Music

Over the past few weeks I have been pestering Craig Oldham to take a look at my work and was pretty chuffed when he invited me to Music to have a look at my portfolio. Again I was pretty nervous about going as I regard the work both Music and Craig have done to be pretty amazing! Because Craig is pretty much the easiest person to get on with we had a decent chat about what I had been up to, where about I was up to in the course which was good, he is familiar with the college and has seen many previous students from years above which was a talking point when we spoke about a few projects. I began talking through my projects and we stopped to chat about the various ideas and design decisions etc. He picked out the Helvetica brief and Pasta festival from the PDF I sent him as the reason why he'd asked me to come in and spoke highly of the decisions i had made when creating the Helvetica Neue spread, saying I had really captured the typeface at its strengths with the grid, colour, layout etc. We skimmed past the T-shirt designs and he later said they don't say alot about me as a designer and if I'm honest I struggle talking about them as enthusiastically as other projects so i think I will probably take them out! A new addition to my portfolio is the V&A end sting (well the story board and flick book) Craig seemed to enjoy playing with the flicker book and said it was nice to have in my portfolio, We spoke at length about the photography project and the 'unfolding' idea, I realised I had put the wrong image of one of the leaflets in (major foepar) but he like the idea of folding something back to reveal information and we talked about other ways to push the idea such as making the poster interactive or looking at other things that naturally fold in the environment! He liked the specimen sheet and said although it didn't say anything personal about me as a designer that the typeface was interesting and the choice of colours and layout brought the best out of the type. We had abit of a chat about the Door(way) brief and he really liked the attention to detail and the photographs of the box and said visually it looked great. He was abit wary of its relevance in my portfolio from a graphic point of view. The Pasta festival was a great opportunity to get some advice in where to direct the project, we spoke about how it could work in a graphic sense but then also how to give it an organic feel. He suggested strongly that i end the portfolio with that project as it is a great talking point as it is an ongoing project. He suggested removing the plate from the poster and just having the spaghetti river shape to exist on its own to really engage its audience and making them stop and think. He thought it was best not to over complicate the logo and thought removing the circle and shape of the river all together was the best solution and to just have the logo as just type. I liked the idea of simplifying the poster to force the audience to think more about it! The final piece i showed him was the Water brief which he really liked and was interested to know about how i had reached the final outcome. we also spoke about other ways to develop the project and other suggestions how to show the contrast in the opinions from each society, he thought the nature of the brief had restricted me in the length i could go with the final piece.

A few things he said as an overall was that the portfolio was presented well and that having ideas and being able to communicate them was the most important thing they look for, both of which he felt i could do. He picked up on a few things like the boarder around the story board but pointed out that niggling at them meant he had little other complaints with the work which was great. he said if anything i had a few too many projects in the portfolio which was always better than having too little! we spoke about the ones worth getting rid of and at the end said he would see how much work they have on over the summer and try and get me in the studio, which is amazing. Overall the place was great, the studio is very creative. i spent a few moments looking through their book they have made called "Stuff we really like" which had a bunch of stuff in it that i really liked! Craig was great and it was brilliant to hear his thoughts on my work!