What I have learnt

When we were given our first brief, to create a music app I initially wasn’t very excited because in my foundation year we had to redesign a music app. However throughout the process I actually found myself enjoying it. I feel the illustration aspect of the brief is what kept me excited. During this module I learnt there is a lot more to illustration than just taking a pencil to paper. I learnt that it is the art of creating visual representations and a creative discipline that combines artistic skills and techniques with story tellings or communication objectives. When we moved onto data visualisation, although I had never worked on a project like this before I knew I was going to enjoy it. I’ve always enjoyed problem solving and having a task to structure and organise data pin a logical and meaningful way excited me. Throughout the project my excitement never faded as I enjoyed every minute of it and this has taught me that I would maybe like to go into doing work like this in the future.

What challenged me

Along the process I ran into a few challenges however I feel I overcame most of these. I have never been a great researcher however this module really pushed me into getting more research done. I struggled quite a bit at the beginning with knowing what to research and how to do it especially for the music app as I wasn’t feeling the project that much. I’m still not at the level I would like to be but from the beginning I feel like I have improved. When creating charts fro my dashboard a ran into a few problems with the data for my sleep chart. As the y-axis was hours and the data I collected was in hours and minutes this confused me initially however I worked around the problem by converting my data into hours in decimal. This ensured all data was correct and showing the right values on the chart. This was then easy for me to complete for my screen time chart as I had overcome the problem.

What to improve on

Like I mentioned above research is something I would like to improve on as it is my main challenge on this course. I am trying to improve my skills by doing weekly research into topics and artists that my lecturers suggest. I also would like to improve my time keeping, although I got everything handed in on time I feel if I managed my time more I could achieve a little bit extra, such as extra research work. Another thing I would like to improve more on is talking about my work, I struggled a lot with this throughout a levels and my foundation year however I feel like I have got better at it but still not the level I would like to be at. I feel reading would help with this as it would extend my vocabulary and help me learn more about the work I do.

Overall, I really enjoyed this module and hope to work on more data visualisation projects in the future.