography and further know the history and design principles behind typefaces and their typographers. I can now work a grid to a layout and negative space is my best friend! I have developed my use of textures, mixed media and collage.

Before I started Core Concepts, I would create something visually stimulating but have no regard as to whether the design was functional. What I know now is that design can be aesthetically pleasing but it must sell an idea to a client, it must communicate a message and it needs to be “user friendly”. I now understand “form follows function”. Design is as much psychology as what it is creativity… it is like being able to perform magic to an audience! It is learning human behaviour and communicating through it. I am looking forward to developing and progressing what I have learned in my next unit; Creative Book Design – an area in which I learned from Core Concepts that I am interested in and interested to pursue as a potential career option for the future.