My Memory / Memoir project mostly consisted with my illustrations and a few photographs I took on daily basis.
One of the reasons I chose illustrations for the major components of my work is that I rarely have opportunities to go outside and shoot photographs outside due to the current state of COVID-19 in New York City. I also work almost completely remotely in a as a part of design team for few grocery stores and clothing stores, and thus I expected myself to have very limited chance or motivation to create something in outdoor environment.
My inspiration mostly came from my body sensations, emotions in daily life, artworks, videos, movies or other entertainments I was to watch.
Many of my work included somewhat personified images of animals, since I watch a lot of animal videos and like to interact with animals on daily basis. For example one of the graphics on the upper left side was a personified hedgehog eating a baby mouse, inspired by knowing that hedgehogs eat other smaller mammalian,s in contrary to what people usually imagine.
Some of my pages included small amount of work for my career, which is mainly a graphic designing job, creating images for websites and a few physical fabrication.
One thing I found most painful about this project is that I had to include any sort of images that connects to my memory regardless of my assumption for their qualities as an art piece.
As someone who tend to pursue delusions of “perfectness”(which never exit in reality), this was a difficulty I faced, tried to overcome, yet it became one of the largest factors that my project remains unfinished.
I sorted these images without regarding their created dates, but their color schemes and elements as a drawing instead. (portraits, designed illustration, rough doodles…)
Overall, I consider that I unfortunately failed to achieve the requirements of the project at any chance, lacking almost 30 visual components and also some writing components to display with them. One of the major reasons was conceivably because I hadn’t been able to find the balance between quantity vs. quality of the contents. Although it was mentioned in the syllabus that we shouldn’t be thinking too deeply about qualities of our components, my habit still prevented me for creating & include something that doesn’t reach my aesthetics in the project. (I tried my best not to prevent, but it still ended up with not having enough components as a result.) This was also disturbed by the fact that I chose illustrations for the main medium, which usually takes more time to process than photography, at least in my cases.
As I look back, I also strongly regret that I processed the layouts completely on InDesign. If I had used the application in a combination with Photoshop and created completely designed images on Photoshop, it would opened up wider space for me to be more creative in terms of typography and graphical orders of the images due to my higher proficiency in Photoshop in comparison to that of InDesign.
If I was to work on a similar project again, I would improve my work by managing my time and schedules more wisely so that I am able to achieve finishing the project completely rather than working on small details.
