Rationale / Self Assessment

When asked to create a blog for this brief I was really pleased. I’d been meaning to start a blog ever since coming to university in 2007, as I knew it would be a good way to express myself and engage with and discuss matters of design, and perhaps even a useful tool to show potential employers. However, as with a lot of good intentions, my blog never really came to fruition. Once the university projects began I never seemed to have any time to actively write a blog as well, and it got pushed to the back of my mind. Which is why, when I received this brief, I was pleased to finally be forced to write one; without such motivation, my blog may never have began.

When writing my blog I found it hard to get started. Not just to start blogging in general, but to start each and every post; the first paragraph was always written and re-written several times over. Looking back over my posts now, I’m finding lots of elements that I’d like to re-write; certain phrases that seemed fine at the time but now seem somewhat cringeworthy, or arguments that could have been made stronger if I’d worded them a little differently. I never struggled to find topics to blog about, quite the opposite, I could never find enough time to blog about all the things I wanted to. The main problem I had was finding the right tone of voice. I wanted to write in a way that was interesting and entertaining, with some of my personality injected into my writing, but I also wanted it to sound professional. I took inspiration from newspapers such as The Times and The Guardian, in particular their weekday supplements, ‘Times 2’ and ‘G2’, which offer a more casual and entertaining style of journalism. I also took much inspiration from other blogs; since starting university I began reading numerous design blogs, and there are now around 30 which I actively follow. This is noticeable in many of my entries, where I have quoted from or referenced another blog or design website. In some cases, my posts have been a direct result of a post on someone else’s blog, where I have read something that I have found interesting, and wanted to investigate it for myself and add my own opinion on the subject. For example, my post ‘München 2018 and Other Olympic Logos’ was inspired by an article I read over at the ‘idsgn’ blog [http://www.idsgn.org], which I used as a basis for further discussion on Olympic logos.

As my blog is all about design, I felt it was important to make sure that my blog itself was nicely designed. I did not want to simply stick with one of the predetermined Blogger layouts that users can choose from, they’re overused and not at all interesting to look at. Surely it would be hypocritical to have a poorly designed design blog? Design is subjective of course, so what I consider a good piece of design, someone else may consider to be a bad design. I cannot therefore say for certain that my blog is well designed, but I’m pleased with it myself, and I hope that the design, as well as the writing, reflects some of my personality. I created the header for my blog using pen and paper for example, to reflect the fact that I like using traditional, craft based elements in my design work; I could easily have created the header on a computer, but I preferred to create it by hand and then photograph it.

The subjects that I have blogged about vary; if you look at the list of labels on the right hand side of my blog, you’ll notice there are 16 different categories. The categories with the most entries are graphic design which has 14, illustration which has eight, books with seven, advertising with five, and animation and film with four each. Most of these come as no surprise to me, as they reflect my interests and my passions within design, but the one that I didn’t expect to have written so much about was advertising. I think perhaps the reason for this is because advertising is all around us, and we see so much of it in our daily lives, that there’s always plenty of different campaigns, successful or otherwise, to blog about. The blog posts I enjoyed writing the most were the ones where I did a lot of research and really got stuck in to what I was investigating. The two which really stand out for me are ‘I Like Classical Music, Therefore I Hate Good Design’, and ‘Ikea Causes an Uproar’, and I think the reason they stick out is because I was discussing designs I considered to be bad rather than good. I found it somehow more satisfying and more worthwhile to discuss an element of design which is not working, and investigate how and why, rather than to simply point out a design that I do like. These posts follow a similar formula; I would investigate the topic thoroughly, synthesise my research, offer my own opinion, and then contrast this with the opinions of other designers. However, I found that I was so concerned with what I was writing that it often took me a whole day just to write one post, and it began taking up too much of my time. As a result, I had to intersperse my longer posts with some shorter ones, the formula for these being a little simpler; I would highlight a design, and then briefly discuss it’s good or bad points. However, these were less satisfying to write, and did not receive as much contribution and discussion from fellow students as my more investigative posts did.

Writing for my blog has thrown up many challenges, and made me stop and think about design in a way I would not have done before. Above all, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing every post, and I hope that my blog successfully informs, entertains and discusses different elements of design. In total, I have written 15,364 words on my blog, which makes for an average of 475 words per article. However, I still have countless things that I wish to blog about, so I will definitely be continuing my blog in the future for the sake of my own personal development and not just as part of a brief.