Exercise 5.5: Reflective practice

Begin by reflecting upon the sorts of projects, exercises and assignments you
have enjoyed most:
● Do you enjoy the creative freedom of working with your own text and images from scratch, or do you prefer working with text and images that are provided to you?
● Do you prefer working in a ‘hands-on’ way, physically manipulating paper and materials, or do you prefer working digitally, laying out the pages and page elements on-screen? Which of the subjects covered in this unit have interested and engaged you?
Below are some pointers of what has been covered in this unit, as a reminder. They are very broad areas, so as you’re reading through the list, reflect upon the more extensive content of each. Consider what aspects you enjoyed the most (and the least!) and make notes in your learning log.

• Contextualisation: Researching designs and designers
• Typography: Principles and experimentation
• Colour: Colour management and working with images
• Paper: Properties and qualities
• Printing and bookbinding: Processes – traditional, digital

Try to identify a specific topic within one of these subject areas that you are interested in and can look into with more detail. You might know immediately and instinctively what you want to pursue. You may want to know more about traditional methods of bookbinding, for example, or hand-making paper. You may be interested in the mathematical principles underpinning the Golden Mean and Fibonacci series, and how these principles apply to page layout. You may want to design your own typeface. You may want to extend and adapt one of the projects and exercises you’ve already undertaken on the course.
The focus of your interest may be quite specific. Identify it through this exercise by exploring each of your interests in turn and taking note of your resulting thoughts in your learning log.

Reflection on previous assignments

Based on my previous exercises and assignments, I enjoy working both digitally and hands-on way. I personally prefer to work with text and images from scratch so I have more flexibility on my design.

I enjoyed working on each previous exercise and assignment. I’ve learnt a lot through each of them, however my best favourite ones are:

Part 1: Your zine

The first assignment was my first zine and I used both physical a hands-on approach. Overall, I was pleased with the final design.

Part 2: Designing a cover

It was interesting that by keeping one element, same colour palette and typeface how many different designs with different layouts can be made. I really enjoyed this exercise as it was a way to experiment with different compositions and layouts.

Part 3: Experimental typography

This exercise really helped me to think about typography as an illustration. I decided to keep the design black and white and just concentrate on typography.

Part 4: Collating and binding

This exercise was one of my favourite exercises, since first I needed to design digitally then bind it myself. In this exercise, I thought about print process and binding in more depth.

Overall in this unit, I’ve learnt a lot about layout and print. I needed to do research for each exercise and assignment. I believe at this stage, I have a better understanding about typography, colour, different types of papers and print process. Hopefully, I would be able to use my knowledge in my last assignment.