When I look back over the last year (and a little bit!) of this Creative Book Course the one thing that I wish I could have managed better is time!! This year has been crazy busy in my personal life and I have really struggled to juggle it all! I have been renovating our house, planning our wedding which is in 3 months time, I have been designing and creating everything for the wedding, trying to stay fit and lose some lbs for my wedding dress! Working my full time job and then maintaining a social life throughout..I haven’t had the healthiest year, again, I put this down to my body running on stress and lack of sleep! I know a lot of my friends have children and are always joking that I don’t know how it feels to be busy but this course is full on when you have so much else to concentrate on also! I felt like I struggled more for time this time around more than Core Concepts but that was possibly because I lived alone then and I didn’t have the commitments and social life that I do now! My only regret with this is that this tail end of the course has been rushed slightly more than I would have liked it to have been but nonetheless I still try and put 90% of my effort in… I’d like to think even more.

Despite the time constraints and having to have an extension and then barely reaching the end, I have thoroughly enjoyed this course and I feel I have grown and developed from Core Concepts. I feel really apprehensive about putting my work forward for formal assessment as I don’t feel I have done as well as what I did for Core Concepts and I know I shall be very frustrated and disappointed with myself. Core Concepts I knocked out of the park despite everything I had against me at the time. I am always proud of the steps I have taken and for how far I have come since starting with the OCA. I even started applying for design jobs recently which is something I never had the courage to do before, I never felt I was good enough or up to scratch digitally. Everything considered though, I have reached the end and the work that I have achieved in this unit I am pleased with and I am proud of.

I have improved my skills using design software, my typography has improved and I have more knowledge in the subject, I had no idea really of the print process or creative process that happens in book publishing and I have learned much more about this. I have become more comfortable with using grid systems and creating layouts.

Part 1 – When I saw the assignment to create a zine I had no idea what a zine was and the idea of producing a WHOLE book scared the sh*t out of me! I was not confident in using the software efficiently yet, I had no idea what kind of content I needed to create, I was so far out of my depths. By the end of this assignment though I absolutely LOVED what I had produced and created! I did drag this assignment on though for much longer than I should have done – partly because I was frozen scared for a big part of it and secondly because everything I was creating I wanted to be perfect. Paginating the pages to print myself was a nightmare for this assignment and this followed me all the way throughout the course. Designing and making zines definitely interests me though! If I have any spare time at any point in the future I would love to make some zines for fun and try and take them to fairs and try my luck to see how well they do! I love that now looking back I have a stack in my living room of my printed zines that are so personal to me and my childhood and the books I read. I love how I now have this to look back on forever, it is like I have recorded history forever.. I even buried a copy in the new walls of our house before we plastered the stud walls! There was so much creative freedom with this assignment, although the brief was to create a zine based around influential books there were no constraints on the media we used, what content we included etc.. my creativity and imagination went wild with this assignment and I loved it!

Part 2 – Robinson Crusoe was my least favourite assignment in this course. I just felt that I couldn’t get it right! I jumped straight in designing for it without really sketching many initial ideas and it showed later on down the road where I ended up going back and completely reworking all three designs because I just was not happy with them. Even now I can’t sit back and feel like that was my best work. It didn’t help that I was far out of my depths with the story, I had no idea what the story of Robinson Crusoe was and had to do a lot of research before I could really sink my teeth into designing for it.

My tutors feedback has always been helpful and helps guide me to the right outcome and suggestions, there have been many times where she has suggested things I could have done differently and I have sat there and thought “…oh yeah!… why… didn’t… I… think… of that?” This was one of the reasons why I went back and realtered Robinson Crusoe completely! I have a lot of feedback to work on for all the units before my formal assessment of this course! There are a lot of suggestions that have given me a fresh new mind on an exercise or assignment and that I want to improve on.

Part 3 This was typography and grid based and even though I had experience of this topic in Core Concepts, this was on a higher level than I had gone into depth with before! I was a little bit scared to complete assignment 3 which was designing the books for the good and bad typography. I really enjoyed designing these, I have pinned these at the top of my Instagram because I am so pleased with how they turned out. This was a moment for me to reflect on because when I first started Core Concepts I would look at work like that and wonder how the hell I could ever create anything like it, I imagined my old self looking at them books and probably passing out at the fear of not being able to do it! This is growth! My only regret with that assignment is that stupidly I created the whole book in Photoshop and imported it over to InDesign which meant that the grids were not as accurate.

Part 4 was the altered book assignment and it was one of my least favourites.. not quite as much as Robinson Crusoe but it did throw me once again out of my comfort zone, I can’t say I didn’t still enjoy it in a weird way though. I have been so used to designing digitally that it threw me off having to get practical and sit surrounded by all messy materials! Again, I would have liked to have had more time to spend experimenting with even more mixed media and altering more pages than I did. I do like experimenting with different mixed media though, I would have perhaps preferred to create a digital book on mixed media; I could have done more with it – importing and scanning medias in and manipulating them digitally etc…

Part 5 was the book on typography, I really enjoyed this assignment even though I only had a 48 hour window to complete it! I cringe when I write that… time hasn’t been on my side. I do feel though for the limited timescale I had that I have managed to create something good. I am anxious of the outcome of it with my grading though, I am worried that I might have gone too far out of the box and am scared that OCA will see what I have done as not meeting the criteria. This is a risk I was willing to take though because I really believed in what I was creating and I feel that what I have come out with is a piece of history, culture and recordings of typography and art in an ever disappearing urban environment. I feel that the book will make people look for typography when they go out on the streets and make them more aware of their surroundings and taking in what they see. I reflect back on what I was like in assignment 1, scared to move and scared to make mistakes and spending ages constantly redoing over my work and this last assignment was the complete opposite, partly because it was taken out of my hands with the deadline looming but also because I feel I have grown and am learning that things do not have to be perfect, perfection does not exist.