It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be

With the PPRD hand in coming up I've been looking over my skills map from the beginning of the year to see which goals I have accomplished & which still need some work.

My Personal Goals were:

• Self confidence (especially public speaking)
• Organisation
• Time management
• Communication
• Concentration
• Leadership

I feel that I have definitely improved in a big way with several of these goals, especially organisation, time management & concentration. I feel that I've finally mastered the art of juggling several projects at once, & allocating them all time & attention. This came from the multiple projects within the VCC2 project, which I found a massive struggle at the time but taught me a lot about spreading my time over several different things simultaneously. Since then I've had to juggle live briefs, competitions, SBC2 & the course fundraiser, as well as beginning the Professional Project. I feel that I've handled the stress of this very well, much better than in VCC2. This in turn has increased my confidence, which also improved positively at the end of the SBC2 project as I gained an immense amount of satisfaction from seeing my website running smoothly up on the web. This also increased my confidence as I felt that I'd found an area of design to concentrate on & increase my expertise, something I hadn't had before. 

Despite this, I feel I still have a long way to go in terms of increasing my confidence. I have a bad habit of not believing in myself enough, lacking confidence & not valuing my own opinions as strongly as other peoples (I automatically expect them to know more about something than I do). This mindset is something I need to snap out of once & for all, as I feel it has held me back throughout the duration of this course. I recently read a book titled "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be" an inspirational book by Paul Arden, who works in the advertising industry. This book is full of inspirational & motivational nuggets, & has really inspired me to take control of my own destiny.

Technical Goals:

• Dreamweaver
• Illustrator
• Flash

When I filled out the Skills Map I had never experienced Dreamweaver & it was something I was really looking forward to learning. I was well aware by this point that the majority of graphic design jobs advertised in the North West seem to be looking for web designers, so if I wanted to live somewhere closer to my family than the South of England then it was definitely a good direction for me to head in. Fortunately I really enjoyed this unit, although frustrating at times I have never experienced as much satisfaction upon the completion of a project as I did when I finally got my website fully functioning & online. This has prompted me to focus my Professional Project on web based design (a web site & concept for an iPhone app). As for Illustrator, this was a program which for some reason I had struggled with last year, but I bought an Adobe Illustrator classroom in a book & concentrated on getting to grips with it. I am now fully competent using Illustrator, & used it for the majority of the design of my Communicating Ideas brief. I still feel that there's room for improvement, & I think it would be a good idea to buy the Photoshop Classroom in a Book to refine my skills in that program as well.

As for Adobe Flash, although I made a simple animation for the front page of my website which refreshed my memory of the program, I haven't gained any extra skills. This is something I should probably work on at some point (possibly over summer), & I also think it would be a good idea to learn how to build websites in Flash if I want to focus on web design in my future career.