Year 2: What's Happened So Far?

During the beginning of October, Julia McKim had come in to introduce the Collaboration Project which consists of both Highstreet store and a Designer brand of your choice and using the ‘trickle-down effect’ to design a range of black boots to be released in Autumn/Winter 2021. This industry briefing showed us students what is to come from this really interesting project which I have been greatly enjoying working on. It was also helpful to have the input from Julia who has experience within the industry as her advice helped to show a clear path of this project and this allowed me to enjoy this assignment from the earliest stage. The style of footwear is already in stores so market research can be carried out in both Highstreet stores and designer outlets which also allows me to gather primary photos and not solely online-sourced imagery.

I really enjoyed writing the blogs for Kim’s class which were set within the first month of Year 2. For the blogs, I carried out extensive research and spent a lot of time refining to produce entertaining reads.

I’ve never used Autodesk before Richard’s CAD classes but I have managed to adapt to the software as I can relate it to ones that I have and do use such as Sketchup, the 3D Design software. Alongside designing digital footwear on Autodesk, I have also been creating a software manual on using Autodesk for general design of footwear.

Comparing my time in Year 1 to now, it seems like I am being more time efficient when it comes to doing my footwear work as I am much more used to working on multiple assignments throughout the day. During my first year on this course, I found it difficult to find the right work balance between the modules but since then, it has been much easier to plan my days as to get the most out of them while making sure to have produced my best work in time to be handed in. One of the more important aspects of the modules is trend prediction so I have been utilising the WGSN service at DMU’s Kimberlin Library. The trend forecasts that have been produced by WGSN for upcoming seasons such as A/W 2021 have been very useful for me, especially for my Black Boots project, to receive inspiration for boot upper and sole unit designs.

Of course, as with any new thing, there have been some challenges with returning to full time study. One of them was only having a single week to create a collection of footwear designs for the Black Boots project and picking out the final 6 designs. Since this project is presented digitally, I have been laying it out using Adobe InDesign, drawing the silhouettes of my designs on Illustrator, and painting them on Photoshop. This process had to be repeated for many different designs and angles so the reading week, in which I had to produce this work, was a very busy one. The Black Boots project is actually my first project which is based around the ‘trickle down’ effect so it was a slight challenge doing the correct research and finding valid content and information to help me produce boot designs in the style of Prada and Zara.

I have been making my first ever pair of shoes in Manufacturing class and a great challenge has been trying to keep both shoes identical to one another but I hope to have finished this eight week project within the following weeks. After receiving feedback for my previous project proposal draft for the assignment of Kim’s class, I now have to produce a perfected final project proposal on ‘Rejuvenating Traditional Men’s Footwear’ for mid-November but I also have to continue on with the Black Boots project and have it finalised for the end of November. For me, the more difficult project that I am doing this year is the trend forecast assignment which in my case consists of creating a trend prediction website based around 2021’s Top Gun: Maverick movie. It’s actually been much more difficult of a project than I would’ve imagined since I find it relatively easy to work my way around website developers such as Wix but creation of my own forecasts is nothing I have ever experienced.

In conclusion to this blog entry, I have enjoyed every aspect of Year 2 so far with just being a month and a half back on the course and being back in study mode in a new accommodation.

Thank you very much for reading the blog and please feel free to leave any comments and feedback for me to read!