Thursday 6th February

This morning I worked on another business card. This time it was for a matchmaking business called "Happiness Connective". The business already has a brand and a website, they simply wanted business cards to match. This meant that I already had all of the artwork, colours, fonts and contact details and all I had to do was design the layout of the card. After I designed the card I asked Adam to take a look at it. As soon as I asked for his opinion he started making small changes. He made a lot of alterations and the design soon looked more like his than it did mine. I ask for his opinion because he has more knowledge than me, he has more experience than me, and he has an incredible eye for detail, but I just think that sometimes he gets a little carried away and rather than giving me some pointers to experiment with he ends up working on it himself. 
I made two variations of the business card, one the way I had designed it but incorporating some of the changes Adam made such as the alignment and spacing, and one with all the alterations Adam had made. We then sent both of these to the client and they ended up choosing the design that I had worked on. I think that this goes to show that my ideas are good and I need to trust my own designs more.
I think that Adam has a very specific style and when I design something it doesn't look how he would personally design it, so he starts to make changes. While I think that it is good to have a signature style, it is a little frustrating when you're working as part of a team. As designers we all have strong ideas of what he like and don't like and because design is so subjective opinions will clash. I still think that Adam is extremely talented and I value his opinion, so in future I will just make sure to ask for his opinion on what I have done, but not ask what he would do, as this is where he starts to personally make changes. While I want the designs to be my own, I do think that the alterations he suggests always make my designs stronger so I will continue to note any hints and tips that he gives me, and take on board all constructive criticism that he gives when I do ask for his opinion. Hopefully this will enhance my skills with the finer details such as alignment and spacing (which is what Adam tends to pick up on) while still giving me the opportunity to develop my own style and bring something unique to the company.

In the afternoon, I continued to work on the branding for Sales Force 10, but my pace on this project is now starting to get really slow as I feel I have developed the logos as best I can without a second opinion. I told Julian that I would like him to look at the logos before I carried on tweaking them, so I printed them off and we sat and discussed them. He really liked two of the concepts, and one of the colour palettes, but he didn't like one of the logos. This was because I had created a rainbow coloured vortex on a black background in Photoshop and added white text beneath it and it looked more like an album cover than a recruitment logo. However, he did like the font I used so we decided that I should try this on its own as the third logo. Therefore I now just need to develop a fourth logo for Tuesday.