Final Statement

This year has been one hell of a learning curve for me, it has exploited my strengths and weakness' allowing me to grow as a designer and photographer, it has been a rollercoaster of a year with a starting place of confusion with my projects and how to explain what I was searching for, I was stuck in a rut of I want to create but I don't know what. This made me look to where I would like to be and what I would like to do that I have never tried. So, I threw myself in the studio, just getting used to the environment and working with a model. This was a huge leap for me as I am so used to documentary photography with the subject being buildings or open spaces, but I fell in love with it. It enabled me to explore lighting and work a lot on my communication skills and being direct with a model. Whilst in graphic design I was able to just let loose and have fun, I've always loved fashion and looking at articles and magazines, finding new trends etc and this is what started my journey into editorial graphic design, I definitely found this part of my course the hardest as I was allowed the freedom to do whatever I wanted and I was so used to having some kind of boundaries.

Then in the end stretch of my degree the whole world has flipped upside down and I have had to adapt to a new way of working and creating from my little bedroom back home in Wigan, with no equipment apart from myself and my laptop. I feel that in the first half of the year I learned a lot more about photography and myself but whilst we're in isolation I have found myself learning more about typography and editorial design and how layouts work, photographs with text etc. But not only my technical skills I have learned a lot about time management and organisation, as much as I was managing my own time whilst at university it was a lot different as you could technically "go to work" meaning leaving the house and working from a different space, where as at home I am in my bedroom without a change of scenery, meaning that my time management is all off, unable to focus because at home there are a lot of distractions so I would then stop working. However, I have solved this an am able to separate my work space to my personal space allowing me to concentrate more when I am at my work space. As for the future, like I said in my opening statement I am still unsure of what discipline I would like to go into after graduation, but I know that if it was photography in a studio I would be 100% up for that because I enjoyed working in the studio so much during my final year.  Finding the confidence in myself and work this year is probably the biggest thing I am taking away from my final year because if you don't have confidence in yourself how are you going to put work out there.