education

11 Loop & Umbrellas

00:19.2 I came into graphic education… when I was seventeen… not really building to anything. And then building a little bit more as I began to understand more about the context of graphic design, the methodology behind it, the thinking behind it, more and more about graphic designers themselves and what they do. I had a better idea of context in terms of work that was going on in other institutions and in other practices. So that kind of varied quite steeply when I got into my second year of study. And then I did an internship in [another city]… over the summer between second year and third year. And that’s really when it went, in a very short space of time, up… And then I had a funny time in my practice about six months’ ago where I was involved in the branding of our degree show… the off shot of that wasn’t very positive and then your opinion of your own work went down. And then I got an internship within about a week and it went up again… trying to think about where it’s going next… that’s the difficult part. 02:48.6 I think it always… comes back to itself, so you’ve kind of got this kind of grand shape that’s kind of always going round and you’re always relating back… a constant circle… In a few years’ time… in terms of my aspirations, I want to either work abroad, work in London, work in Glasgow… so hopefully that will kind of bring my knowledge, my experience, my contacts up… further and further… moving gradually upwards, kind of learning new things… the uphill kind of struggle, which is the uphill movement of where things are going… Things kind of happen very, very suddenly. So like here, for example, you gain one piece of experience, you go somewhere, meet a certain person and it kind of skews up… in a very good way. 05:18.7 Achievement of ideas and knowledge up that axis… perhaps productive comes into it as well… things that you do through your practice… your knowledge… gradually growing over time.

07:30.8 I’ve dealt with my education since coming out of school in almost six-month segments… could be five months and a month of something else and then moving onto the next, so it’s very much in terms of semesters. I think the meaningful parts for me would be… the internships… Internship times are really valuable because… I think you learn so much in such a short period of time… especially when it’s your first internship you start to get such a better idea of…where you want to go with your practice in the future [and]… professional skills you learn a lot more of. It gives you just a clearer idea of the kind of work you love and the kind of work you want to aspire to… I was either the only intern or one of two interns. And the amount of time… they can invest in you, it’s great [and]… you don’t have to tick boxes in an internship, which I think is great. In uni, you have to tick boxes… You can focus on making the work as successful as possible, rather than on particularly showing your process or showing research and just ticking boxes… You’ve got a surge of kind of achievements, ideas, knowledge, productivity because you’re squeezing so much into such a small amount of time… [and] that kind of surge… make[s] you feel good… On an internship you go in, you do your work and then you come out again… and you’re constantly part of that process, which is really, really helpful.

14:25.4 Right now in the start of [final] year, I’ve come out of an internship… the lines of sort of beginning to blur a little bit… into this mush where you just don’t know where you’re going and what you’re doing. 34:56.4 When you’re at school… you’ve got this kind of brick wall… you don’t know what your ideas are doing… [but design education was] like a sort of wrecking ball… a complete sort of removal of what happened before you were seventeen. 38:51.6 For me moving forward, I think it’s not so much a brick wall but… a cloud of ideas and it’s this kind of idea of constantly moving… and the cloud starts to… begin it’s journey Things change very, very quickly… the… seventeen years of my life didn’t really change that much. And then things will change every five months, ten months. And sometimes… your cloud can be a sort of a cloud that doesn’t really know where it’s going. And sometimes it’ll clear up and you get a kind of better picture of what’s happening… And sometimes it can be kind of dark and dense and…pretty unnerving. 42:14.2 So sometimes it rains and sometimes we need an umbrella. So on this journey, kind of where we are now… is umbrella time… in a very real way, doing work, forming relationships, doing what you need to do… Your life going on around about you will always change. You can’t help that. But you can deal with… whether or not you’ve got a rain jacket.