I would say that my use of practice time was uneven. There were days when I could’ve been working on projects from this class, but I didn’t either because I was tired from my other classes, or because I lacked that motivation. I would “plan” on doing work the next day but would never follow up on that plan, either because I got caught up doing other things or because I forgot. Which is ironic because I write everything on my planner but forget to check it. Though time management was an issue, I would find the time to work on it either late at night or when i had brakes in between my classes or at work.

The sophistication of my work was MEDIUM. I was very aware of what the requirements was, and I had a vision in my head of what to do. Especially when i chose the theme organic, or macrobiotic, the symbol for the vegan restaurant that I work at. I knew that I wanted it to be loose, that safe wavy type of feel. On a deeper level, I feel that I connected to not just this project but this symbol because i feel that my life in a way is organic and loose. I have things “planned” out of how they are supposed to go but 9 times out of 10 i just end up winging things and go with the flow. Like whatever life throws at me, i’ll take it. What helped for me when doing this project, was the sketching stage. In the previous classes that i’ve taken we don’t start out by sketching our ideas (granted i did in my first basic graphic design class but i didn’t really grasp the idea of how sketching helped) so doing it with this project I felt helped a lot. I just let my ideas flow and sketched whatever my hand felt like, and where my mind flowed. Though i had a good start, I think that there was still room for improvement, and I could have definitely pushed my designs further. I could have experimented more and made it a little more challenging for myself. Again that was because of time management, I am now starting to grasp how I can manage my time better and what parts of the day work for me and which do not.

Feedback was very USEFUL to me. Everyone saw something that I didn’t see, or maybe did but didn’t realize it was important enough. I appreciated getting feedback from my classmates, especially the critique where we wrote on each others work, because that gave everyone an opportunity to write specifically what could be improved, and that helped me look at little details on my work. I have to say though, as a comment to you (Tuan) i appreciated when you told us that it was up to us to choose our final designs, that we could take into consideration other people’s feedback but at the end of the day it was our work, our designs and we were the ones that had to choose which were going to be the final ones. Through out past critiques, I feel that they are made to where we should make changes on our designs based on what everyone else has to say, which is okay but i don’t think we should do everything that they say if we as the creators of it, don’t think it is necessary or don’t like it.

The level of challenge i gave myself was MEDIUM. I was satisfied with my work and felt that it reached the goal of organic. BUT as i mentioned before i could have challenged myself more, pushed my limits, and see where it could have taken me. I think that if there would have been more time, even though the amount of time that we had to work on it was good, I could have still maybe done more adjustments to my symbols.

I did just the class assignments. Apart from gdes 1 i also had image methodology which i worked on, a good amount of time as well. I did attend the Riso lab lecture with Lindsay Staar, i got a good insight on what her design life is like and what type of design work she does. I also looked at the snake postcards which were pretty great, It’s amazing what type of work is out there that if I don’t see, I won’t know is there.

I am very MATURE in my social development. When we are in class, especially the people I sit next to we were always working on our designs and on top of it. Even outside of class I feel that I concentrate on it when I am working on the designs. I have also learned so much about Illustrator, like how important the pathfinder tool is, the X ray mode view which gives me the guts of the design, and how strokes need to be converted to actual objects. I feel like I only knew the basic of Illustrator coming in, but now halfway through the semester I’ve already gained knowledge that i will be bale to take with me going forward.

I felt that I was WARM in the contribution to the climate. I am definitely more comfortable giving positive feedback than actual critiques. I think most people are. That is something i need to work on, is how to actually give feedback on where rooms of improvements are.