Professional Development Plan

So throughout the year I have had to take note of the things I have been doing that go towards developing my design skills and reflecting on them. All of this gets recorded in my personal development plan which gets handed in for my promotional design module along with my blog, portfolio and final exhibition. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to document everything in something other than a book and instantly went down the path of doing a timeline. After a few variations I ended up with a 5 meter long roll showing pretty much everything that I have done briefly since the start of my final year in Uni. Printing the thing out was actually the easy part, there was a slight hiccup in the fact that Photoshop can't open up a document with more than 30 million pixels and this therefore meant there was a slight reduction in quality of the final print (btw yes it was designed in InDesign yet still for some reason had to be printed through Photoshop, I have no idea why either). Still pleased with the end result I had to make up something for the roll to sit in so that it could be wound around using a handle to make it easier to read/display. This is where a lot of my time went recently, you will be able to see from the pictures below it wasn't all that straight forward. A bit of imagination is needed in the first few pictures;

After we realised the mechanisms inside the 2 roller blinds we had bought were different from one another we had to come up with a plan b and fast, so as you can see below we took apart a printer that was lying around and managed to find a decent belt and 2 cogs that could just about fit the bill.

Next stage we had to find 2 poles for the roll of paper to wrap around, 2 brushes were also to hand so they were quickly cut down and turned in a rather unconventional method, using a carbide tip cutter in a £45k CNC machine. Dad didn't have his woodworking tools with him...

Test piece of paper in the device and all worked rather well which was a surprise considering we were trying to put something together as we went along. A bit risky but it did what it needed to do!

Next stage was getting back into Uni to cut down the 5 meter roll. This was another part I wasn't looking forward to as it had to be done by hand and this early in the morning, me on week 6 of being ill and holding a scalpel, not ideal to be honest. Once cut, tested out on a small scrap whether masking tape could be rolled in the device which it could. I placed the tape down each side and it made the roll a lot less likely to tear underthe stress of turning.

In the device there is a small amount of movement from the beginning to the end of the roll but that was to be expected. A frame was made to hide all of the innards and to be painted so the final product wouldn't look as rough. Considering it is made up of 90% mdf and a glue gun I am just hoping it all stays together long enough to get marked. If I had more time and money it would have been dove tailed and put together out of something more impressive but I am very pleased with how it has turned out!