Graphic Design 2.1: Professional Practice, Project 4: ‘Getting to Know You’ Exercise 2
Exercise 2: Design Training Plan
What you will be doing 10 years from now is largely determined by the choices you make today and each day that follows.
Start by reverse-planning your career goals. What will your title or achievements be? What will your professional work/portfolio look like? How did you achieve this position? What journey did you take to get there? What work did you create along the way?
Determine the end goal.
Divide the end goal into supporting goals.
Define targets for each supporting goal.
Detail the actions required to achieve each supporting goal.
Next, think about the daily, weekly, monthly or yearly steps you can take towards your design career goals. If your goal was to play professional tennis you would have a very tangible and specific training plan. For example you might get a coach and train every day, you might challenge yourself to play a new opponent every week and perhaps enter a tournament once every couple months. The steps to becoming a professional designer can be laid out in much the same way. Write these out and sort them, for example by frequency (how often each occurs) or by dependency (which step depends on another being completed).
Finally, design a timeline to illustrate the next ten years. The timeline can take any form – digital or analogue. For example, it can be a poster you will keep next to your desk that illustrates the design training plan from a single perspective, it can be a website that allows you to zoom in and out to various degrees of detail, or you can design a personal planner or diary that includes the key milestones for you to check off along the way.
Determine the end goal:
The specific end goal for me is ever changing but is based around running a design agency working on varied tasks such as illustration, branding and creative direction. The goal is to have an established personal brand with a varied portfolio of work. I aim to be working with clients I enjoy, creating content for them such as posters, illustrations etc for films, musicians, other creative fields and branding for new or start-up companies. Ideally I would like to have variability in tasks, briefs and clients allowing me to create varied work.
Divide the end goal into supporting goals:
2.1 Develop my design knowledge and skills across all areas of design, find a section to specialise in, develop a style and produce work to the highest level of quality
2.2 Develop a portfolio to communicate varied design skills, specialisation and expertise
2.3 Establish a personal and business brand to attract the clients I desire
2.4 Have a network of contacts within the industry of freelance designers, creative directors and art directors
2.5 Become an expert with the specific business and operational skills related to the industry e.g. contracts, timelines for project delivery etc
Define targets for each supporting goal:
2.1 Complete degree in graphic design, practise and develop skills in weaker areas, become familiar and confident with varied areas of design, define an area of specialisation and style, become expert in that area
2.2 Showcase a portfolio of varied work via a website and through social media posts showing different design skills, define a focus on a specialised area of design, constantly experiment and update portfolio with new work
2.3 Use social media, website, SEO and advertisements to develop a personal and business brand (establish business) promoting my work, give value and products to audience
2.4 Attend local and countrywide events to promote my design agency, network in person and via social media, create work with and for other designers developing relationships with various people with different skill sets.
2.5 Work with other designers and agencies developing knowledge of specific graphic design business industry, constantly evaluating workflow/productivity
Detail the actions required to achieve each supporting goal (10 year timeline):
2 Years: I will complete my Graphic Design degree within 2 years, alongside this I will develop my skills in weaker areas and gain as much knowledge of graphic design broadly as possible. In order to help define an area of design that I would like to specialise in, I will set monthly and weekly goals outside of my design degree, checking in monthly to see how I am progressing. I will choose a specific area to work on monthly e.g. Illustrator quick keys, Logo design, Magazine Illustration, Typography Design. Time is very limited, especially outside of completing work for my degree so short amounts of time daily will be allocated to working towards this goal.
Throughout this period I will create a website, develop a portfolio of work, including work completed for my degree and experimental work outside of my degree and update the website with the new work when I feel I should. I will upload work to social media and begin to develop a personal brand. I will use social media to reach out to other designers, comment on work and receive feedback thus developing a relationship with more established designers.
4 Years: I will be more competent in design and have a specialised area to work within. I will aim to work for local businesses/individuals whilst still developing my design skills and workflow. I will have established an audience via social media which helps to allow me to work with clients that I am interested in. I will have developed a strong portfolio of which I can add new client work to. I will attend design events and network with established designers and agencies, gaining further insight into their business operations.
6 Years: I will have developed my personal brand and be able to generate enough interest for constant design work opportunities. I will feel confident enough to reach out to larger brands and art directors, promoting my work to them and hopefully gaining experience or work from this. My portfolio will be more refined, with a specialisation and style that is more recognisable. I will develop and utilise any relationships I have within the industry, constantly reaching out to others to grow this network. I will constantly re-evaluate my skills and business.
8 Years: I will be confident and refined in my design practise and have worked with various clients across different industries. I will have a strong portfolio of work and personal/business brand. I will aim to work with clients I am interested in and with other designers/agencies. I will be very competent with my client process e.g onboarding, contracts, presentation skills.
10 Years: I will feel more expert within my field and enjoy working with varied clients on different projects. I will outsource design work for other designers allowing myself to work on areas I feel passionate about. I will have great, meaningful relationships with other designers who I can ask for help and feedback from. I will constantly update my portfolio with new and experimental work.
I continued to look through various types of design on Behance, collating more mood boards to reference when designing. I really liked the ‘thrown together’ style of work shown in figure 2 and 3.
I had decided to use a collage style to layout the information for my timeline, inspired by the use of bold lines and tactile elements from my research. As this timeline was for myself I used it as more of an opportunity to experiment.
Once I had fleshed out the information for my timeline, I began to look for inspiration for the design and style of it. As the timeline is for myself I wanted to experiment with a different style and layout that I found visually interesting. I went onto Behance and began looking around. I came across a magazine called ‘Oh Hai’ and collated a few designs that I liked from it into a mood board for reference. I made notes of the colours, compositions and typefaces used.
Despite these being booklets (aside from figure 3 showing a time line) and not being of timelines, I gathered a lot of inspiration on them for layouts. I began to sketch my ideas as a rough guide.
Using my rough sketches I developed a composition first using black/grey rectangles. I then developed a colour palette that I found visually interesting, including greys, browns and orange. Using various ripped paper textures I had previously created I added some ‘rip’ marks to the composition, along with imagery of a stopwatch developed using Midjourney and edited in Photoshop, this was a nod to this being a time line, spanning over 10 years. I also used a texture taken from a photo of a burnt cooking pan (disgusting, but interesting to use as a texture) and layered this over the centre rectangle in the design.
I broke down my key targets into sections:
Exploration
Development
Confidence
Refinement
Expertise
These sections represent where I hope to be with my design skills from years 1-10 broken down into 2 year segments. I split my detailed targets into bullet points and hand wrote them, scanned them in and arranged them onto the composition in Photoshop. I like the tactile appearance of the type and as this is for myself, again I took it as an opportunity to experiment visually.
Resources:
Figure 1: Behance (no date) Behance.net. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/26756299/Oh-Hai-Magazine?scid=social48057126&adbid=613467192323997696&adbpl=tw&adbpr=63788496& (Accessed: 12 April 2024).
Figure 2: Behance (no date) Behance.net. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/113128527/BASEMENT-EVERYTHINGBOXSET (Accessed: 12 April 2024).
Figure 3: Behance (no date ) Behance.net. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/20589883/Hacedores-del-Mundo-Lou-Reed (Accessed: 12 April 2024).
Figure 4: Stopwatch image (14/4/23) Mid Journey. Image created (14/4/24).
