Reflective Practice

A Reflection on Level 4

What I think went wrong: my struggles and difficulties of getting through first year.


From the start of level 4, I realised that I had a lot of learning to do if I wanted to succeed on the course and progress to level 5 comfortably. I was relatively new to the discipline and so every brief that was sent my way, I had to come up with a totally new way of working and thinking in order to approach it in an appropriate way.

The first major difficulty I had to overcome was time planning and management. This was something that I hadn't really had to deal with in the past apart from my foundation year. But even that didn't prepare me for the amount of things I had to juggle all at once. I was quickly overwhelmed and didn't see how I could get it all done in the time given. However, through PPP sessions and my own experiences, I slowly but surely found my own way of working that allowed me to complete all the tasks. This took time and a lot of the time I would rush tasks just to get them done which meant I didn't get as much from them as I could have. However, as time went on this happened less and less until I was getting a lot more out of tasks, briefs and sessions.

Another major difficulty I had last year was my lack of ability when it came to Adobe softwares. I hadn't had much experience at all and in some cases close to none. This meant that I took a lot longer to complete some tasks such as the font design brief. Through experience and practice, I started to formulate appropriate skills towards the end of the year but I was still slower than most and also had less skills and knowledge of the software and so was capable of less when it came to the final product. Despite this, it was a major learning curve for me that I benefitted hugely from and can now comfortably complete tasks on inDesign and Illustrator. 

As I hadn't practiced a lot of graphic design before I enrolled, the way I worked wasn't very suitable to the discipline. I hadn't used my mac book much in the past as I preferred to do things by hand. However, I came to realise that it would benefit my practice to get better at using my laptop. This ended up speeding up my learning hugely as I was able to complete tasks more confidently.