Publishing multiplatform: Alec dudson
Alec Dudson, the founder and editor-in-chief of Intern Magazine, has established a widely respected platform that highlights up-and-coming talent in diverse creative domains like design, photography, illustration, and writing. The magazine was started as a Kickstarter project in 2013. It includes a wide range of subjects, including internships, career development, and industry challenges. The brand operates on various platforms, offering digital content, hosting events, and organising workshops to assist and inspire young creatives. The magazine's print edition features high-quality content, while its digital platform provides a diverse selection of articles, profiles, and multimedia features. Furthermore, it offers a wide range of events and workshops aimed at promoting networking and skill development within the creative community. Intern Magazine is committed to supporting and empowering emerging talent, fostering connections, and offering industry opportunities.
I think Alec’s dedication to helping people feel more connected to a community of creatives, was a revolutionary method of building a network to support and empower young people. He didn’t set out to create something that would only benefit him, but he set out to create a support network of individuals who could both showcase their work and network with other creatives and companies. He created something interactive and engaging that helped promote up and coming talent and that drew in new clients and trade. This has made me think about my own project more deeply and the intentions behind my design and research. I went through a similar experience to Alec where I studied multiple degrees but it took me a long time to work out what it was that actually really moved and motivated me and retraining in your mid 30’s isn’t ideal but I’m so grateful I found design and I’m excited to see where I can go from here. Last term I didn’t feel like I created my best work, It was lazy and didn’t really have any personality, this term I have found a project that I am really interested in and would love to explore this properly. My project stems from my issues with flattening/emotional blunting and a desire to create an outcome that benefits people who also experience this. I wanted to delve into how film can be a strong force for evoking strong emotions and sentiments and how film can help people with mental health conditions to feel less disconnected. It’s not as ambitious or all inclusive as the intern project but I felt I needed to start small and be more specific about who I was targeting and to narrow down my audience so that the research wasn’t too general and I wasn’t taking on something too big.
Social change UX
Watching Joe’s talk about his projects that involve social change induced mixed feelings of admiration and a sense of disconnection. Many of Joe’s projects, although some he deemed unsuccessful, had a genuine desire to involve and create a community of people who could benefit from the projects. This brought up a lot of shame surrounding my feelings of disconnection from life and people. Often I feel such a disconnect from people and life that I find I can’t get any joy from things. I’m generally quite a timid, meek person and big groups of people make me feel uneasy and anxious, new surroundings and unfamiliarity often make me feel apprehensive and this often diffuses into my life and work. There was a quote from the bbc series the thick of it where Hewitt calls Abbot 'out of his depth… disconnected to the point of autism and this line really resonated with me because I often feel that my experiences and my mind work differently from others, I feel trying to engage people in my projects and personal work might be futile if they don’t share the same sentiments as me. This disconnect is something that has led me to study this project. Like how Joe studied the language and semiotics in political speeches, I would like to explore the language used in film to evoke certain emotions and how film makers engage their audience through language, cinematography and sound design. I think Joe’s suggestion of taking walks and exploring your surroundings to find inspiration was spot on. Initially, I didn’t really understand the point in our walks to look into the unnoticed but through these walks I’ve felt that I can think with more clarity and generate more ideas.
Academic Creative Practice
This lecture helped me to think about what my main goals were for this project but also for my career in general. It also made me reflect on why I chose to do this course. Initially, I chose this course because I was hitting a wall with my job applications, often either not hearing back or not being considered because I didn’t have a background in design. My intentions with this course was to spend the two years learning and getting a background in design. I was under the impression initially that we would be taught about the different types of software we would be using as designers but I have felt that the course is more concentrated on writing and ideas behind our designs. This is something that I’m neither very good at but also I don’t particularly enjoy and so a Phd isn’t really something I would even consider as I feel it would be another 4 years of research and writing which I don’t think I could handle. That said this project is something I think I will be considering in the future. In the future I would like to perhaps write a screenplay for a film and I think my research for this project into disconnection in mental health and how film can get people feeling more connected would be really helpful for a possible film project. It’s definitely a project that will be helpful for my future career path. A good point that Ben made was that your writing needs to be accessible and comprehensible to everyone that reads it. When I read my ex boyfriends Phd thesis, I found the language to be very flowery, mostly because it was scientific but I just couldn’t understand the terms and the language he was using which caused a lot of frustration and a sense of inadequacy that made me feel like I wasn’t intelligent enough to pursue a masters or a Phd but what I’ve realised through doing my own research and studies, is that it’s actually quite difficult to make your work understandable and uncomplicated especially if you’re doing something really specific that involves language and terms that are specific to that subject area. For this project I would like to include a literature review of the information that is already out there, as I intend for this project to build upon previous research mentioned in the lecture. This will help me to not only build on the research but find areas that haven’t yet been examined and open doors to new and exciting research. Another clear point made in this lecture is that we make sure our research isn’t based on opinion and personal preferences or experience and that we take an objective look at the research. This is going to be particularly difficult to me as the purpose behind this research was to delve into something that was really personal to me. Another difficulty I struggle with is making language more direct and simple, I tend to write quite a lot and condensing isn’t my forte but is something I would like to improve on.
Design Craft
This video had me reflecting on my own work and what I want to come of it. There have been a few times where I have shared my work on social media or e commerce sites and following this I have come across work that looks identical to mine. Initially this frustrated and upset me but I realised that maybe something good could come from sharing and influencing other people’s work. I am often heavily influenced by other artists and this sometimes comes across in my work. But this video made me realise that even if you aren’t appreciated by everyone there’s always going to be someone that is deeply influenced by your work and it speaks to them. This man’s obsession with this typeface resonated with my obsession with design, I often find myself working until the early hours on different projects that design fuels my passion. Creative endeavours always help me to detract from the hardships of life and to do something constructive. That is the motivation behind my project. This video had me reflecting on sharing my work and the legacy we leave behind after we’re gone.
Theory lectures
Theory Lectures
Theorised making
So this week I had a oops moment, I had discussed my project with Ben and Dan and was concerned that my someone was pursuing a similar theme to mine. It wasn’t until this week that I actually got around to viewing the theory lectures where Ben talks about his work involving the intersection of film and space. I did question how he was able to point me in such a specific direction in my tutorial and how he was able to generate complex psychology terms off the top of his head, but it’s just dawned on me that his area of research is in the same field as my project! Which was a bit embarrassing. Initially, I thought I had a novel idea and that my personal experience made it a bit more unique, but I’ve realised maybe it’s actually a common topic and that there have been many studies into affect, film psychology and mental health.
Initially, I did think for my final project, I would either produce a sensory experience like a home-4d experience or I would make some kind of short film/documentary about the topic. I was a bit concerned that if I were to make a documentary film on my topic it might be quite biased towards my own experience, also it’s quite difficult to get a good representative sample size in studies and so the results I felt wouldn’t be conclusive of anything accurate or authentic and this worries me.
That said, Ben’s talk of parafunction and the way the media represent their own biased agenda got me thinking, maybe a work of ‘parafiction’ might work better for example making a documentary using qualitative data and interviews. After all , much of the work of films isn’t the objective truth and is often a reflection of the mind experiences and lives of the creator. That said this project is only 24 weeks long so I’m not sure I’d have the time for this. I would love to work in film in the future. At the moment I am just making pitch decks and key art, but I often question if it’s challenging me enough. I feel like this course has helped me to think about ideas in a more critical and perceptive way. Last term admittedly, I got lazy and my work wasn’t great and I’d like to improve this term.
Theory | Lecture 2 – Research Led Report
I found this lecture really helpful in helping guide the direction for my research. I’m now thinking of doing something qualitative much like the surveys talked about in this lecture. Their ideas stemmed from their own feelings of alienation in the design world and trying to find common ground with other designers who were feeling the same way. My research will also be based on spectatorship and the viewer and so I need to get more involved in connecting with people who share my experience with emotional blunting. It would also be interesting to find out about other people’s sensory experiences with film. Similar to my project, this lecture talks about shifting the focus from the boss to the workers, where my project intends to shift the focus from film itself, to the experience of the viewers. The talk about Ken loaches film sorry we missed you generated some ideas for how I might come up with my final idea, the idea that this film was inspired by many people’s experiences of the gig economy, the dehumanization of the work involved, and the candid stories told made me realise that I needed to get more involved with a community of viewers for my research. It would be interesting to see the commonalities between viewers and how they experience film. This film was a form of discussing workers’ rights and experiences through narrative storytelling and was a great way for encouraging discussion and debate around the topic and shows that not every project outcome has to be shown in a technical scientific way and can be approached in a more creative out of the box way. The talk of the workers union and getting people’s perspective on working remotely as a designer got me reflecting on my own experience. Although I like working remotely and there are many advantages to it, there are also downsides such as feeling isolated as well as having to cover the costs for equipment and expenses that you wouldn’t otherwise do if working onsite. This discussion emphasized the importance of getting involved with a community of ideas to help change or improve a situation. I found the talk about the design census really interesting, and it had me reflecting on the reliability of surveys in general. I was shocked to see that designer’s average salary was £75,000 It made me wonder if they’d interviewed a small sample of designers but then I saw that the sample size was 9000 people. The numbers and the figures for the design consensus painted a nice picture for designers but when the context was revealed that actually most of the people who took the surveys were creative directors, it made you rethink the reliability and validity of the research as you didn’t get a comprehensive view including the junior and midweight designers. This study has made me wary of presenting anything that claims to be comprehensive or conclusive of anything. I would rather base my research on something qualitative that doesn’t assert any misleading facts or figures.
Theory | Lecture 3 – Professionally / Studio/ Credentials Orientated Report
Alec from Intern talks about Hawraf and the information they released relating to their company. This encouraged me to reflect on where I want to be in the future. After creating the business plan for my hypothetical business in an earlier module, I realised that there were so many components to setting up your own business, and many of them made me feel a bit uneasy. Alec spoke about using the information shared to get a better understanding of expenses and processes behind running a business. He shared some useful information on setting up an easy document about logistics. Currently, I am freelancing as a graphic designer, and it worries me that I don’t use any contracts for my clients, which can cause many problems down the line, such as pricing and final deliverables. At the beginning, I started giving my clients a fixed price for something, and my costs started quite low. I found through experience that low pricing attracts the wrong clients who undervalue your work and expect to have lots of changes added in for free. Following this, I started adding in extra costs for extra revisions, but in hindsight, a contract might work better for this kind of work so that we can agree on the pricing and deliverables. Intellectual property was also discussed by Alec, and this is something that I find quite troubling. Often, I will create work for clients without a contract, and then later on, I will see them claiming my work as their own and receiving positive feedback without crediting me, which can be quite painful. Through some of my clients, I have worked for high-profile names, but the mediators in between always seem to get the credit, which can be unfair.
The feedback form shared by Hawraf was a great way of collecting information about where they went wrong and how they can improve. I’ve learned that constructive criticism is always helpful in helping you grow and progress. Through this questionnaire, they were able to determine what changes they should make and how to be more inclusive.
Lecture 4- Business Plan
Although I haven’t yet thought about my final outcome properly, I did take note of the information Alec discussed about creating a business plan and a lot of the points were transferable to my project such as creating a structured framework for outlining my objectives, methods and strategies which I will be covering in the project proposal. For my final outcome I was thinking about maybe creating a sensory experience/ subscription box with sensory film themed items. Reflecting on this lecture I would most likely need to identify the resources needed for the project such as funding and materials, I would also need to create a budget. I would also need to cover marketability, competition and scalability. I would like to explore my research more comprehensively before I decide on a solid outcome. At the moment I am in the early stages of research and have yet to come up with a more concise research question.
References
The Doves Type, 2015. Rediscovering a Lost Typeface — BBC News UK Website [short film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_bGsT_5SFA [accessed 17 November 2023]. Original source, BBC News Website, February 2015. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-31534032/one-man-s-obsession-with-rediscovering-a-lost-typeface [accessed 17 November 2023].
Lecture 2: Social Change UX [Recorded lecture], GDE750:. Falmouth University. 7 January.
Lecture 3 – Professionally / Studio/ Credentials Orientated Report [Recorded lecture], GDE750:. Falmouth University. 7 January.
Theory | Lecture 2 – Research Led Report [Recorded lecture], GDE750:. Falmouth University. 7 January.