opinios

First Day Of Design School

I started my part-time Associate Diploma in Graphic Design tonight.

I have enrolled at a small design school in the city that offer evening classes (two nights a week for 2 years), to get some more guidance in the creative aspect of this whole design thing. I loved drawing as a kid, and have always sketched and drawn cartoons and tried to find the right medium to harness the artist within. After an extended period of allowing the right side of my brain to dominate, I think this might be it. Some of you might remember that this web site actually began as a result of being frustrated at wanting a creative outlet. So in a sense this web site was a step towards doing this course.

Not that I have any regrets mind you: my software developer's salary has enabled me to travel the world and do all sorts of things. But I am definitely excited about this.

I am feeling really positive about the course; there is a good mix of people (seven of us, I think I'm the oldest!) and the lecturer is a very enthusiastic, chatty, positive person with a ring through her nose and crazy hair. I think she'll be great, as her approach to learning is very much "we're all adults, we all learn stuff from each other, there will be things you can teach me and things you can teach each other". The whole evening was more of an informal chat and I can see it will be a very supportive environment.

Even though tonight was very much a meet-and-greet and administrivia session, she also gave us quite a few handouts to get us thinking about our first project which is related to typography: capturing different examples of type out there in the world and grouping them and presenting them on an A3 sheet. And the first brief which is a logo and brochure exercise for fictitious company. Straight into it!

She also encouraged us to start keeping a visual diary, which should be interesting - capturing images that we like (and ones we don't) from magazines, photographs, anywhere, to use as a reference for the future, to dissect and to help us develop our own style.

I'll try and capture as much of what we cover in class here as I can, including the images. I think it will be useful to look back on.