I found A1 a bit hard at first with regards to the inspiration. Some weeks I was struggling to find inspirational pieces and when it came to annotating them I didn't really know what to write. I feel I've made significant progress with this area of the sketchbook work though, since I went from writing maybe a sentence on each piece to a whole page.
The first assignment, A2, went well, but the ones we've just done (A3 and A4) I found a lot tougher. The main problem with A3 was my time management. I allowed myself to get behind (which was partly due to not having the internet) and as a result ended up having to do hours of catch up work late into the night, which left me stressed and tired and lacking motivation to go back to college after the Christmas holidays. My screen design was particularly stressful and seemed to take forever. It took far longer than I expected it to, and as a result I was up late trying to get it done.
I found some of the shorter deadlines for the mini-assignments particularly stressful, and struggled to meet them. The thing that seems to take up most of my time is the ideas generation process in my sketchbook. I can get the thumbnails down in about 10 minutes but when it comes to the next stage and the final design it takes me forever, and as a result some of the mini-assignments were rushed. This led to typing errors, and in some cases I wasn't entirely satisfied with the end result though luckily we were given an hour before hand in to make some minor adjustments if we deemed it necessary.
Due to the pressure of trying to meet deadlines the sketchbook work was also a bit rushed, and perhaps not as accurate as it could have been. It could possibly have benefitted from more detailed annotations too.
In terms of written content I'm confident that's an area I've done well with, though in some cases I've struggled to edit out enough to meet the word count. My competitive analysis for A3 could have been a bit more in depth if I'd had more words to play around with, but I think it covers everything and I feel it was a damn good effort considering I had to use a competitive site written in another language!
I feel my ideas generation is an area that definitely needs improving on in this next semester, as well as my time management.
Overall though I think the first semester has gone well and I have progressed sufficiently. I've passed A2, and A3 and A4 are out of the way -- at least for now. Hopefully I've passed them too. As long as I keep on top of the next set of assignments I'm confident I'll continue to do well and move closer towards employment.
The mini-assignments have gotten more intense with shorter deadlines and I found this morning’s grid exercise particularly stressful. I barely printed it off in time, meaning I didn’t get time to perfect the design like I would have wanted to. Still, what’s done is done and