For this section of my blog I am going to compare and contrast the processes and practices of two design practitioners who both gave lectures at Stockport College, they are Damian Gascoigne and Gillian Blease.
I chose these two because I felt they gave two of the best lectures over the past academic year, I thought they had great styles and relevant pieces of work and I thought they had a lot of interesting points to say. Gillian Blease was on the 17th October and gave a very professional and down to earth lecture and Damian Gascoigne was on the 13th March and gave a very funny and informative performance.
The first similarities I picked up upon from the two practitioners were their backgrounds, where they both came from print based design courses; Gillian Blease took a Typography course here at Stockport college before moving on to MMU to study a foundation in Art and Design. After completing this she headed to Newcastle University to concentrate mainly on Fine art.
Damien Gascoigne studied graphic design at Kingston polytechnic in 1984 (and later went back to lecture there on animation) but when he finished and worked as an illustrator for 5 years he decided that unlike Blease, he wanted to move into moving image. In a way I have taken a similar path to Damien because I started out in graphic design too but felt I wanted to move into moving image as I found that more exciting and interesting.
After her education Gillian spent 6 weeks living in Japan that she said highly influenced her work, and then moved to London to try and make a name for herself and managed to get a contract job working freelance for the guardian thanks to the help of ACME, which is a support group for artists looking for residency in London.
Gillian explained in her lecture that sometimes collaborating with different people on projects sometimes leaves you with no creative freedom as she found from working on the South Bank Literature Festival in which she says she "felt like a puppet" because the creative team already had a strict idea of what they wanted. I similarly have come across this problem first hand in my old job producing posters and magazine layouts for a company that already had (very dated) set templates for how they wanted things to look. I found that you just have to accept the fact and just do the work how they want it, even if you think it looks bad!
Gascoigne has a wonderful way of finding and collecting inspiration as he refers to it as ‘working without working’ he says that something interesting happens all the time and that he just takes in ‘life’ all around him. He loves taking photos and especially loves drawing and doodling things in sketchbooks and notepads, he says he keeps a post-it pad by the phone because it is interesting to see what you doodle when you are not concentrating on it! And also he loves watching people, especially their hair, and their posture! He mentions that these features are very important in character design which I fully agree with after doing my project using little cartoon characters.
I thought it was really interesting to find out how professional designers do their research as it is something you don’t usually get to see, and I always thought that when I finished college and university I wouldn’t bother keeping and compiling research because you don’t exactly get marked on it like when you are on a course, but recently, especially after hearing Gillian and Damien talk about their methods I feel I will try and do more and be inspired by Gascoigne to make sketchbooks full of my random thoughts and doodles as you never know when they could come in useful.
Blease won a competition for her piece "lists found" that won her her very first computer and which meant she could learn and experiment using the program Adobe Illustrator. Her progression from fine art/illustration to more digital inspiration spawned from this and I think definitely in a good way, and has got her commissions with big name brands like Barclays, Waitrose and the Guardian.
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