OUGD402 Personal and Professional Practice Seminar Manifesto

We started out this session with some presentations by a couple of third years, detailing their personal and professional practice manifestos. They used the manifesto to define who they were as designers and how this has shaped what they want to do with their design skills; such as moving foreword with design, doing something new or wanting to change the world. 
We were then challenged to find out what the first things first manifesto was without googling it. i went and asked a second year and found out that it was a list of beliefs and self appointed rules that designers decided on in 1964, this was a time when graphic designers were advertisers to a great extent and this meant that they became tired of the consumerism and vacuousness of design. They outlined that they wanted ethics and morals to apply to graphic design and creative practices in general, in short applying an honest purpose to the practice. 

We were then asked to pair up and produce a manifesto between us detailing our own personal approach to the motivation behind our design process and practice. Me and Vanessa came up with the following list.

1. Design that makes consumerism bearable.
2. design that has a clear, concise and intelligent thought process behind it.
3. Design that effectively communicates a message to its chosen audience.
4. don't follow trend, do what you believe to be right.
5. Drawing during the design process is imperative. 
6. respect the rules of design enough to break them in the right ways.

We then got the brief:

To use this manifest to create a piece of graphic design that Ian Anderson would want to keep for life. the obvious first stage of research for this brief would be to research Ian and what kind of design he is involved in. I will then look into further analysing the items in our manifesto and if they give any hints as to a definite direction to go in.