- Hey friends, today I'm kicking off a new series
on this channel where I'm gonna be showing you
the projects that I worked on throughout design school.
Think it's always fun to look back at work
you've done in the past, and think about
how far you've come since then, what you've learned.
And I thought for design school projects in particular,
it would be really interesting for you,
for me to go through them, and show you
what the projects were that were part of my degree
and also for me to tell you what I would do differently now
that I've had eight years of industry experience,
looking back on this work.
Personally I love watching videos
of people walking through projects from their design degree,
it's fun to see the similarities and the differences
between degrees all over the world.
So, for some some context, I studied a Bachelor of Design
at Massey University in Wellington,
and I majored in Visual Communication Design.
It was a four year degree, so this series
is gonna be four videos long,
one for each year of the degree,
and showing you the projects that I have saved,
I haven't saved all of them unfortunately
but there's a good amount here that
this is gonna be really fun to go through.
So, hope you will join me on this trip down memory lane,
let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
so the first year of the Massey design degree,
which I did in 2007, so this was quite a while ago,
keep that in mind, when we're looking back at my work.
For the first year, back when I studied,
it was a very general year,
where there were students
from all different design disciplines
'cause in my degree you could major in fashion design,
animation, or visual communication, like I did photography,
there was a bunch of different majors
all in together in classes.
And the core classes were called creative studio,
where we were given a brief and then we had to answer it
using varying different mediums,
and they were sort of more, like it felt quite fine artsy
to be honest.
It was more arty than it was, you know,
this is a client design brief that you're answering,
it was more about getting inspiration
and expressing yourself creatively, that sort of thing.
And I really struggled with it,
I wasn't in that zone going into university.
I'd been very by the book in high school.
You know, like what do I have to do to get a good grade,
that's what I'm gonna do, so this was a challenge for me.
Which I think was a good thing, I needed to go through it,
and I needed to kind of suck at it a little bit
in order to realize what it was gonna take
to be a creative professional.
So anyway, our first big project involved
going down to Cuba Street, which was one of the main streets
in Wellington, and back then anyway,
I haven't visited it for a while,
so I'm not sure if it still is, but it was kind of
an alternative cool zone I guess, bunch of different
weird shops, some that had been like,
you had institutions that had been forever,
and then some newer ones, that sort of thing,
and yeah, we just had to observe.
Take our sketch books and observe for a couple of sessions.
And that meant like sketching things around us,
making notes of stuff, just trying to get a feel
for the vibe of the street.
People got really into it, I remember,
I have this vision in my head of this one student,
like literally picking up cigarette butts from the ground
and sticking them into their sketchbook,
which I thought was kinda gross.
But that was the sort of art school thing we were doing
at the time.
Once we'd done the sketches,
we then had to create sculptures based off of them,
and that's what I have some photos of to show you.
This first one, I'm pretty sure is actually
a representation of cigarette butts,
and like where they were on they ground.
I think I drew a little map in my sketchbook,
and then built this from it.
It's quite funny because this is actually something
that I still do today.
Not draw maps of cigarette butts,
but more create things, like visual representations of data.
I love patterns or designs to be informed
by a piece of data, and like this map
of where cigarette butts were, was a piece of data.
So it's interesting to me that I'm still
kind of doing that today.
Maybe in a little bit of a different way.
So this sculpture, well it had different heights to it,
there we go, I was trying to make it like 3D.
And I think these first ones
were kind of sculptural sketches,
so they weren't meant to look very good,
which is good 'cause they don't.
You were just kind of getting your ideas out there,
just like you would when you're sketching in a sketchbook.
This one I think was like the pathways we were walking maybe
I don't know.
This one here I think you can start to see
that I really struggled with the 3D aspect of sculpture.
This isn't something that I'd done before,
I had generally be doing design on a computer.
And so this more artsy thing was difficult for me
'cause yeah, this is quite a flat piece really,
even though the bottom part is 3D,
I just found it hard to think in 3D I guess.
And yeah, I was sticking with boxes,
I think I was inspired by the bricks.
I think that's what that is.
And then what this was too.
Cuba street had this big pedestrian zone,
with these brick patterns,
so I think I sketched a little of them in my sketchbook.
I don't know what the red and the black
was coming from in particular.
To be honest, it was probably just the color paper
that I had.
I remember a lot of students were at this stage
putting a lot more effort into their craft than I was.
They would, you can use a drill to straighten pieces of wire
and they were doing that.
But I dunno, I felt really out of place in the workshop,
and I didn't know what I was doing,
and I didn't ask for help.
And so, I ended up with pieces that looked like this.
So let that be a lesson to you.
I feel like I was starting to be onto something here.
Like, these overlapping shapes and things,
but I think that I didn't do a good job
of explaining my inspiration to my tutor
and so, I didn't, I dunno.
It felt like an accident where I was getting to,
even though it kinda was, I dunno.
So I was pushing this idea of overlapping shapes,
and I had these boxes if you can see through here,
I'm like pointing at the screen,
like you can see what I'm pointing at.
How you can see like this pattern of bricks
and then you see through to the other pattern of bricks.
Which is kind of a cool idea, they make some cool shapes.
But my problem was that I didn't have the meaning behind it.
And also this was way too literal,
I was using sandpaper and brick colors.
So I was going with this overlapping idea
and then I think we're gonna get through,
oh that's kinda cool, the shadows.
This was the idea I kind of ended up sticking with,
this transparent paper with shapes on them.
And like looking through the shapes.
And my final piece was this.
Yeah, this is literally what I handed in as my final piece.
Oh gosh, I struggled so much with craft as part of this.
I couldn't get it to be neat,
I think I wasn't having a lot of patience with it.
I probably didn't allow myself enough time to work with it
and make it neat.
So, it just ended up a mess.
And I remember being frustrated by this project in general
'cause I was like, this isn't what I wanna be doing
with my career, I don't wanna be making sculptures,
so why am I having to do this?
And I was just, I think, on the defensive
and wasn't giving the space to learn and be inspired
by the brief.
So yeah, I ended up with this as my final piece
for the project, like I said, I didn't get a good mark,
I think it was maybe it was a B, I dunno,
which was bad for me, 'cause I was like A student
up until then.
The next project for this class was a self portrait one.
Where it wasn't just drawing ourselves,
it was like expressing our identity through things.
And I can't remember which one of these things came first.
But I was really into music basically,
you will see there's also trends throughout all
of my design projects, I tried to bring music in
as much as possible.
I still love music a lot, I've just like,
gotta know the having it to be involved in everything.
And one thing that I found was these mixed tapes
that I made, in high school.
Yeah, I always loved to record songs off the radio.
And have them, these little mix tapes for myself.
So I took a bunch of pictures of these,
as like my inspiration materials I suppose.
And then we just had to make stuff
and keep making things and trying things out.
One thing was this little silver cassette tape,
which actually was meant be like a platinum record.
I did these surveys.
(laughs) this is so emo.
Where I got my friends to answer questions about me.
Like my favorite meal, what have I got here,
my family members names,
what appliance could I not live without.
My phone was apparently the right answer, or my iPod.
Uh, yeah.
And then this incredibly deep statement
if no one knows the real me, wow.
Oh this was a fun one where I basically,
I put paper, this was such design school thing to do,
put paper all over this hallway in our flat,
and then I played a song and I was just like,
feeling the music through me and writing as the song went.
Again, terrifying.
Yeah, I'm glad that is not what I ended up in.
Oh, look, there's little emo me.
Okay, let's stop looking at those ones for now.
I made a mixed CD, instead of mixed tape I guess.
Yeah, I don't know, there wasn't a deeper meaning behind it
and I'm not sure what the point of this was
other than to just be like, "Oh there's some music
"that means something to me."
and I'm gonna put my iPod on it
'cause that's how I listen to music, I don't know.
I remember my tutor really liking the photos that I had
of those mixed tapes and pushing me
to go down that direction,
saying, "There's something here, these are such
"innocent little things these tapes you've made for yourself
"recording from the radio."
but then there's the whole music piracy thing
and how that's illegal and what do you think about that,
and maybe that's the direction you should go down.
And so what I ended up with was kind of thinking
oh maybe it's a campaign about home taping being illegal.
And I did this crime scene,
where they have like little evidence markers.
And, wow, there's some great photos dropping here.
I mean that's the problem, I think is
that it didn't really comment on anything,
evidence bags with the tapes inside them.
I definitely didn't push this far enough.
I can see the idea is there, it's just,
I was hurrying to make a thing,
you know, I wanted to get a thing made,
teacher said piracy, so I was like,
"Okay, we're gonna make it about piracy."
and I don't think that I dug into it enough by myself.
So what I ended up with for this project
was the series of posters about mix tapes being illegal.
Yeah, not great.
I remember one other students project
for this self portrait assignment was,
they had this mural on the wall,
and it was a pixel art of themselves,
but it was made with coffee filters that had been stained
with coffee, you know, varying shades of brown,
which looked really cool.
And yeah, I think again in this, my level of craft
and skill just wasn't matching up with the idea
and also I wasn't pushing the idea far enough.
Let's move on to semester two, shall we?
So for semester two we had Creative studio two,
so it was another round of that general more artsy class.
For this project, I remember we got given a setting,
I remember some people had bus, or a park,
and I had a waiting room, was the thing I was given.
So just like when we were told task to go down
to Cuba Street and draw and get inspired,
it was kind of like, go visit some waiting rooms
and think about that, and that's your inspiration
for what you're gonna make in this project.
Very general, I know.
The main thing I remember making,
was this game here.
It was called the waiting game,
and it was about the unspoken rules in a waiting room
that you don't enter a waiting room
and sit directly down next to another person
waiting there if there's other chairs available,
you're always gonna leave a gap of one,
it's kind of like the unspoken rule.
And so it was this game of you follow down the pathway,
and there were these little cards inside.
Yeah, this sort of instructed you on what your next turn was
and that sort of thing.
Then I had also put in this buzzer in one,
so if you sat down on the wrong seat, it went beep.
I remember being really proud of getting that
to actually work.
And then I don't remember why this was a part of it,
but I remember we also learned about book binding
as part of this project and we were making books.
So I had done these black and white,
mostly it was spray paint a bit real paint I guess,
textural drawings I suppose.
Based on that inspiration of the waiting room.
Think this happy, shocked, excited, anxious
is like emotions you could be feeling in the waiting room,
I don't know.
Yeah, we did these big paintings
and then we had to cut them up, I'm remembering now,
and make them into pages of a book.
So I have here this book,
and I think it had to feel like a sequence,
the way you arranged it as I went through,
so this is some of my pages.
I don't think I have any pictures
of the thing altogether unfortunately.
But, yeah that was, you can see a little stack there.
That was that project.
I don't think I have all the work for it,
but that was, gives you the general idea
of what it was about, very arty and again,
not super graphic design related.
I apparently didn't save the work in this hard drive
of most of my electives that I had this year,
'cause as well as these two core classes,
we got to pick some other subjects we wanted to study.
I loved photography in high school,
and so I wanted to take photography class
in my first year of university as well.
And this was film photography, which was really fun,
so we'd go into the dark room
and actually produce our photos ourselves.
I found these two ballet dancers who were willing
to do a session and I could come in and take photos of them,
which was really fun.
And I was playing with slow shutter speed
to get this movement and stuff.
I really liked that photo.
Yeah, that was some cool stuff.
I don't really remember what the briefs were
for this bit.
I remember we had to do series for our second project.
And I think it had to be taken within a radius
of the university.
Something like that.
I found this stairwell that I loved,
and that as I was taking photos of
with short depth of field, I loved the light coming through,
and the textures.
I still really like this photo series to be honest.
Think it's really moody and cool and quite abstract.
Yeah, that was my goal was to make it really abstract
and to, so that maybe you, I don't know, see it as a set
and don't quite realize that it's stairs.
The different light and the patterns
and that sort of thing.
Yeah, I thought that was really cool,
and that they looked cool as set, let me,
there's one of them.
(clears throat)
I hung these up on my wall for ages afterwards
because I liked it so much.
But my tutor did not like this at all.
I don't know if it was because I didn't explain
it's some and deeper meaning behind or something like that
but yeah, I just remember her not being super supportive,
I didn't get a good grade.
And I remember there was other student in my class
who had done this series where he'd put this
little model thing onto a tree stump and taken photos of it,
and I just didn't get it.
I didn't think the pictures looked beautiful,
like something I'd wanna hang on my wall,
and I remember she was raving about his project,
and then, that's when I thought maybe I'm not gonna
do photography at university.
I don't get it, I don't like that sort of thing
that you apparently you have to do
to be good at it.
I like this sort of stuff, so I'm not gonna focus on it.
Again, like I said, I had that mindset of
I wanna get a good grade at all costs.
So these were probably some of the last film photographs
that I ever produced.
All right, that has been a look at my first year
of design school, and some of the work
that I produced during it.
Yeah, definitely nothing in there that is portfolio worthy,
but it's fun to look back on, and to remember
just how difficult that year was
to try and get my head around
being in this super artsy place
with all these artsy people.
Yeah, I hope you enjoyed looking through it,
and stay tuned for video number two
of my second year of university
when we do get more into graphic design work
coming up soon.
Thanks for watching, give a thumbs up if you enjoyed it,
and I will see you in the next one, bye.
(upbeat music)