A Myriad of Emotion

First week back after the half term and reading week, and what a week!

Monday morning involved each of us doing our presentations about our respective colours, and it was actually quite a pleasant morning. The presentations were one-on-one with Steve, and whilst not doing ours, we were able to sit in the refectory. This gave us time to get to know each other better, as well as offer each other support both prior to, and after, our presentations. It was also good to get to know the HNC student Mark better, as this was the first full day he's spent with us.

The presentation itself, as far as I am concerned, went quite well. I over-ran the time limit slightly, but not massively. I had been forced to amend my presentation on Saturday as when I practiced it, it was too long. Maybe I should have rehearsed it more after I had removed a couple of slides, but time restraints meant this wasn’t possible.

Monday afternoon, to describe it in a word, was ‘eventful’. Firstly we discussed in our new seminar groups what our feelings were towards the course after the first half term, before bringing this before the whole group. This was quite a useful exercise, and it brought to light a few interesting points. One of the main points was the ongoing issues around communication- in terms of email response times, the number of blog comments, etc. This remains an issue within the group, but hopefully it shouldn’t for long… the number of times it has been reinforced now makes me feel that soon it must be sorted!

After this we looked over a few general feedback points from the marking of the assignments. These were problems that recurred in a number of assignments. This, again, was beneficial, as it showed a number of specific details that need to be included within the assignment, that maybe I overlooked. It made me quite nervous, however, and the wait for the results seemed to last forever! Hopefully next time we will be able to get results earlier in the day.

Then, finally, we were onto the grades! This was the moment that we had all been patiently waiting for over the past few weeks. Thankfully, I passed. When hearing this I was briefly happy, but the mood in the room was sombre, and I quickly found my frame of mind was deteriorating. I guess with the combination of the earlier conversation about communication, and the number of referrals, it was hard for people to stay positive, even those who had passed.

Tuesday was a much more encouraging day for me, and the time at college definitely felt more comfortable. Throughout the morning we had a very interesting debate concerning the question ‘Are we Artists or Designers?’ I hadn’t really considered this before, and a massive amount of interesting and controversial points we made. I’m still trying to make up my mind on the differences, and I’m looking forward to exploring this more in the first essay for the new A4 assignment. One interesting article, entitled Art Vs Design, can be found at the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) website.

I spent the afternoon completing further research on the subject, as well as having a seminar group in which we looked over the new assignment sheets for both A3 and A4. Both the assignments look really interesting, especially the image manipulation stuff in A4. I’m really looking forward to getting into this and developing my skills in this area over the next few weeks.