Evaluation of Unit X

With the last final hand in looming, I feel happy to have achieved so much in the past few months. My practice has advanced greatly, and I feel ready for the future. Unit X has enabled me to complete the aims I set myself at the end of the Practice unit, these were to develop my practice whilst still being experimental, enhance my online presence and build both an online and physical portfolio to a professional standard, maintain and build new networks, and work on a collaborative project. I feel that I have achieved these aims to a high standard whilst managing my time well. In the last couple of weeks before the assessment, I need to finish my final samples, check my portfolio has been conducted to a professional standard, and make certain I have fulfilled the learning outcomes for this unit.

I feel that I now know who I am as a designer. There is a part of me, which continues to hold a love of embroidery, and beading and heavily embellished fabrics, with the most intricate of details. This laborious work is something I would like to continue from time to time, it is refreshing to combine the two ways in which I work; combining my heavily woven bright chaotic samples with my profoundly time consuming and intricate bead work. For my final few woven designs for the Manchester School of Art Degree show and New Designers, I intend to fuse these ways of working to portray my working style and myself. I now know, that as a designer I always want to work with sampling. I enjoy being able to produce a design, appreciate my newly created fabric, and then move on to the next idea relatively quickly. I feel that this is a good way to work, as if I am ever to sell my work, I will constantly need to be ready to make new fabric designs.  I have learnt the importance of making each sample different; samples too similar to one another wouldn’t sell in the real world. In the future I need to continue to focus on creating an array of samples, ranging from the simplistic and effective to the more strenuous attention to detail.

Research has been and will continue to be invaluable to my practice. It is important to be aware of the work others are producing around me. It has also been extremely useful in order to help me build my work to the same professional standard as designers working in the same direction and has enabled me to advertise my work in the correct manner (Maja Johansson, Georgia Fisher etc.)

The way I have directed my practice this year has meant that I am confident that I have a breadth of work with different styles to show, different techniques and strengths. I have also worked towards several different contexts, showing my versatility as a designer. Through my interviews so far for internships, it has become apparent to me that I must never stop working with colour, as this is what I have been told is one of my major strengths.

In the final weeks before the assessment, I am now focusing on preparing my work to its most professional level, through my physical portfolio, online presence and creating business cards to allow people to access my work, all of which will be crucial to making connections and networking through New Designers and the MSA Degree show, as well as the foreseeable future as a post graduate. I am extremely excited to have my finished portfolio, and to see the outcome of the collaborative photo-shoot, I feel it will be an excellent way to summarise our collaborative project, particularly as the samples have been extremely time consuming, and they deserve to be shown appropriately and professionally.