[THISISINTERN LIVE] FROM ALEC&VICKY (WED 8PM)

Vicky Carr (the engine house) and Alec 

what would you be doing now to prepare for the future if you were a final year student rn? 

• Do work online 
• time and space to think about your portfolio
• Your online presence how you present yourself to the outside world 
• Reach out to people, send others your portfolio to get feedback 
• Take a look on social media (linkedin, twitter, instagram) 
• Help each other! Feedback on others’ work 
• Access to resources
• Portfolio websites, creative softwares  (discount deals, free access) 

Any tips on coping with a lack of resources? (to digital) 

• good alternatives, great training opportunity 
• How you can show your ideas and produce work digitally 
• Physical work would have to be photographed 
• Might begin with digital work 
• interactive, some people like digital things 
• Not “everything is digital now” 
• Can’t make anything, you can propose anything 
• Use language and sketches to picture your ideas! 
• Portfolio: how you present your work to the outside world 
• Physical execution isn’t always good, might undermine the idea 
• Digital mockups could be creative (take pictures of billboard, walls…) and stick your work into that on PS
• Good stock website: mockupsforefree.com, graphic burger, free adobe stock 
• Learn smth new? Youtube! Linkedin learning! Google! 
• Don’t have to be all-round, don’t have to be perfect! 
• More tools you take on, more language you have to express yourselves 
• Keep on learning!  Actively learning through your career!
• Don’t fear to learn and sort things out 
• Digital work only: development is king
• Would like yo see you try, could hand in smth terrible
• Key is to show your thinking and development 
• Portfolio is just a conversation piece for you to know each other
• Just to show how you approach things 
• More interested in the ideas, not exactly the final outcome 
• Make portfolio even more interactive! Moving images? 
• Yes final outcomes are important, but ideas are the key 
• Blog your developmental work, portfolio is to showcase final outcome 
• Put your development somewhere that could be accessed 
• Essay work, thesis: just pick subject (smth new to tutors) 
• Make it experimental and fun 

Does a student’s mental health factor in to the overall design process? How are you balancing your mental health and design work? 

• Schedule and plan, structure time  
• Routine
• relax, don’t stress yourself too much 
• Go outside, take a walk!
• Dont settle 
• Make use of reminders app on Macs 
• Keep yourself on track of everything
• Make lists of lists 
• Ponadoro technique: 15mins, 5 mins break… 
• How to be a freelancer? Get up in the morning, get dressed, get back and do work, makes you motivated 
• Exercise a bit! 
• Find your way to stay motivated!  
• It tough to be super productive all day for everyone!! 
• Be kind to yourself, it fine! 
• Try new things, make it exciting! 

Do you think there will be a place for print design now?

• print offices 
• slow, but works too! 
• Get stuff delivered! 
• Print vs digital 
• Interactive? Shareable? 

Do you have any advice for photography students? 

• stop shooting? 
• Design and visual art? 
• If you can use your daily walk to go and document things? 
• Smth fascinating might come out! 
• The strong and airiness of streets 
• Observe things, zoom in all the details 
• Make a photo series , document your home, surroundings, family 
• Make photo books, zines 
• Image can define a situation, so record things from now! 
• Nice opportunities to work on your editing skills, digital side of practice 

How can we go about getting our faces out there s graduates now that a lot of events and network cancelled?

• there will be a comeback 
• Would be adjusted! 
• Just keep creating! 
• Face to face online meetings 
• People are trying to join up through online meetings 
• Look for those and chat with and reach out to people through those 
• events, directory sites 
• thedots
• dezeen

Do you have any advice for students freelancers when freelance opportunities are super thin on the ground?

• show the work you wanna get 
• Work that you do want do? 
• Reach out to people 
• You are not bothering people!! Just reach out!!  
• Don’t think that people genuinely don’t want to hear from you 
• Send emails! 

How can we get the most out of virtual portfolio review?

• Figure out what you are looking for? 
• Ask questions specially 
• How can I xxx?, is xxx?
• Keep in touch! 
• Always ask for recommendation!
• Use the network, the industry is small
• Ask for advice and suggestions! 
• feedback, crits, pitch? Be specific! 
• Tell them what is it you want! 
• Who you are? What you want? What you want them to do? 

Will studios still be hiring at the moment? placements? 

• yea 
• In demand 
• People switching things online, switching medium 
• Things can be done remotely with your laptop, phones…
• Placement doesn’t have to be 5 day a week 
• Opportunity is still there, but its nature might be different now 
• Keep looking, keep searching, don’t give up 

Vic's advice 

• keep calm, keep an open mind about things 
• Keep in touch with lecturers 
• Get facts 
• See opportunities in things and try to relax! 
• Send vic an email! 

MY THOUGHTS 

I have been checking on these online live talks on instagram! (@thisisintern, @livetalkfrom) Creatives give out advice and talk about their work through IG lives. I am actually quite into theses kind of online talks. As I am not keen on talking, these talks definitely help me a lot! (even not during the quarantine…) This is a talk from Alec and Vicky! They talked about things we could do out of the most during the quarantine. The main thing that they would like to bring up is that make good use of the digital world and do not fear about the change. Learn new stuff using free software deals and keep learning! Even professional designers are learning throughout their careers and it is actually the best time and opportunity for us to learn new skills. It depends on how me make full use of the quarantine time and get what you want from it. 

After the talk, I feel so motivated. I was quite stressed since the quarantine started and was trying to make full use of the time and keep things back on track. The talk kind of helped me to calm down. I also feel motivated to learn new softwares! I feel like the quarantine is sort of hint to the future that most things would be switched into digital medium. Physical outcome and development is important, yet, digital work would be the trend and that it is crucial to equip myself with sufficient software skills in order to survive in the outside world. Therefore, if time allows, maybe when I get my COP work sorted and get 505 done, I would like to try new stuff like 3D cinema to maybe create some kinetic typography..? Or maybe try recording stuff through photography or filming and try learning video editing skills. To be honest it has been something that I would really want to learn, but I have been putting it aside as I got worried about the outcome a lot. But like what Vic said, development is king. Just give it a go and start trying and keep learning! The outcome could be shit but the idea could be mad. 

POSTER TASK (IMAGE ONLY)

1.

It is based on the idea of the devil tarot card. The card shows Baphomet, or the Horned Goat of Mendes, a creature that is half man, half goat. I then googled an image of Baphomet torturing people and used it as the starting point.  It is then being manipulated by applying the distortion glass effect from Illustrator and being image traced into a black and white image. The final image is slightly distorted and the silhouette of the half man half goat creature could still be seen clearly. 

2.

I then cropped a bloody scene in a painting where Saran was killing people. I then stretched it to fit the vertical A3 artboard. As it is a graphic scene, I decided to cover them up with black blocks to create an effect of censorship. However, after added those blocks, the image became really flat, therefore, in order to add texture, I pixellated the background image with the colour halftone effect. Finally I image traced it to make it black and white to meet the task requirement. 

FINAL PRODUCT

1. Distortion 
   
2. Censorship and pixelation 
   

[RESEARCH] BRIEF CONCEPTUAL RESEARCH

CONCEPTUAL RESEARCH 

WHAT IS…

D

= The general tendency to maximize one's individual utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others —, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.

D factor 

= D represents the one basic general dispositional tendency of which specific dark traits arise as manifestations

= represents the common core of all dark traits. 

D core 

• Egoism 
• Machiavellianism 
• Moral disengagement 
• Narcissism 
• Psychological entitlement 
• Psychopathy 
• Sadism 
• Self- interest 
• Spitefulness

Dark traits

= aggression, selfish, or cheating

THE PERSONALITY TEST

“individuals high in D will pursue behaviors that unilaterally benefit themselves at the cost of others and, in the extreme, will even derive immediate utility for themselves (e.g., pleasure) from disutility inflicted on other people (e.g., pain). Vice versa, individuals high in D will generally not be motivated to promote other’s utility (e.g., helping someone) and will not derive utility from other’s utility as such (e.g., being happy for someone).”

“There are a variety of beliefs that may serve as justification, including that high-D individuals consider themselves (or their group) as superior, see others (or other groups) as inferior, endorse ideologies favoring dominance, adopt a cynical world view, consider the world as a competitive jungle, and so on.”

“over the life span or over some period of time, so you could actually intervene in this kind of trait.” — Prof. Benjamin E. Hilbig form the University of Koblenz-Landau

• The most predominant of these tendencies are known as the “dark triad”, which includes psychopathy (a lack of empathy), narcissism (excessive self-absorption), and Machiavellianism (the belief that the ends justify the means).
• There is a total of 75 questions in the test for doers to answer. Most questions are inclined to bring out the dark side of oneself.
• Mostly scenarios that force people to make choice, whether to put their own interests first, or to take care of others first. 
• All of them are themed under the dark side of humanity which is categorised into the D factors 
• Egoism 
• Machiavellianism 
• Moral disengagement 
• Narcissism 
• Psychological entitlement 
• Psychopathy 
• Sadism 
• Self- interest 
• Spitefulness 
• People with a higher score seem to take pleasure in causing others pain. 
• The ‘D-factor,’ which links all of these tendencies, addresses that person’s propensity to disregard or provoke others’ hardship to meet their own goals or interests.
• individuals maximize their own utility, go to what is their own best self-interest [and] to some extent taking into account or not taking into account it may hurt others, and another very important aspect is that many of these people can hold beliefs that serve for them as justification for their behavior.
• gives you a very good prediction of how this person might behave

MY THOUGHTS 

After researching on the D core and D factors, I realised that it might be too narrow as a theme, therefore, I created a mind map and tried to further develop the idea. I came up with a few more potential themes that is related to the dark side of personality/ humanity. 

1. satan 
2. The devil tarot card 

• satan could be the main visual theme of the outcome 
• RESEARCH ON SATAN ART 
• I can play around with the concept of rainbow colours being joyful and BNW being dark 
• The dark traits of personality correlates to devils 
• THE DEVIL (tarot card)
• could maybe create a set of play cards under the theme of tarot, but only with “the devil” cards? 

THE DEVIL- TAROT

UPRIGHT

Shadow self, attachment, addiction, restriction, sexuality

REVERSED

Releasing limiting beliefs, exploring dark thoughts, detachment

• shows Baphomet, or the Horned Goat of Mendes, a creature that is half man, half goat.
• represents good and evil, male and female, and human and animal

MY THOUGHTS 

I found the idea of balance white interesting. My initial idea aim of the brief is to make people admit and accept their dark personality traits and to know more about themselves and others. After knowing about the balance idea from the THE DEVIL card, I found out that striking a balance between your dark personality traits and your good ones is crucial when it comes to humanity. Being too good might bring harm to yourself, but at the same time being too evil might do the same. This idea of striking a balance could be applied to the visual elements of the outcome. Taking play cards as example, instead of only using dark traits, I could make use of colours to balance the dark theme off? 

VISUAL ELEMENTS 

1. Balance between the good and the bad 

• make use of visual elements to make the outcome less dark? 
• The use of colours to lessen the discomfort ness? 

2. Satan, the evil spirit 

• middle age art 
• As background images? With bold words in the foreground? 

3. The devil card (tarot) 

• the interesting texture of images in tarot cards 
• Play cards with only THE DEVIL cards? 

CONCEPTUAL RESEARCH METHODS

1. INTERVIEW
2. NEWS ARTICLES 
3. SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS (PERSONALITY TESTS)
4. OBSERVATION 
5. DISCUSSION 

CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH METHODS

1. GRAPHIC DESIGN ELEMENTS 

• rainbow vs BNW
• Satan
• Triangle (dark train diagram) 
• Flower graph (d core diagram)

2. EXISTING PLAY CARDS 

NEW IDEA DEVELOPMENT

IDEA DEVELOPMENT 

After a while of research on the coronavirus which was thought to be my research topic for 505, I realised that I actually would like to research on something more personal, rather than a social issue. I have been really interested in humanity and would like to dig deep into the theme and educate myself with more knowledge about it. Plus, I have done quite a few projects on social issues since Year1 and I feel like do something more abstract would be more interesting and refreshing. Also, I might want to leave the coronavirus vs racism idea for next year's 10 briefs. Therefore, I made up my mind and decided to go for the theme "DARK FACTOR OF PERSONALITY" which is kind of new to me. I came across this idea a few days ago when a friend sent me the D factor personality test. It aroused my curiosity in the dark traits of one's personality. The test can definitely help me to know more about my true self, as well as letting my friends know more about me. I therefore analysed a few points below.

After doing the test, I sent the link to my other friends and we talked about our results for quite a while and sort of analysed each of our personality based on our actions in daily lives and how we treated each other. The conversation was really interesting and I thought the idea of the test is really useful for people to know more about themselves. People always have the tendency to listen to love listening to praises rather than lectures, telling them what they did wrong. I thought that spreading the idea of D factor can definitely help people to admit the their dark personality traits and help them to accept their true selves. 

POTENTIAL OUTCOMES 

For my final outcome, my aim is to have more people know about the D factors of personality and help them to know more about themselves and even people around them. I think that it is important for us to realised the dark side of ourselves and try to cope with it and accept our true selves.

In what kind of circumstances will make you want to know more about yourself? Or make you want others to know more about you? 

1. Play cards
2. A self help book? A tiny one? 
3. A drinking game? Board game? 
4. A series of images(dark traits personality)  that create a sense of disgust and discomfort?