[PROFESSIONAL PROJECT BEGINS...]

Today we officially begun our Professional Projects. The unit that will either act as a portfolio piece to get us jobs if we decide not to do a third year, or the unit that will pretty much get us onto the third year.

Dan took the session, handing out booklets that he had made to help us prepare, and to start our initial brainstorming. The booklet had four main sections -
- What are your strengths/what learned?
- Preferences?
- Where do you want to be?
- What type of work do you want to produce?

I worked through these sections and it helped a lot. It made me see in more detail what I want to achieve, and opened me up to new possibilities that I may not have thought of otherwise.

I see myself as both a Graphic Designer and an Illustrator, and am looking to progress onto third year Graphics. Therefore I am needing to have mainly a graphic project, but I am still wanting to implement illustration in there somehow.

I felt that I was a bit of an all rounder when it came to strengths and weaknesses. I feel that my only weakness really was Flash animation. I believe my strengths include print (poster design, magazine layouts), branding, illustration, web, and theory.

Obviously it would be pretty much impossible to implement all these strengths into a project, so I am going to have to pick and choose. I feel that my real passion lies within print, typography and illustration, so I am going to have to think of something I can do with this. I also enjoy the theoretical side, so having a project that I can link in with my theory unit would be ideal.

Another factor to deciding what I want to do is going to be that I need to choose something that is going to keep me motivated over these next 12 weeks, and something that is actually going to take 12 weeks. I feel that if I combine my passion for design with another passion of mine I will achieve this. Better get thinking!