So it's been a while since I have shared much on here, or in all honesty, anywhere on Social Media. I've been a bit scarce from it all over the past few months and I won't lie, it has been due to feeling a bit lost with everything and not knowing where or how to go forward with it all. I graduated from Uni last month and also had my 21st birthday in June. As well as those things there was the obvious EU Referendum between the two which majorly dampened my spirits- but I'll keep that for another post. 

But really, the past few months I have felt restless. I have wanted to do, make and go places but I have been feeling a bit trapped by what I am expected to be doing by those around me as well as the expectations I have for myself. My motivation has plummeted to an all time low but with the #CBloggers Meet (I haven't spoken about this here... another post for this!) in literally under two weeks I feel like I need to get back on the ball with things. So I guess, you should be seeing a bit more of me from now on and hopefully more of my favourite thing to post, photography diaries! 

I want to live in a cottage 

by the sea, 

and listen to the waves as they

soothe my restless heart

- Unknown

Location: Rock Pools, Cowie, Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Time of Day: Mid-afternoon
Weather: Overheard clouds with some warm sun.
Camera/Lens: Canon EOS100D + 18-55mm
Reason for going: Afternoon walk for when I for once have a Sunday off!

Last up in my lil Honours Project series is the one about my poster series. Carrying on from the first two posts (A Run Through and Meraki App), the last of these is the thing that pull everything together into a series about encouraging designers through their concept development and the tools they use. 

The posters I created then compiled some of the views I had on these areas and then I screen printed them because 1. who doesn't like to get their hands messy? and 2. screen print is damn fun to do! But in all seriousness, the whole project at the end was an exploration into creativity in the digital age but initially, it was more of a play and test of tools within the creative process so it makes sense to take the things I'd tried and make them part of the final "product" too.

So below is some shots of the screen prints. But they will make way onto my online shop at some point too so keep an eye out for that! In the mean time find out more info and read about the full process on my website here: http://www.ohhaystudio.com/#/empower-the-designer/ and again through my honours project blog here: lh-honoursproject.tumblr.com

So in my last post I shared a run through of my honours year project and outline very briefly the key turning points and aspects of my going through it. But in this post I wanted to focus on the first of two outcomes- a social media app/network that allows, specifically, young creatives to share work with, connect and explore a much wider creative world/community. The second is a poster series about empowering designers to think about their creative process, but that'll be in a separate post!

The main outcome then, the app, was the large focus to my project due to the amount of work and the ideation process that happened within it. But I'm not going to bore you with that entire ideation process in this shortish post, so if you fancy reading it all, check out my honours project blog here.

Anyway, so the app initially was something I was developing as a concept because of the stuff I was doing for #Cbloggers and I wanted to create something that would be a tool for creatives to share their work and connect with other like-minded individuals while also being able to be inspired by the things they see. Through a lot of searching and brainstorming I eventually found a name that fit the whole idea for it which is "Merkai".


In terms of developing the visuals for the app, it was kind of a straight forward process. I knew I wanted aspects of the visuals to be hand drawn while other parts would be obviously vectors. With having the logo hand drawn, it then made sense to have the rest of the text as a standard font, then the icons used throughout as these illustrated assets.



Putting together the app once the visuals was created was simple too. If you hadn't heard about it yet, Adobe brought out a new software called Expierence Design (Xd for short) back at the start of the year which is a more WYSIWYG interface compared to their other software- Dreamweaver. The software was so easy to use and made it possible for people to interact with the design in real time. (You can still do it, play around here: http://adobe.ly/1Slyp8B) 


The last aspect of this project and honestly, I think my favourite part of it, is the promotional material. The idea of the advertising was something I had been trying to brainstorm for a while but it finally came to me one night when I wasn't sleeping which was to go back to the meaning of Meraki. And get people to think about how they do their work and make them become part of the advertising campaign as well!
That's essentially all the aspects to this part of the project then. I had the intentions of just having one final outcome post but I feel it's quite long as it is so I'll make my poster series another post!
In the mean time, you can read a bit more about this project on my website here: http://www.ohhaystudio.com/meraki

Hello again! It's been a few weeks since my last blog post but thought I'd try get back into things with a little run through of my honours year project as I said I would in my degree show post. Anyway yeah, last year after I finished my BA Year I shared a few blog posts summarising all the work I did for my modules and spoke a lil bit about the project and all that sort of stuff so felt I would do the same thing again. So in this years summary series I will have two posts, one will be around the development and process of how I got to my final work and the second will be a more of an in-depth explanation of the final outcomes. 

This year my honours project unlike some uni's actually lasted the full length of my final year- so about 7ish months. And I guess due to the fact that during my college time we would work on projects for about 3-5 weeks and then go onto a new one, I knew I couldn't spend those 7 months focused on only developing one concept or idea, so instead it was largely a focus on the creative process, mixing different techniques/processes/materials and seeing how the affect the outcome. 

If you read the second uni update post from my Honours Year last year then you would have known a bit of what my plan was during these months- which was to pick briefs from places like D&AD and BriefBox. Although I ended up straying from this quite a bit and more focused on the actual creation of illustrations and hand lettering to expand skills in these areas, they were there as options when I felt stuck with what I was doing. 

So this was essentially what I spent my time doing up until about March, which was when we had out Feedback week/presentations. It was then around this portion of time that I started spanning my work into the areas that resulted in my final outcome- which was motivational hand lettering and also thinking about the social media aspects of creativity in the digital age. 

With one of the aspects of the feedback from my presentation in that week, it was revolved around the question of "Who is this for?", which did help shape my thinking and in the end, made me develop the concept of the social media app (more in the next post). 

However, because I had spent a lot of time during this year exploring tools and materials I wasn't satisfied with having only one outcome that largely only explored the social media aspect of creativity. So because of that then, and the fact that I had been doing a lot of motivational and thought-provoking hand lettering at this time, I started thinking about how I could tie these things all together as well. This resulted in my 'Empower the Designer' poster/screen print series which you may have seen already through Instagram. 

Anyway, I think that's a fair break down of the project development without going into too much detail... But if you'd like a more detailed version of this, my Honours Project blog is still live so I can read all about and see much more of the work I produced here: lh-honoursproject.tumblr.com

It's been pretty quiet across here, again but the reason for that if you do not know is because I've been prepping for getting my dissertation and honours projects finished and submitted. And also getting things ready for my degree show...

Two years ago you may remember I shared my College End of Year Exhibition in which I shared my stand and wrote a lil bit about the opening night and the details for attending, so it makes sense to do the same for my Uni Degree show too. 

Last month as part of #CrazyRebelliousArt challenge is posted about my biggest successes so far but today is the other side of the coin: speaking about failure. As someone who is still young it doesn't really seem like I should have many failures in life and truthfully I don't. But what I do have, and what I think most people have at this age, is things that happen in your life that really change the direction in which you moved forward.

To me these events in my life are both things that originated back at Secondary School, the two pivotal moments that really altered my future could in some way be considered as failure would be 1. Doing horribly in my 5th year exams and 2. Becoming fed up with art during that part of my education. In saying this though, the consequences of what have happened since then have been good and I wouldn't change them at all!

Could someone please explain to me how it is December already?! It feels like it was only January yesterday! Anyway, with it being December I thought I would try hope on the #Blogmas train! So why not start the month with a lil month update...

Oh wow it's been an incredibly long time since I shared a little update about what I'm doing at uni! Actually, my last update was on my first day back at uni this year, oops! Anyway, with today's post for #CrazyRebelliousArt being a Photo Log of a piece of art work created today, I thought instead I would share what I've been up to at Uni since my last update!

For today's #CrazyRebelliousArt topic, it is meant to be about whether you feel people should go to art school to pursue their dreams of say being an artist or designer. But since I'm still in my own education I feel like I'm in a mid point where I can see the good and bad sides of the education although I'm not at a speciality art school. Instead, I'm doing a post that I've been wanting to do for months since reading Charlotte's own about misconceptions about Fashion Management. 

Recently I read Lauren from DorkFeatures blog post which is all about the future. After having a little chat with her on FB and both of us basically having spoken about worries about the future I thought I would share my own thoughts of it.

In a years time, I will have turned 21 and will be (hopefully) graduating, or have already done it by this time. This thought kind of terrifies me. I have less than 365 days to complete my honours project. To experiment in Education for what is probably the last time. And then go into the 'real', big, bad, scary world!

I'm still not sure what I will be doing this time next year once I've graduated. I want to try and do the "typical, just out of Uni/in their 20's/gap year" thing which would be pretty damn amazing. But I also feel like once I've graduated I need to start looking for a job straight away otherwise I'm never going to find any type of design job.

Obviously this is very irrational, and there will definitely be some sort of job out there. Even if it's not fully focused in design. But I am now in my 20's now and there is so many expectations out there that people usually do during their 20's and some of that expectations I worry if I'll be able to do if I want to travel and I want to have an awesome job as well and have an awesome place to live!

I covered a lot of things I want to do before I turn 30 in my '30 before 30' post but to be honest that is probably only half of the things I actually want to do! Or even feel like I should do. And obviously I'm just freaking out a bit as the process of ageing has somewhat just become a bit more "real" to me now than it had done 5 years ago! It creeps me out that 5 years ago I was still in school, not even sitting my Standard Grades yet and in the next 5 years I'll probably be in some proper type of job funding myself fully! 

Okay... This is obviously a very rambly post about me being scared to hell about the future and what i may, or may not bring but everybody gets that way right? I'm not the only one here having like a quarter-mid-life crises right?! Right, so this is getting a bit much now so I'm going to leave it here. Thanks for reading if you did!

Plus points if you can tell me where the text in the image comes from!