During the First year, I actually started to notice how important collaboration is while working in a creative field. You do not have to like it, but it is all about connections. I realized that this is a very important issue that I actively need to work on if I want to be successful at what I am doing. I am not a very social person, I do not have the need to make friends all the time, I do not make things nicer than they are - I either click or I do not. No smalltalk no fake interest. This is not a bad thing though but it can come across rude very easily and that’s just not how you connect. I need to find a way in between both extremes. Also socializing is very exhausting to me when i do not feel like it. 

Summarized, I was worried to work in groups. 

But my group is actually very cool. I do not have to be the way I would be usually because everybody is very engaged and motivated to create something cool. Also its just girls and that is a major plus to me personally. The vibe is just better. 

I think there are multiple things that we can agree on and our ways of designing are not that far away from each other. We noticed that during the second task, because we often drew and thought about similar things. Communication is very light and easy and criticism is accepted. There are no unnecessary fights or whatever. I am actually very excited about how it all will turn out in the end. 

I have been really confused about the brief though, because I do not really understand what we have to do and what the difference between the group project and the personal project is. Also, I have just been getting used to my schedule and my teachers - that is all gone now. It is a bit annoying because I have to redesign my whole day to day life, working hours, etc. which is hard for me because I take routines seriously. Also I just really liked the teachers we had in Unit 5 and I was really happy about everything, it all feels a bit more distanced now. The teachers that talk to me now, are people that I have never seen in real life, my GD teachers know who I am and I have talked to them multiple times face to face. I hope that everything will became clearer during the next weeks.

Anyways, thinking about education, I thought about including my grades and a letter of my school for the background. That just shows generally that my family was middle class, I had good grades, I am a girl and my age. I added the fact that I am white and straight since that is very important about my upgrowing aswell. Lastly, I added elements that represent my home, like a tea bag, sheep and the sea. I also put in some of my standard drawings to represent my style. I really do like the outcome, I like rough styled collages anyways.

We have to do a presentation about our personal ideas next week. I have 3 ideas, but my favorite one is about putting my home, regional tea tradition into more modern communities and seeing how these traditions keep getting people together, no matter where they are. I want to focus on street/modern people, young adults in cities from 20-28. I think it would work the best as an editorial and for my personal project I would do a video/music video? I want to put graffiti on tea cups etc., put people in parks and to the ceremony there, I have a lot of ideas how to visualize that already. I need to look for some research that has been done about the topic though.

On Friday we called to do the reflective tasks for our group meeting and it was really fun. We decided to do collages to represent ourselves for the first task, then we did fast drawings for the second one. I think it is much more interesting to do those drawing in 30 seconds like we did, than thinking too much about it. I enjoy things that are raw and honest. 

I agreed on creating a presentation to show our drawings in the feedback talk. 

I have to admit that for the first time ever, I feel like working in a group is helping me a lot. I like that there is structure, we meet every few days and we compare and talk about our work and ideas. That forces me to not do everything last minute like I did in the past - that is so important. I hope that I will keep that in future projects because i am really getting used to doing work early as possible.

After the tutorial our group met and we talked about the feedback. We made plans to meet up and think of ideas for the presentation next week.

The talk on Friday was not my favorite, it was just not the work I am really interested in. I am generally interested in more moder, futuristic work. But I made notes about the questions she talked about in the beginning because I find them really interesting in terms of rescearch. Where does community end? Etc. These were important questions to keep in mind.

I will continue researching for my main idea, and do the presentation tomorrow. Also my group wants to do a Mindmap together, that idea came from watching the rescource by Sharon Betram, about what community is. What does community mean to us? I believe we have to talk about our perspectives as a group to find out about each other more and to make the project more cohesive.

At the end of the week we met again and made plans on how to move on over Christmas/ generally. We decided on making timetables per week for our groups, weekly meetings and so on. Also, we will create a shared Mindmaps and moodboards for our shared idea. To me, the most important thing in this project is working together. It is really sad that its mostly just 5 people in our group coming to meeting ands reaching out. I personally started protocolling our meeting and generally what I am doing for Uni. I feel like this project is 80% organizing things and 20% actual work. I think a protocol is very helpful in this case. 

We then met up to decide our main idea for the group project. We made everybody come to a call for the first time, since this is the most important decision, which was really great. Finding a shared idea was really easy because everybody agreed very fast, we all shared the same favorite. I also decided on the idea for my personal project and I am very excited to get started in the new year. We chose an idea where also the many architecture/furniture students in our group can focus on. India, Rocky and me will be the graphic design/poster/... team. I am very excited to see the outcome and to get started soon!

I found the tutorial on Tuesday good, I liked that we were alone with our group and just talked about what we have been up to. The feedback was only to define the audience a bit more, and we decided to create a mindmap to do that. Other than that, we just have to keep experimenting which I am fine about. We did not really talk about the personal projets. I really enjoy that my group is mostly hard working and really organized. We get along very well and its easy to make decisions. I really did not expect that and I am happy to make friends aswell. As I already said, my previous group projects were really bad and I did not feel recognized and heard. I think a major key point in our group is that we are all equal, there is no boss, just people who share more and some share less. 

I was quite busy personally because there is a lot going on in my private life right now, so I did not manage to watch this weeks lectures. I will do that next week. I find it really hard to motivate myself these days, especially when there is even more going privately. I have always been the person that is never at home, always going somewhere, I have been busy. I just love being busy. But being at home all the time, it drained my motivation a lot. In Germany, we have been on lockdown since November, stricter lockdown since December. Going to Uni was such a motivation to me, just seeing all the people there, how they dressed and acted and whatever, it inspired me a lot. I don’t have creative friends here in Germany and it draines my passion and inspiration about what I am doing here. It does not really feel real anymore. I really miss having connections, getting inspired and just having to dress up, get up, go out to learn. I feel like I am becoming lazy and i hate it but on the other side this is okay due to the circumstances. Still hard to accept and hard to find a way how to work with this feeling. I will update if I found a solution!

We had a tutorial on Tuesday and to me it was really confusing. We had like 10 min with our tutors and then they left us with an other group. We had to give them feedback about their idea and work. I did not really like their idea because it is about helping old people during convos, which is an honorable thing to do, but I think its quite an obvious ad easy idea. They also did not seem really organized and like one girl was doing all the work. We also have to give feedback to our group members and present our ideas for our individual projects. That was really good, because we can all talk very openly and everybody was open for critique and feedback. We meet usually 2-3 times a week now which I think is great. We also agreed on giving each other „jobs“ so we know exactly what to do and when to do it. The allotment will be done next week and then we will focus on its brand, like the logo and merchandise. I really like how its working - it does not feel forced at all, it just flows. The only negative thing is that some members re really quiet. One girl looked at our Padlet for the first time this week and she kind of embarrassed us as a group during the tutorial. She basically asked what we are actually doing with our group in front of the tutors, which is not quite the right timing. We tried to contact her over the last 2 months and she would not respond. It’s just annoying because we are really organized and talking like that when we are presentating is just not professional. But I hope she will try to work with us from now on. That would be great because more people mean better work and more hands to produce work for our project.

One major thing that I have learned during the group work is: how powerful Pinterest is. I have never used Pinterest before and it is helping me so much. Especially about layout and just general design, I have always been so overwhelmed by all the options that I have. Creating a Moodboard on Pinterest really started to help me reduce the stress and to feel the direction that I am going into. It’s great.

We also want to create guidelines for our final outcomes (the posters,flyer,logo,..) to make our final pitch look cohesive and show that we communicated. If our final work would look completely different from each other, that would just show that we did not communicate well. So this is so important in my opinion. I also have never set „guidelines“ before and I just realized how helpful this might be not for group projects but also for my personal ones.

I also created mockups for the first time using photoshop. I have seen these mockups done by Sofia, and I thought a flyer would look better in 3D. So I watched a couple tutorials and it actually was not that hard. I was still very proud in the end, because it looked so professional. Being professional has been an insecurity of mine for longer now, I have heard in feedback often that I need to be more „professional“. I was always wondering what that actually means, but I believe I am getting closer. These mockups are professional to me, because they show skill, they show the vision that I have and they are finished. They look clean. 

After that we did not talk again, but we will meet up again to celebrate the submission. Overall, i have been really happy with my group and the way we worked together. I really like the girls and I hope to stay in contact actually. Working with them was the easiest groupware I have ever experienced because they were interested, attending and enthusiastic. It feels weird to go back to normal now because I got so used to working with them over the past months. I will miss it!

I planned to finish my individual project in the beginning of the week but then the tea set I ordered did not arrive. So I had to find a quick alternative at home. I was also trapped at home because of the weather, I could not go back to Hamburg because no trains were running. In Hamburg I had all the other equipment for my project, like pens, markers, spray paint. Lastly, I have had ordered a LED photo light to be able to shoot professional pictures at home, I wanted one of these for a long time now. But before I could pick it up it was stolen. Just A LOT that happened this week.

Obviously, I had to adjust. I could only leave home on Thursday, which left me with 3 days for the personal project. To make the most of it, I started writing my text for the editorial/zene I am doing, mapped out the layout for the zene and prepared everything as far as possible. I painted the tea set with a friend on Friday. On Saturday the weather was really good, so I decided to take the pictures outside with sunlight. We went to a local park and layed out some white sheets as a background. When it comes to these things, I really wish we could go to Uni. Being and learning to be flexible is important, but having a photo studio would make the process a lot easier and more professional, without paying for additional personal equipment. I then finished the layout and the zene on Sunday along with the final submission pdf. 

I am really annoyed that it got so „last minute“ because I was really hoping to get everything done earlier this time. I wanted to keep Sunday free, to have it as a check and refined day before submitting. I believe you always have to sleep over a design and then look at it the next day, just to see if you’re still happy with it. These happenings were out of my control, but if I would have taken care of it earlier on, it wouldn’t have been such a problem. Still, I feel like this has gotten better through the project, because working with people who might be better organized than me really helped me create a structure/time plan that works for me. I hope that I will be able to use that knowledge from the beginning on during the next projects, preventing situations like this week from happening again. Overalls, I am still happy with the outcome of my project. Compared to what I would have done 6 ,months ago, I personally see a great process that I am proud of. The layout would not be as clean, the pictures would not have been edited this way and it would not be as cohesive. Still, with better time management I wonder what I would have done.