There are numbers of students on our Fda course that already finished ABC Diploma in Graphic Communication last year. They have reason to compare FDA and ABC diploma and think about advantages and disadvantages of both. I am one of those students. I have something to compare this year to.
I started preparing to FDA from the first day of my summer vacation. I was nervous about it because I hadn't been that experienced as other students that applied to that course. ABC diploma was my firs ever experience in arts subject and I felt like blind, deft idiot who should understand stuff she never even heard about. However, the first day on FDA relaxed me and made me feel a little bit better. Darren's phrase ' You are here to study and you shouldn't be a professionals, so, don't worry about your mistakes' made me go to the shop, buy loads of books on typography, Graphic Design and Illustration and try to multiply the university's studying process with my own self education process. I was surprised when we've been told that we will have Personal and Professional Development lessons that will explain to us how to find work, promote ourselves and make a portfolio. My biggest worries were about my lack of professional knowledge so PPD were kind of light in the end of the tunnel.
Creating our own blog was the first step in our ' professional development' plan. Some people were really disappointed about it because we had to just show our project process and that might be boring for public. Everyone wanted to have minute of fame and popularity. My first few weeks of blogging were just about checking statistics, showing some of my works and writing about exhibitions I've been at and something that inspired me in the Internet. I've been photographing every inspiring thing I could see, recording lessons and their outcomes. I realised then, that having a blog, makes me think deeper and look widely to see more things than I usually did.
I wanted to make my blog interesting not only for Fda student, but also for other people surfing in Internet. I tried to show some specialities of my country, like in 'Culture shock 4 U' and 'Some bad views of my city' posts. Also, tried to inform people about something new and interesting in Arts world like in posts about my journey to Frieze Art Fare or Skin Exhibition. It helped me. I learnt new artists, found new great techniques and websites with great inspirational and informational data which not everyone knows. I wanted to share and I got a good number of views of my blog. I also had a great story related to it. I wrote a post about Dan Attoe and when I woke up next morning, I found more that 100 views of my blog. The reason of that was Dan Attoe's message on Twitter with link to my blog post in it. I was surprised by that. I never expected that someone like him can find my blog site and share it with everyone else.
Blog is very useful in terms of study as well. Studens can absolutely freely share all research information with each other, share our drafts and see what people finally done. Period of the biggest information sharing was during our Final Major Project time. I am not talking for every student, but I honestly tried to share my best research pieces with other people. We had a little bit lack of guidance with our book, so I tried to find book prototypes in the Internet, to show people how it should look like. I found Luca Rosean's online publication of the 'London Through the eyes of a designer' book. People liked it and I felt good for helping them.
I honestly think that blogging helped with self development. I watched so much great projects, techniques and usage of different materials that decided to develop my knowledge further. I started doing tutorials to improve my software skills, started photographing staff I never photographed and so on.I feel much more comfortable after this year and have clear plans for summer, like to do the projects on my own, develop my CV and portfolio and check different agencies in Spain, to know their scheme of work.
Summarising my first year of blogging, I can see, that the most popular posts were about FMP book prototype, post about Dan Attoe and history of Myriad Typeface. People mostly came from Blackboard, Facebook and Twitter. Most popural month were November 2010, when I had more than 350 views.
My plans for the future development are redesigning of my blog. I want to make an introduction image, work on typographical side of my blog and layout. Of course, blog is not a proper portfolio stuff. However it may become popular like ' Blog of Francesco Mugnai'. And the only possible option to earn that is to work hard, watch, hear and collect all interesting information.
