Thursday 22 April 2010

DESIGN INDUSTRY & PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

Today I have tasked myself with undertaking an experiment with 4 3rd year students on the BA in Graphic Design at The University of Salford.

The aim of the experiment is to gauge the effect technology has had on graphic designers and the thought processes.

I have devised the brief and a short questionnaire to hopefully answer or at least make it a little clearer as to what the outcome will be.

I have an hour to kill as I have just chosen my guinea pigs and I am waiting in the soft pod in the BA Art building as they are actually having a lecture at the moment.

I will update this post later today with some of the findings.

As Danny has already stated this is also my least favourite module (Design Industry & Professional Practice) and as such putting a slight twist on it has given the project a little more meaning and makes it more relevant to me. It is really interesting to see how students of today can adapt to different situations. When I first set out in the Graphic Design Industry I started work on a drawing board and it was only 12-18 months later that the mac was introduced as a tool to aid in the design process.

I remember, at least for the first 3 or 4 months just using the mac as a glorified typesetting machine, still using the drawing board, darkroom, pmt machine and CS10 as the main tools of my trade. It was only after experimenting with the mac and chatting with other designers that the penny eventually dropped and realised that you could do pretty much everything to compose an advert or printed piece of literature on it.

This brought me to the reasoning behind my question - does technology effect the way that designers (graphic) design and more importantly impact on the thought process. I often wonder if it is true that if a designer is not confident within a software package and it is the only tool available to them that they distort their design ideas to accommodate this fact?

I am really looking forward to seeing the results this afternoon.

































After collating all the information from this afternoons experiment and interviews I have now had a chance to post up 3 of the 4 results from the exercise. It was really interesting to look and read through the results. A really interesting issue was that one of the students had produced a really nice design on the computer and just as he was finishing it off his computer crashed and lost all the work he had done. Fortunately he had the idea of photographing the frozen screen image on his iphone before restarting the computer. I will post this design up as and when I receive it on the email.














































Richard Lewis - The student who's work was lost due to a computer crash sent me through his screen grabs last night. It is a shame that the designs where not fully presented as his logo identity looks really strong. One of the pitfalls of modern technology I suppose - If you don't save your work on a regular basis you can leave yourself open to hours of stress and heartache.





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