Essay Completed

Over the next few blog posts I will be posting updates on work I have done over the past month, as I have had a difficult time with my mental health I did have a few weeks of not being able to work on my modules, though over the past two weeks I have started getting back into working again. 

That being said, this post I will go over my essay progress - the short summary is: it’s done! But I will give more of a breakdown here showing some of the pages in the essay. I am still awaiting feedback so changes may still be made after this point. 

Word Count

My word count from start of the Introduction to the end of my Research Reflection comes to 2671 words. As the essay requirements are for 2500 words with a 10% allowance over or under, this means my essay fits the criteria.
The total words of the whole essay, inclusive of also the Contents, Bibliography and Appendix comes to 2936 words, though this isn’t what is used for the word count requirement for the essay - just thought it was worth noting!

I definitely spread more of my word count in the Personal Research section as this had lots of specialism specific advice that I found really useful, the word count for that section came to 1312 words. The Practitioner Lecture Series I did 931 words, while still really insightful I found I didn’t get as much information as I did by speaking to industry artists one to one. 

Bibliography and Appendix 

Below is a screenshot of the Bibliography, I always find Harvard Referencing a little tricky but I think I have managed to do it correctly. I made reference to the talks we had, conversations I had with industry artists myself, and any images used in the essay (that weren’t in a talk linked already). I also had to go through this section and update my name as I had it legally changed and updated with the University!


For the Appendix I had to give evidence of conversations I had with industry artists, so in this section I included screenshots of the email discussions I had with Jack Eaves and Ben Erdt,  I also included my LinkedIn conversation with Jørunn Agnes. Below is a screenshot to give an idea of how I formatted the Appendix, effectively just screenshots cropped and centre aligned on each page!

Practitioner Lecture Series 

I know I have done a previous blog post going over the information I used in my essay for the Personal Research section, but I didn’t go over this other main segment of the blog - the Practitioner Lecture Series.

For this section, I covered three guest lecturers we had come to give talks at the University. These three practitioners being; Claire Norcross, Rebecca Appleby and Rob Watson.

Claire Norcross is a lighting designer, and I found her talk interesting as she went over the influence nature has in her designs, how she takes man-made inspiration and combines it with inspiration from nature. I have included a screenshot showing some of this segment below.


Next I made notes on the talk by Rebecca Appleby who is a ceramics designer, what I found interesting about this talk was that Appleby also made mention of influence she gets from organic and man-made material - a similar sentiment shared by Norcross. She gave an example of a project she worked on called “Urban Palimpsest” and how she got inspiration from industrial structures in her home town. I have included some screenshots showing this below.



To conclude this section of the essay I discussed graphic designer Rob Watson. Detailing work he did with the Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, Watson emphasised how important the research stages were in working with the client, how understanding what fans, players and staff within the FC felt about the club was crucial to designing branding that fit and made sense. Below is a screenshot of some of the work he did for the club which I included within the essay.


Research Reflection

Within the Research Reflection portion of the essay I went over some of the key takeaways I got from my research and writing the essay, I have included a screenshot of this portion below. Overall, I found working on the research for this essay really insightful, it was interesting getting the perspectives of artists within the games industry as well as watching the practitioner lectures.







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