Presentation, Pie, and the Sculpture Park

The day of the presentations had arrived, after a 2 weeks of holiday and self study. I did not feel awfully well this morning, but soldiered on regardless. I felt less nervous about this presentation, and I feel that as I do more my confidence grows.

This confidence came from having reliable research which I gained from getting the The Stratocaster Chronicles: Celebrating 50 Years of the Fender Strat book, which contained a lot of detail about how the Strat became so popular. I focused on how the product itself became an icon through its design, and I’ve now become aware about how much the small details count – something which I hope to emulate on the course.

My presentation was pretty well timed – I went with the principle of making 1 slide for every 30 seconds, plus a start and end slide which would only be on screen for a couple of seconds. I think I covered all the bases, as I talked about how the Stratocaster has affected our culture, as well as foreign cultures and what features set it apart from the competition.

In the afternoon we went on a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is one of my favourite places to visit, not only because they sell Samuel Smiths and Ossett Brewery’s finest ales, but because of the rich natural environment.

After a lovely steak and potato pie (made with Ossett Brewery’s Treacle Stout) Chris T and I wandered around the park looking at the exhibits and taking many pictures of anything which caught our eyes. I found that at this time of year there were many beautiful colours in the trees, and many textures on the bark. I’m hoping that these will come in useful when putting together creative work for the new assignment, and I will continue to use photography as part of the process. Some pictures from today are posted below.
For my creative process for this assignment I am going to use many other different types of media, including collage materials, paints, pastels (oil and chalk) as well as pencils and paper. This should give me plenty of ideas to work from, but I am expecting that turning my creative work into a commercial product will be very tough. I would think that the reverse creative process may be a good way to work with artistic clients, as they could produce documents such as ideas boards which could then be converted into a final product.

After returning from our trip out, we were told our grades for the CSS Beauty assignment. I have received a merit for this assignment, which means I have already filled half my quota for my goal of getting 4 merits in this final year. Apparently I just missed out on a distinction which is a bit disappointing, but I was only aiming for a merit anyway. I think having the dreaded man flu the day before hand in may have had an effect, but that’s life. My official assignment feedback will be next week, which I am looking forward to.

I recently purchased a book called Fingerprint: The art of using handmade elements in graphic design. This book has shown me that you can combine graphic design with traditional print techniques. OpenType fonts look very interesting, as you can randomise characters within a font library to generate hand written looking type.

I have also purchased Caffine for the Creative Mind which I am hoping will give me some ideas on how to get my creative juices flowing for this assignment. It is yet to arrive, but the synopsis looks promising.