Pipped at the post!

After hundreds of votes were cast, my design to advertise a budget airline came in at a respectable second! Really quite pleased with myself! See the top ten runners and riders here at The Drum. Having never entered a design competition before, I have now officially got the competition bug... Thanks to all those that voted for me, and well done to the other entries.

I made it onto the short list!

As some of you may have read earlier in the week, I recently entered a graphic design competition hosted by the Drum magazine to advertise a budget airline - and I made the short list!! I am super excited - it's the first design competition I've ever entered, so currently sporting a rather large grin. As a reader of my blog, please could I ask for a small favour? Please could you click this link and "like" my entry? It's the one with the line "live a little for not a lot." If you could, that would be awesome - thank you!! I will keep you posted on the outcome.  

Playing around with Illustrator yesterday I created a cute little fairy that my nieces will totally love. In fact I have created them one each to match their hair and eye tones, as well as favourite colour... I was so pleased with it, that I thought I'd give it a whirl, and turn myself into the homepage fairy for a week or so, after all it is my site. Although I will probably go back to my usual photo which is more in line with my website as a whole in a few weeks time. See what you think of the creative fairy.

At school in art lessons I was always told to come up with ten variations on a theme, choose my three best ideas, develop several ideas based on those ideas to get a final result, which I then had to work on, oh and to keep a notebook of my all my workings out and which artists I had looked at to get my ideas. I have to admit it was a very lengthy process... And when I started on the path of graphic design, I thought that this was what I had to do for every project and like before it was a very lengthy process... And so, to my present situation. The other day I was casually browsing the internet and came across a competition #tightbriefs on the Drum twitter feed in response to the new Ryanair advert. Come up with a design that shows "how you would advertise a budget airline" (full article here) have your submission in by midnight. And here's what I cam up with in about half an hour. What I learned about this first dabble in the graphic design competition world is that my speed has really picked up. I am under no illusion that I will win, but with this entry I have proved to myself that I can turn around a project in a restricted time frame with no trouble - and this is something I wouldn't have been able to do three years ago. I'm really quite pleased with myself for submitting this for two reasons. One, I have proved to myself that I can turn around a task efficiently when called upon and two, I would never have been able to even submit anything as I did not have the confidence in my abilities to ever hit upload a few years ago. This is all down to gaining that all important design experience. Yes, every designer dreams of being able to complete the Sistine Chapel ceiling on a Mac, with idea generation and time to fulfill the task to the best of their capabilities. But what I have learned along the way is that sometimes speed is of the essence and getting something down on paper is often half the battle.