Uni Blog

Hi my names Jack, Im a 22 year old designer studying at QUT and Majoring in IVD. My passions lie within a broad spectrum of the creative field, including animation, film and most importantly music. This is my blog for DXB101

[jackmurraykib101]

#8 Changes in the self as a designer.

For this blog post I would like to point out that I am going to be addressing the changes in myself as a designer over a 3 year period from when I started IVD.

My first thought surrounding this question is that these days, I do know what I want to do with my life. I have figured it out! In a nutshell, I want to combine my burning passion for music, specifically music production, with my skills in design…

Think Audio-visual stage-design sort of stuff, 3D mapped on stage visualizations  built to be flexibly in sync with an audio output from the Dj banishing the distinguishable nature of light vs sound and instead packaging them both up into  a vivid sensory experience for the audience. What im talking about here is nothing new, well it is ‘new’ per-say, but its been done before, at least in one form or another… but this shit is the future, im telling you! As technological advances continue to provide us with stronger, faster, better tools, the possibility’s continue to extend. This, I think, is my dream job; travelling the world with the best producers and Dj’s and setting up mammoth stages that blow 400 thousand peoples minds at the same time.

Actually I lied, my dream job is being that producer travelling the world sharing his art with the world. I am more driven in music then anything else in my life and I truly believe I will make it one day if I keep this current level of commitment.. We’ll see.

(My production project supporting artwork: https://soundcloud.com/jackmurraymusic) 

In saying that I would also be more then happy doing sound design or writing soundtracks for films etc.

But, of course, how does this differ from when I first wrote my design identity in 2013?? Well my original identity statement reads:

“I am creative person who is passionate about digital design including film, motion graphics, print design and logo design.

I need to work on being able to adapt my design ability to better suit a clients brief and needs rather then becoming lost in my own ideas. I tend to find that if I approach a brief and solve the design soloution I become to involved with that idea and don’t brainstorm enough to try and find other soloutions to that problem.  

Something I haven’t properly considered is perhaps the importance of using and improving my illustration skills for initial ideation/brainstorming and client consulting.”  

Basically it still stands true however I don’t feel as if purely design is going to make me happy, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it and its great to have  as a ‘job’ prospect as I have already made some great money from my work across a variety of projects, but I know deep down that I want to translate my creativity over into the bridging realm of music production and live visuals as my lifes work, and no doubt many elements of my design talents will be evident through that. :)

[jackmurraykib101]

#7 Reflection on tutor feedback

Last week we were told to pair into groups of 4 or 5 and work on our major charrette. Given only 2 weeks for the task we launched straight into it and got started brainstorming ideas and a direction for addressing the brief; “Come up with a design solution to enrich and improve the first year experience in the Creative Industry Faculty (Choi, 2016)

Our first agreed upon idea was to design an app that would be fondly known as ‘your buddy in your pocket’ a sort of virtual guide to starting university, helping student find their way around uni and open their eyes to the facilitys and services offered at the uni.

At the halfway point of the assessment period we presented our idea to Alice. She gave some helpful feedback about our idea and how we could improve upon it to make it more relevant to the brief. Overall she was supportive of our idea and thought it had potencial, she informed us that we would need to prove some research surrounding ‘rewards systems’ in other platforms or apps to justify the probability of success for our idea. She told us about the Miitomo app and encouraged us to all download and play it over the weekend, which we did.

The tutor feedback session actually proved to be vitally important to the final product we delivered as we all found aspects of miitomo that we though necessary to implement into our app idea. One such idea was the seemingly unnecessary feature of being able to customize your avatar or ‘UniBuddy’ as it ended up being called. We found that this was a really engaging feature in Miitomo which otherwise would have been quite boring. Being able to heavily customize your little character is a lot of fun, and will contribute heavily to the apps success.

“User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave – and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.”

– Jesse James Garrett, User experience designer

[jackmurraykib101]

#6 Reflection & Evaluation: Minor Charrette

So we’ve just finished the mini charrette, thank god, that was intense!

We only had 2 and a half hours to resolve a brief, design mockups for our solution, shoot a 1 minute promotional video and a 5 minute presentation.

I was in a group with 4 others, and after some brief discussion we decided upon tackling the brief with a fairly literal approach. So the brief basically asked us to design a solution that would make it easier for first years to adjust in the post-acceptance letter, pre-oweek period. We decided that since no one has even had a chance to meet fellow students, tutors or course coo-ordinators, they really find themselves quiet stuck for help if they need it, they don’t even know who to ask… So essentially our pitch was to combine qut blackboard, qut virtual and student emails into one, easy to access site, while adding one additional aspect to the online QUT experience: class forums.

Yep so that is the crusk of our idea, auto-adding class forums for each student individually using student numbers and class registration data. So no need to sign up for anything, its already all there in front of you. This would allow students to ask questions to the class instead of just the tutor, as student will often be able to respond to a question faster then our busy tutors, and students are able to browse through previously asked questions which maximize the efficiency of communication.

The mini charrette was really good for getting the creative juices flowing in preparation for the major charrette. And I was able to bring in some points of inspiration to the table for the major charrette as a result of this exercise.

Some of the problematic areas surrounding the mini charrette were things like

Time management – Understanding thoroughly the time constraints at hand and being able to scale down the time needed for each task appropriately.

Task delegation; being able to divide the tasks up equally and have each team member execute the same standard of work as everyone else to make it a unified solution.

A democratic team leader, which doesn’t let the team stop moving along but also listens and considers everyones ideas fairly

I will keep everything I have learned from this weeks exercise into the main charrette assessment piece in a couple of weeks, and hopefully become a valuable asset to my team.

[jackmurraykib101]

#5 Group Ideation and Prototyping

This week we focussed on the design process and came up with definitions for the word “designer”. This is an interesting one because there are so so many things in our everyday world that you would class as ‘design’, and of course, many different types of people that you would or could call, a designer. 

Graphics designers, Industrial designers, architects, fashion designers, landscape architects, animators, game designers, filmographers, etc are some of the designers we have right here at QUT! Then theres sound designers, audio engineers, artists, town planners, interface designers, and so many more. My point here is that almost everything is design!! The table I’m sitting at right now while I write this was designed with the user in mind, thats why I bought it! It is at a good height for extended use, I can rest my forearms on the top while I type, and then underneath is a slide out draw where I have my keyboard and other instruments, with all their cables feeding out the back keeping everything super neat. I could keep listing things in my room that have been designed but i’m hoping I’ve got you thinking now and you’ll be able to see for yourself how everything is linked back to design.. Usually products that are shitty compared to their equivalent rivals are lacking in usability to some degree, or maybe they just don’t look as nice.. < still design. told ya ;)

“User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave – and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.”

– Jesse James Garrett, User experience designer

After walking around the city for an hour or so taking pictures of designed scenarios I realised how much our city has been designed for public use, its been designed just for us! I know that sounds stupid haha, its good thing its been designed that way because we’re the people that use it, but still, the average person doesn’t take notice of these things. I definitely hadn’t. 

Things like Queen Street mall (specifically the empty quadrangle at the top and Queen Street stage) have been built for our use, and to create an atmosphere and culture. You could even go as far as the landscape architects behind Queen Street mall have designed a mindset.. Think about it next time you walk down there, there’s a certain air that comes over me when I stroll down, soaking in the detail of the entire experience. It actually kind of makes me want to go buy some new things and spend money; and its SUPPOSED TOO!

Crazy eh? 

Anyway so in class I collated all of my images and extracted some common themes:

- Waiting/Resting (these two go hand-in-hand because people seemed to be waiting in some way or another; for a friend, lunch-break, for the bus, for their cigarette to finish etc. but all chose a relaxed position and took advantage of their environment to aid their comfort.. leaning, sitting etc. 

- Socializing; Definitely a common theme with probably half the population of people I witnessed walking in groups. The city definitely is a bit of a special outing especially for younger people or groups of young women presumably shopping

- Taking advantage of tech; It’s almost a straight cut, those people who are walking by themselves and not in a group, are entertaining themselves with their own personal soundtracks to life. I don’t blame them either, I had my beautiful ATM50X’s with me, never leave the house without them. Also people using self checkouts and atm’s presumably to save time and potentially even the social interaction of dealing with a real person and having to abide by the formalities that go with that behaviour. Of course you can choose not to abide but that usually results in insult to the other party and them basically thinking you’re a rude piece of shit. Anyone who’s worked in retail or hospitality knows what i’m talking about here. 

We then we’re handed a design brief that asked us how we could improve the orientation experience for first year students. Which we then refined to a more specific question: 

“How might QUT alter their distribution of information to make it less overwhelming for first-years during orientation week?”

We ended up deciding upon a forum-styled home page for a new online QUT Identity simply called QUT Online, It bundles up all the messy elements of the current online experience and displays them in a much more unified way, on one page. The forums addition will auto add you into your enrolled classes corresponding forums as well as giving you customised notifications for relevant information dates, and current QUT first year activities that may not be very well known among the students. 

[jackmurraykib101]

#3 Otis Chamberlain’s Sandwich

Otis Chamberlain is a New Zealand-born painter, illustrator, sculptor and musician currently based in Melbourne, Australia. His visual work spans over a two-decade career in the realms of character design, geometry, pop-surrealism, and science-fiction. Taking cues from mathematics, physics, abstract art and pop-culture; his distinctive color palette and oscillating linework form a recognisable style that combines various techniques and manifests over a wide range of mediums. He is also an enthusiastic drummer, guitarist and electronic musician. Current band projects include Harm, Ornithologist, Akaname, and Police Lucifer; he also composes instrumental modular-synthesizer soundscapes under the name Spectra.

When selecting a designer for this weeks exersize I immideiatly thought of Otis. He has long been an inspiration of mine and I admire his work both digitally and with the old fashioned paint brush. Before I blabber on about him too much, take a look at some of my favourite OC works:

His unique style of vector illustration brings so much vibrant character to his works, however he mentions that his biggest calling is hand-draw/painted works, but in a world full of deadlines he has adapted his style to include computer aided design and speed up his workflow. 

When thinking about a sandwich for otis, I decided it needed to be illustrated, and then vectorised, as he explains here in this facebook comment: 

“Seeing a few people have asked about the process for this kind of illo - i usually draw all the independent layers in pencil, then trace a "good copy" with pigma ink-pens (02, 04, 06), then scan and clean up in Illustrator. Then i comp the individual elements into Photoshop and create trapped-fills for all the solid shapes/separate tone-fills. After this its coloring and doing a lot of gradient tones for shade. Its probably a backward way of doing it all but it works and i have some level of control over it if i need to change anything later.

Please note that I have indeed sampled Chamberlain’s work here for the backdrop. It can be found here: http://www.otischamberlain.com/#!Decendents of Zardoz/zoom/cb54/dataItem-ime73zli2

I felt this represented Otis and his style adequately, obviously its a shit house attempt compared to him but thats why he is famous, and I am not! 

I started by drawing this, then going over it in pen, then since my scanner wasn’t working I took a photo of it using photo booth, and used Illustrators awesome ‘image trace’ function to vectorise my drawing, in the process giving it some really nice characteristics that you can see in Otis’s work. 

Anyway down to the Ingredients! I’ll keep it short and sweet:

Sesame-seed bun because he has a traditional aspect to him, what with his pens and paint brush! how old school is this geezer! haha, just kidding he’s awesome. 

Lettuce because Im not sure if he prefers grass or not and it would be rude to make assumptions! 

Tomato because its rich with tasty juice that excite the pallette.

Melted cheese because it represents his textures throughout his works, with whifs of smoke and who knows what that seem to just melt and ooze all around his works in a really beautiful way. 

Beef paddy: because his works, are very hearty.. by that I mean they carry a deeper meaning which makes his artwork quiet powerful. 

Double beef and double cheese! Because this is no standard burger.. this is a special burger for a special artist. 

Special Sauce! This is what makes (a) burger become (Otis’s) burger.. No one else knows the recipe and thats what makes it unique. 

[jackmurraykib101]

#2 Mind Map and Reflection

Dr Ruth Bridgstock presented the issues surrounding the First Year Experience in our lecture on the 18th of March.

She talked to us about the importance of maintaining a strong attendance rate at QUT for a number of reasons but most prominently, the direct link to government funding. The funding takes into account factors such as number of actively enrolled students and the ratio of students finishing their course.

Personally I find the resulting side effects of this system quite beneficial for the students as it puts pressure on the university to maintain relevant course structures and keeps students satisfaction as an utmost priority.

QUT has acknowledged that currently their endeavors to maintain high student attendance and low attrition rates are not producing the results they were hoping for.  The data available suggests two huge contributing factors,  financial difficulties and personal problems.

This is an interesting puzzle to watch the high-ups at the university try to figure out.. They are not exactly easy things to approach, the university can't just give out free money and even a fee discount system would be a mammoth task for the university to begin to implement as it would involve student profiling and a lot of extra money spent in admins to process financial-difficulty potential students.

Personal problems aren’t any easier, with the broadness of potential issues being far too big to address with a single approach.

As a student in my 5th year of university at QUT I can say that I have considered dropping out many times. I have changed degrees twice (Landscape architecture>Architecture>IVD) and also taken a gap year in 2015 to travel South America. Sure uni gets shit from time to time and you want to quit but to be honest I have found it more frustrating how long it drags out for.. Having subjects being semester specific can be extremely frustrating if you need to do a certain subject as a prerequisite for another subject but it is only offered in semester two, so you have to wait another 12 months just to be able to do that subject once you have completed the prerequisite.. This has happened to me this year and I am having to turn down Job opportunities just because I have to attend University next semester… In Addition to this I sincerely wish the university would look at offering summer semester courses for IVD as that would have allowed me to pursue my other interests that have come into the picture since starting university 5 years ago.

I feel that while financial pressures no doubt contribute, they can be alleviated by way of  the HECS HELP initiative, and personal problems are always going to vary and most will be out of the university’s capability to provide help for. I am quite sure that the Uni could improve its attendance rate if it tried to cater for students who simply can’t follow the typical/intended structure of their course (ideally 4 subjects per semester for four years), because as interests grow and change and job opportunities present themselves throughout the extent of the course, the students flexibility needs will become more demanding. QUT needs to address this if they want to see a higher graduation ratio.

[jackmurraykib101]

So, Whats Design?

When analysing this question, I found myself at first struggling with the enormity of trying to simply define a statement so broad. Design is lots of things right? I mean, architecture is built around design, art is a form of design, so is sound design, web design, and then of course we've got graphic design! And thats just scratching the surface. 

I decided to break the question down and draw common elements out of every form of design. Design serves a purpose, good design solves problems, but surely theres more to design then simply fulfilling a brief. Design is creative expression. 

If we look at design from a designers point of view, It is more like an individual articulation of a proposed problem. The rich ocean of creativity flourishing in a passionate designers mind proposes infinite potential for design. Sure they are given constraints within the brief, but ultimately they have complete control of how they interpret and apply themselves creatively.

A good designer produces something original from essentially a thought, a spark of imagination that has inspired a physical product. Design draws on raw creativity, original design is a display of the miracle of human consciousness. Before that individual person experienced that thought, that idea didn't exist; and yet given time and the tools necessary, something has been created out of nothing. Further more, that something might inspire others to produce something else original, and so on and so forth. 

So how do we actually sum up this seemingly daunting question? Well to put it simply I believe:

"Design is an individual interpretation of a creative process, that addresses a brief while communicating form and function".  

[jackmurraykib101]

#1 Reflection of 'Who Am I?'

My Identity sandwich:

I am creative person who is passionate about digital design including film, motion graphics, print design and logo design.

I need to work on being able to adapt my design ability to better suit a clients brief and needs rather then becoming lost in my own ideas. I tend to find that if I approach a brief and solve the design soloution I become to involved with that idea and don't brainstorm enough to try and find other soloutions to that problem.  

Something I haven't properly considered is perhaps the importance of using and improving my illustration skills for initial ideation/brainstorming and client consulting.  

My Design Sandwich

How do you create such a tasty sandwich you ask? Well boys and girls.. imma tell ya:

It all starts with a grassy base. Because why have lettuce when you can have grass?? Everyone needs their greens, their essentials that make up the stock staple of there sandwich or design process and grass is mine. I like the smell of grass, I like the taste and the texture, I like that it comes from nature and I like how inspired I become when I add grass into my design procedure. It helps me look at problems in a completely new way and literally *all* of my best work has been achieved when I hit an absolute mindblank where the only ideas in my head are the most predictable boring af ideas for a brief... In my frustration I sit out in the back yard emersed in grass, and then bingo.. you got cho self an idea! take a look at these two images.. Image one is the most uncreative, boring piece of shit haha, seriously though, lame. (oh btw client was a gardening business). 

And this is number two is after I nearly gave up and decided to stroll around in the grass for a while:

Thats more like it! ^ The logo is now well defined and much more scaleable while also promoting a strong colour scheme. The subtle gradients and shadows etc. used in the first one to make it try and look semi interesting have been replaced with a flat, much more refined design, which will stand out in any scenario and at almost any size. 

Anyway, yeah grass is the first on my design sandwich. haha

Well next on the list is a stick of RAM (its hiding behind the grassy base). RAM is vital to me as a designer because it represents my almost exclusive digital creative expression. And that expression was once limited by my computer, which is a crime against your own potential.. never again will I be limited to what my computer can handle.. after forking out 2.5k for an absolute rocket my work has never been better, specifically in music production which, when having hundreds of channels and double as many plugins all running and rendering in real time, can be veryyy CPU intensive. Since upgrading the most important tool in my shed, my full potential is starting to be explored, and its a hell of a lot of fun :) 

After that is a simple plane of glass, this represents my minimalist, modern approach to design. Glass is never going to be out of fashion, and neither is sleek, minimalistic design work. wether it be UI interfaces, websites or logos, it will always look good if it is simple, effective and modern. 

Then there is a steak.. because steak. that is all. 

Haha, nah lets see if I can justify this; Steak represents a good wholesome approach to design. Combining well established rules of aesthetics and user experience, the steak sits in the middle of my design sandwich, with creative ideas starting there and spanning outwards in all directions. Similar to an architect designing a beautiful house, he must also keep in mind the rules and regulations of his brief and keep them in mind as he works on creating something interesting and unique. The steak is the backbone of my design process, my experience mixed with my style. 

Ontop of the steak is cheese, specifically Old English Cheese. Which happens to be what I ask for at subway everyy singlee time. I experiment with my subway sandwich’s around my cheese, ill mix up the salad, and the meat, but not my old english.. why? because that’s how I do things that’s why. gosh 

This represents my flavour, my process, the way I do things, the synapses that fire off in my brain in a particular pattern every time I am faced with a decision. 

After this we have a tasty selection of code prepared by some of the finest chefs in all of 1′s and 0′s land. These three bundles of joy contain a veryyy delicate arrangement of 1′s and 0′s, hundreds upon hundreds of millions of them! they are on my sandwich because ever since I was in grade 5, they have allowed me to discover, pursue and develop my creativity in a way that simply did not exist two decades ago. Quite fascinating really because without those tasty little blocks on my sandwich, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here, talking about my sandwich, for my design degree.. #gamechanger #digitalage

And to wrap it all up, deliciously soft sesame seed bun.. because where would I be without fast food on my all-nighters.. chomping into that greasy hungry jacks burger grasped within my caffine-induced-parkinsons hands at 3am has been a regular occurrence for me throughout my five years of uni. What can I say, yes I always leave it to the last minute, and yes it stresses me out sometimes but you know what? I’ve actually got f*cking good at cramming... im talking 6′s for 50%ers that I do in two days.. I’ve literally conditioned myself to work really well under pressure, I can’t really work without it anymore :/ I’m not saying its a good thing, its just the way it is for me now. 

If you’re up for watching a 14min TED talk on procrastination, it literally describes me to an absolute tee. 

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator

[jackmurraykib101]

I love logo design, I designed this logo for 'Me' because i love exploring different ways that the brain can interpret symbols/text even when we distort them into abstract forms. I applied this digital noise to the text as it represents my digital orrientation, I love electronic music, producing electronic music, as well many different forms of digital design. I live in the #digitalage