To start off this post I think it would be great to mention about what I was expecting at the very beginning. After looking at the examples that Anne gave us, I was stunned by how people can produce such beautiful but at the same time, informative book for a person. I thought I won’t be able to achieve a lot in this particular project- within three weeks time, I will have to get familiar with a person and created a sketchbook about him or her. Things will definitely be better if there was a clearer, detailed guideline- unfortunately there weren’t! ( Now I take it as fortunate though.) Like Anne have always said, we will have to reinvent the wheel in order to do well in a lot of things; no matter in a project, a design or even in the way of experimenting, creativity and iterativity is all we need. Even though I wasn’t being very positive about the project, I can’t help myself being excited every time she says that- after all I signed up to become a designer. Haha.

  To be more organized, I divided the whole process into stages:

1. KNOWING WHAT TO DO

 

The project started out visiting the Brooklyn Art Library. By giving us a brief concept of what we are going to do and providing us great examples of sketchbooks, I was not that afraid of the project anymore. To be honest, 32 pages sounded ridiculous to me ( maybe everyone in the room). We spent time sharing what treasures we’ve found in the vault of sketchbooks. A lot of them were very inspiring. They were made for different reasons- some were created because the artist( or author or creator) wanted to record a trip to somewhere foreign countries, some were drawn out to make visual diaries about the artists’ daily lifes and some just concentrated on certain interesting topics. Of course, I must admit some were more intriguing than the others for me as some of them have the particular elements I love: minimalistic, design related topics and diaries about someone are always appealing to me for some reason. It is never right to leave a place empty handed- here are some of my favourite pages/ ideas I saw that day. During the whole project I was constantly inspired by these works.

      

 

 

 

2.KNOWING CLARA

 

Like I have mentioned in the post peer interview, Clara is actually the very first classmate that I have met in Parsons. I remember clearly we were sitting next to each other at the Monday morning class (seminar class from Peter). He told us to introduce ourselves to the one who were next to us. Clara mentioned a few things about herself: from Korea, going to do fashion design and loves coloring. Even though we didn’t talk much after the little self-introduction, the first impression she gave me was very friendly and sort of shy. Coincidentally, I got paired up with her for this project. We had a short interview for each other in that week and I started to understand her in a few more perspectives- family, friends and herself.

I would say I experienced both success and failure in this stage. For success, I think we did a great job sharing our stories and lifes to each other- I don’t think it is ordinary to trust people that easily(strange things do happen!). I believe in order to succeed in a peer project, two must understand partnership is never enough if there is no friendship. Its nothing but a genuine thing to grow trust for people when people also start trusting you. I think we did exceptionally well in this part. However, since we letted our conversations flow, I wasn’t able to collect a lot of those ‘must know secrets’ of her. This mistake (I would say it is a part of experimenting) affected my progress for the following week.

 

Data collected on that day- enough for me to build up the basics of Clara but definitely not enough for the sketchbook. I learnt that it’s okay to be creative, but next time I have to make sure the creative ways can at least achieve what I originally set out to get. ( I deliberately did not prepare questions for the interview because I thought the conversation would be more interesting.)

 

 

3.START WORKING

Recalling what I did for first week after my interview- I can only remember myself start listing out ideas. That included the way I want to present my storytelling, the style of the book and the first few pages of the sketchbook. I started late since I was not very inspired up until that point. Since I don’t have a lot of interesting topics to work on so I tried work on the impression first. What I did was to start planning. I found it very appealing back in the library when I see a sketchbook that has a unified format/ style throughout all of the pages, so I’ve kept that in mind when I layout my pages/ images/ texts.

However, I have learnt my lesson and I decided to meet Clara up for further inquiries. After the week I have set agenda for the next Friday lesson: I will try know more about her in depth so I can have more materials I can work with. At last we did have a great conversation and we went deeper that time. Then I started working more on some ‘inner’ self of Clara.

  Another thing that worth mentioning is the interesting answer I got from class. I asked my classmates should I include anything about myself or it is better to be ‘all Clara’. Jose Luis answered me without any hesitations- N0! He said this is my book and the fact that you are creating this book somehow already included you. And it is totally fine if you want to put yourself in. Cavin also mentioned he is going to make a comparison between him and v. I love the concept and I was more comfortable putting whatever I think that suits not only Clara, but me myself! This page is about the band we both love- instead only about me/ her, at last I decided to add something that combines two of us.

 

 

 

4. WORKING DAYS

To be frank, I can totally feel what did Anne mean when she said there are huge chances that we will find ourselves in the midst of who-knows-where during the progress. There will be times that we would love to tear and chuck away all the things we did previously and start over again.I was pretty lost when I was still travelling through the wiggly, meandering line. I often find myself in the dilemma of looking for solutions that are fast and simple instead of slow, delicate workings. (Another great lesson I have learnt from this project: time management)For myself, the most challenging part of this project is the time limit. Since I got other projects and homeworks from other classes, I must learn how to effectively finish my objections and move on the the other.

Another interesting part about this project is definitely the freedom I was granted. It sounds easy when something has no guidelines and you can do whatever you want, as long as it floats your boat. However, in reality it is not that great. Suddenly you will have to deal with a lot of editorial choices- no matter on images, texts or choices of materials, it is all up to you. Since there are no standard ways to create my sketchbook, I will have to figure out what works best. This leads to the iterative processes: (You can always refer back to my earlier peer to peer process post for more iterative processes.)

Create

Prototype

Tryouts

Repeat

I guess this is the second week in a nutshell. For every page I forced myself not to work with my first instinct ( of thinking I know what to do immediately after an idea pops up). Laying out all the possibilities and choices I have can actually help me decide what is the best- it might be two ideas’ combination or one inspired by a few. Or even during the process I can use my current topic to relate to the next one I will be working in. I really enjoy the training of being ‘constantly inspired’ as it is often fun- I will never know what I am going to teach myself next.

 

5. GETTING CLOSER TO THE FINAL PRODUCT

  After the comments from my beloved classmates and the mid-term evaluation with Anne, I’ve gained new perspectives and got more fresh eyes on my work. the feedbacks were very helpful- most of them told me to continue to work on what I did but not to forget experimenting. I believe don’t forget to experiment is totally true because that’s the whole point of the project. Also, Anne reminded me this should be a mixture of both texts and images- which I am lacking texts that communicate with the images. It’s often hard for the author to give himself/ herself some subjective feedbacks on their own work( almost impossible). I am still learning(probably for my whole life I will be working on this too!) how to rely more on people’s comments instead of solely on my instinct or perspective.  

 

6. SUM UP

  I would say the satisfaction of completing a 32 page sketchbook is immensely huge. And to be more organized, I can conclude the main three things I’ve learnt during this project (an adventure, almost.)

– Data collecting. Almost for every part of the project required this ability. It’s not my first time collecting data from someone/ somewhere but none got more intense than this project. Understanding the more information you have, the better choices you can make is very important when you want to achieve high in this project ( or any other things). Trying to absorb from different aspects is often the best way to collect- as you may get a more retrospected view of your object.

– Iterative. Frankly speaking, this process can get either very interesting or very annoying. Since it is a repetitive process, it does take up a lot of energy to constantly think and create. But after this project I realized working with your first instinct as a designer (sometimes even an artist) cannot take you far; you will always stay in the mediocre level since there are a lot of people work that way, too. Good designers can come up with one great idea when great designers can come up with couple of them and merge, tweak, modify them.

– Be patient. It would be impossible to pull off this project without patience. Since this is a three-week project, one cannot simply work hard one week and slack off the other two. It is essential to work on and off everyday because it does take up a lot off effort and time in order to do well. No matter during data-collecting, practically working on the sketchbook or even typing posts like this one takes a lot of patience.

Thanks for reading!! 🙂