As I look back on my work over the course of this past term, I see that I met many of my stated goals when beginning the term. We did a fairly robust set of work exploring and developing competence in the language used in marketing. The lexicons process highlighted and drew upon the curiosity of the group and I probably learned more about marketing language than I realized.
I also gained a base level of comfort navigating the Adobe Creative Suite. It is clearly a powerful tool that I do not expect to ever gain a complete understanding of. What I found most helpful, was first coming up with an idea, and then googling around until I found a way to make my idea real. From there, I made a lot of mistakes, and eventually found comfort in understanding that I could not know everything, but that there was a robust support community around the internet ready to help my designs come to life.
I did get to exploring Trello as a project management tool. I particularly found the Gantt chart add-ons most helpful. I didn’t really feel like I had a handle on the term’s workload until I put all the term’s assignments into Trello and visualized them in the Gantt chart format. Still, that particular program felt a little underdeveloped, especially in the freeware version. Identifying critical paths seemed more difficult than it should have. It did appear that additional add-ons could bring increasing levels of functionality. Still, it was more than I was willing to pay for a series of partial solutions. In the future, when I’m shopping for my next project management software, I think I will try for something with a more robust and integrated feature set.
With regard to my goal developing of brand awareness, I appreciated seeing more insight into the breadth of logos and marks out there, but I feel like we spent much of our time focusing on logos and design. Perhaps not enough time talking about branding can connect with customers and clients. I hope to explore more of this aspect of branding and the development of focused marketing campaigns in the next term.
I am quite pleased with efforts to concentrate on design awareness and design skill. I feel like I have a handle on several techniques to keep my designs looking generally good. However, I am still quite curious about ways and means of making my designs communicate specific, perhaps intangible things to clients to get them to behave in ways we would like them to behave. In short, I feel like I have a reasonable handle on how to make good designs. I am now curious about how to make effective designs and why certain choices can lead to different outcomes.
In general, I am quite pleased with this course. I look forward to coming back in the winter for part II