Just a quick update about how I’m get­ting on here. As you can see, things already begin­ning to look a little bit dif­fer­ent. Note that this isn’t the new design yet but rather a realigned design. Most things happened behind the scenes. I upgraded the backend and also removed the multi-language plu­gin. On the front end I fixed some CSS quirks (though there are still plenty of them) and changed the typo­graphy which is now using the CSS3 font-face and box-shadow prop­er­ties for pro­gress­ive enhance­ment. The logo has been replaced with the one that I’ve been using on my CV and prin­ted port­fo­lio recently. On the con­tent side a massive search & replace mis­sion in mySQL even­tu­ally removed all evid­ence that a Ger­man lan­guage blog ever exis­ted. This was neces­sary so the lay­out doesn’t break in the mono­lin­gual design. Although the pars­ing and dis­play was done through a plu­gin, every post con­tained both lan­guage ver­sions in the data­base and there­for would be dis­played together when the plu­gin is dis­abled. I also went through the pro­jects again and removed some embar­rass­ing work that was left over from a cer­tain uni­ver­sity mod­ule. And finally I’ve rewrit­ten the intro copy to keep it up to date.

In the next phase I am going to merge some areas and work on a new lay­out for the port­fo­lio pages. I can’t say when this is going to be fin­ished as I’m rather busy with other work at the moment — which is still a good thing. I’ll prob­ably update the port­fo­lio with new work before the new lay­out becomes appar­ent though, because I feel that I’ve held back some pro­jects for too long now and I’m dying to share them with you.

Feel free to report any quirks or leave feed­back in the comments.

With the plans for my imme­di­ate future pretty much sor­ted out, I’ve now got two pro­jects left to do until the sum­mer break when I’m mov­ing down to Corn­wall. I can’t say too much about the big­ger one of the two except that it involves a new aspect of digital design (iPhone web apps) for me and another steep learn­ing curve. I man­aged to stick to my self-devised cur­riculum which has pretty much been about digital design. It´s very excit­ing and lots of fun too.

I can tell you about the other pro­ject though, the relaunch of my per­sonal web­site. I’ve been work­ing on it sporad­ic­ally between pro­jects and other work and have fin­ished all the plan­ning work that is neces­sary before get­ting my hands dirty with design. I’ve decided to do a gradual relaunch, which means that I’m going to imple­ment (and test) changes in smal­ler stages rather than reveal­ing it all at once with a big ta-daa. The reason for this is that although it will prob­ably be more work and take longer to fully imple­ment all the changes, it will still save me time as I can start post­ing things sooner that I’ve been hold­ing back until the relaunch.

So what are the changes? Here´s the plan so far: The web­site will be divided into port­fo­lio and blog, I’ll drop the sep­ar­ate intro­duc­tion, about and con­tact pages and include them into the other two. There´s going to be a new con­tent strategy for the blog. I’ll also weed out all the trash from the port­fo­lio. An import­ant change for those who are read­ing this in Ger­man: I’m sorry to say that I’ll drop the German-language blog­ging. The main reason for this is that trans­lat­ing each and every post into Ger­man takes up too much time and stops me from post­ing more. Although the lan­guage switch­ing plu­gin has been awe­some and made mul­ti­lin­gual blog­ging really fun, it´s just not worth the effort any­more, at least in this context.

This web­site star­ted as a per­sonal web­site in Ger­man when I went to North­ern Ire­land. It helped me to keep in touch with friends and fam­ily and to write about my exper­i­ences in the for­eign coun­try. It changed to a bilin­gual blog and port­fo­lio when I went to uni­ver­sity and it still made sense to be bilin­gual through­out my time in Zurich and Munich. How­ever the amount of people read­ing this in Ger­man who wouldn’t be able to read it in Eng­lish too is very small. The pur­pose of the new blog is not merely to keep friends and fam­ily updated any­more as it was years ago. For this I’ll prefer the per­sonal con­tact. The new blog will there­for have a new con­tent strategy and will be in Eng­lish only.

That´s pretty much the most import­ant change. There will obvi­ously be a lot of visual changes, a new logo and brand­ing, new typo­graphy, a new struc­ture, an updated backend and mod­ern web tech­no­lo­gies. All this will be imple­men­ted gradu­ally over the next weeks. Things might break now and then and it could be a big mess at times, espe­cially when the old data­base clashes with the new design. But let´s hope it all goes smoothly.

Stay tuned.

April is draw­ing to an end and noth­ing has changed in regards to this web­site. I prom­ised (myself) to relaunch this month but let´s keep real­istic: It´s not going to hap­pen. It is how­ever, along with one or two other com­mit­ments, now my first pri­or­ity to get it done. Of course there are reas­ons for the delay, and con­trary to what some might think when they know that I’m cur­rently on a “year out”, it´s not lazi­ness, party and hol­i­day. Since the start of the aca­demic year I have worked full-time in two cre­at­ive com­pan­ies with inter­na­tional repu­ta­tion and part-time in another. I have pur­sued freel­ance work for big and small cli­ents and took part in design com­pet­i­tions with suc­cess. Since the start of 2010 I have wrapped up seven pro­jects and suc­cess­fully taught myself many of the things I always wanted to learn but uni­ver­sity failed to address. I real­ised my plan to run my own “course” with my own “mod­ules” and I can say it paid off. And I’m not fin­ished yet.

When in the second year of my degree course at UWE my dis­ap­point­ment with the qual­ity of teach­ing reached a peak, I decided to take up the oppor­tun­ity to study a semester in Switzer­land. This rein­forced my impres­sion that Graphic Design at UWE just isn’t for me and I pulled the emer­gency break which led to the exper­i­ence I’m hav­ing now. It was the right decision. At the point when I walked into the admin office and told them that I was tak­ing time-out, everything was open. I didn’t know whether I could sus­tain myself, what I would do with my time, whether I would change my mind and if I would return next year or not. The reac­tion from UWE was mainly shrug­ging shoulders and the dele­tion of my e-mail account. Form­ally for the uni­ver­sity I became invis­ible since I wasn’t a pay­ing cus­tomer anymore.

Through the exper­i­ence I’ve had since that day, the work I’ve done and the goals I’ve accom­plished, I’ve come to real­ise that my career plans don’t align with the teach­ing at the Graphic Design course at UWE. I’m pur­su­ing a career in the cre­at­ive industry, as a designer, con­sult­ant or whatever it may be. A career primar­ily con­cerned with solv­ing prob­lems cre­at­ively and visu­ally for cli­ents, users and audi­ences. I’m not an artist and I’m not the centre of my own work. How­ever, most pro­jects I was asked to under­take at UWE asked me to either express my per­sonal opin­ion, to graph­ic­ally expose intim­ate details of my personality/life, or to cre­ate work bet­ter described as con­cep­tual art. A crit­ical mes­sage seemed more import­ant than the pro­fes­sional exe­cu­tion or aes­thetic qual­ity of the work. Judging it by using the weight of the file con­tain­ing the devel­op­ment work as an indic­a­tion for the mark instead of actu­ally look­ing through it wasn’t the only assess­ment flaw. Work seemed to be judged neither by form nor func­tion but by the level of per­sonal engage­ment and sac­ri­fice. A usability-driven ana­lyt­ical approach to design was belittled in favour of a prefer­ably phys­ic­ally pain­ful and uncom­fort­able inform­a­tion gath­er­ing pro­cess like sit­ting in a space for 5 hours or per­form­ances sub­ject to pub­lic ridicule. The res­ult were clichés. The role of the designer as author, artist and social com­ment­ator was stressed par­tic­u­larly after some key pos­i­tions in the staff hier­archy had changed. The line “Emphasis is placed on con­tent gath­er­ing and author­ship” was added to the offi­cial course descrip­tion. This isn’t what I signed up for.

Admit­tedly I’ve been moan­ing and com­plain­ing a lot. I’ve had many a rant about the course and it wasn’t always fair or appro­pri­ate. My con­cern wasn’t the 107 typos in 12 poorly pho­to­copied briefs, it was everything that this entailed: the assump­tion that per­sonal expres­sion is more import­ant than usab­il­ity. After I have gained some dis­tance now, I can reflect on it dif­fer­ently. I sup­pose my con­clu­sion is: Each to their own. Some graphic design­ers are artists. For some the most import­ant aspect of graphic design is polit­ical agit­a­tion and com­ment­at­ing on soci­ety. Few make a liv­ing through that, oth­ers are happy with a day job and “do graphic design” on the side. And then there´s another side of graphic design which is industry, cli­ent and con­sumer focussed and usab­il­ity driven. A side where form fol­lows func­tion and aes­thet­ics are an ele­ment of usab­il­ity engin­eer­ing. I sup­pose most good design­ers find a healthy bal­ance of the two. But in order to find this bal­ance, one needs to learn and exper­i­ence both of them.

After going to Switzer­land and study­ing mod­ules in Digital Media, Sci­entific Visu­al­isa­tion and Inform­a­tion Design, sub­sequently work­ing in Edit­or­ial Design with a pres­ti­gi­ous magazine at one of the largest pub­lish­ing houses in Ger­many, exper­i­en­cing User Centred Design prac­tice at an award-winning multi-disciplinary Inform­a­tion Design stu­dio, pur­su­ing freel­ance work for cli­ents ran­ging from star­tups to multi-national cor­por­a­tions and now work­ing in a Social Media ad agency, I’m much more aware of where I’m pos­i­tion­ing myself in the cre­at­ive industry. I regard this exper­i­ence as part of the learn­ing that con­trib­utes to my degree. This means—you guessed it—I didn’t quit. Of course I’m con­tinu­ing to study. I have one more year to go and I aim to fol­low the path I’m on now. I focus on the aspect of graphic design that makes sense to me. I don’t know what kind of pro­jects I’m going to do in the third year. Maybe they’ll have an ele­ment of author­ship and con­cep­tual art. Maybe to some extent they’ll reflect a per­sonal aspect. One thing is for sure: My learn­ing approach is going to be industry-focussed, col­lab­or­at­ive, multi-disciplinary and usability-driven.

I will not gradu­ate from UWE Bris­tol, but from the Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Fal­mouth in 2011.