OUGD502 Visiting Professional Robbie Porter Illustrator

The latest visiting professional was Robbie Porter, an illustrator. Although he started off in the vis comm course at Leeds College of art, he was always interested in illustration and the language of visuals. He says that the best thing that a creative just starting out can do is as much work as possible, whether it is self initiated or for clients, keeping going is important. Anything that you can get out there is worth it.
Robbie took a year out after his degree just to improve his technical skills when it came to illustration. This strikes me as time well spent, because the technical aspects of creativity are always the parts I have struggled with.
The major thought I took away from the tap was that you are very often going to be producing work that you don't like or feel to be good enough or is ruined by the clients vision. This is something that scares me about the real world of graphic design, I just hope I can manage to stay motivated.

In the afternoon we did a workshop about illustration by taking an article in the Guardian and trying to come up with an image that could summaries and intrigue the readers. I was difficult to start with because I was a completely different approach in that you have the general message you need to send directly in front of you, it just needs refining and communicating. I often find that graphic designers have to make or fin the message before they can communicate it. I started off working with a classmate and talking about our individual take on the article and the stance it took and the readership of the Guardian. We then split up the themes we had discovered and produced some mood boards surrounding them. Once we had done this we started sketching and discussing the ideas as we developed them. We found that what we produced tended towards either the overly literal in a comical way or was possibly a bit to dense to decode. Although we didn't produce anything final we came up with a number of ideas we liked.

The article its self was abut sweets at the checkout in supermarkets and described the experience of shopping with small kids as an obstacle course. My favourite idea of the day was to create maze out of the floor plan of a super market and make the entirety of the design a QR code that would link to a game surrounding the idea of a super market as an obstacle course.

All in all the day was really fun and enlightening.