One Last Thing has moved…

Please go to my new blog site at sianlouise.co.uk/blog for more up to date information, work, news and adventures from Sian Louise.

An Element of Change…

So, a while ago, I debated about changing over to WordPress.org because then my blog would be part of my own website and not part of wordpress.com. I tried and tried and tried to install WordPress.org and found it almost impossible. It turns out I was doing everything right but my provider had given me the wrong password. So, yesterday, just to see if it would work one more time, I tried the new password and miraculously, it had worked! I wasn’t planning on this happening but ever since I’ve felt so clever and have even edited all the code so that the new blog site now looks like my website.

If you’re here expecting more posts, I don’t think they will arrive unfortunately because I’ve now moved to a blog site that’s completely mine! It still has all of the same bloggy goodness on the new one, it just looks better. I still need to make a banner for the top of it but the rest is all sorted look wise. And there will be some new features on my blog. Some constructed in the right way features, not just drivel! While you’re there, take a look at my work too by clicking the back to home link. I’m so excited about all of this, I hope you like it. Let me know what you think.

Greeting Cards – The other beginning…

In my last post, I told you all about my Greeting Cards and well, I have some good news and bad news. The bad news is that I went up to a local shop and asked if they could sell my cards, they loved the cards but wanted to buy them for much too little so we agreed it wouldn’t be best. The good news is that I’m now selling them on Etsy.com. It’s all very exciting! My little shop is called: ‘Designed with Love by Sian-Louise’ and I am very looking forward to all of this taking off. The A6 size cards are up for sale at $3.26 and there are cards for most situations. By the end of today, you will be able to buy A5 size cards from my little shop and in the very near future I hope to sell other products.

Greeting Cards – The beginning

Whilst searching for placements and internships, I’ve come up with a little venture to keep me busy. I’ve started to design greeting cards to sell both online and at small events where they are suitable (school fetes, fun days and pamper evenings). I started off with a couple of designs and as I’ve gone along I’ve added designs. I’m selling them a the small price of £2. They are all hand-painted, all unique, and are blank inside for your own greeting and message. I’ll keep you posted on where I decide to sell them, ie. ebay or etsy. This will be the first place for anyone to hear about new designs.

D&AD

<You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve tried and tried to make this blog part of my website but have failed so far, so I’m sticking around for a bit.>

Last week, I exhibited at D&AD, It was a great experience. Above is a photo of our stand where we exhibited and a table in the center for our portfolios. It was really good seeing so much good work there, scary to see the competition I’m up against but I’m willing to take on the challenge.

The Four days of networking and the heat were punctuated with talks from Design Agencies like Design Bridge and Navy Blue. It was really good to meet these guys and if you’re reading this, thank you so much for letting us look around your studio.

It was also good to meet like-minded people who were graduating at the same time, everyone is in the same boat so it was good to speak to other graduates.

One other thing that I did learn, is that I’ve got a lot of hard work to do. I definitely want to keep looking, drawing and being inspired. It was a highly inspirational experience and I loved every moment. I definitely want to be doing this kind of thing more often, getting involved, speaking to people and constantly learning makes me smile!

Sadly we watched England get kicked out of the World Cup in our four days there, In ShellSuitZombie’s room with bean bags and free beer, (I don’t like beer but I had my ever reliable bottle of water!) It was sad to see England get kicked out.

To round up D&AD, it finished with the D&AD student awards. Two of our Advertising Students won commended for their E4 Monday Movie Nights. Congratulations Girls!

The big blogging debate // 200th Post

Welcome to One Last Thing’s 200th Post. How exciting! It comes at quite a pivotal time, the end of uni, the end of education, the start of the beginning…

I was reading over on Rachel’s blog that she is considering changing the way that she writes her blog. She writes on Google’s blogger and is considering moving over to WordPress.org. Where it is provided by WordPress.org and is connected to your own website. I’ve got my own sparkly new website, which is now live and working, no-one looks at it, well, if you’ve come from there to look at my blog, hello! But if you do take time to look at my work, please do not hesitate to send me a message (via e-mail of course) just to say hello. I’d be pleased to meet you if you want to take a look at my work. :D

As I was saying, there is all of this kerfuffle over whether to stick with blog providers like tumblr, blogger, wordpress.com which provide a seperate web page for blogging goodness. Or creating a new one on something like wordpress.org to have a blog on the same webpage as your work and portfolio etc. Everything is one place. Simples! Or not…I’ve tried many a time to install wordpress.org and have had no luck as yet and felt like I was wasting my time, wordpress say it takes just 5 minutes to set up but, 3 hours later and I was still trying to work out what was going on. So, the long and short of it all is, I’ve decided to stick with my wordpress.com for a bit and spend less time trying and more time writing. :) If anyone has any suggestions of how I can create a wordpress.org blog attached to my website, carrying over all of my 200 posts and using the same design as my existing website, please let me know…answers on a postcard to hello@sianlouise.co.uk please!

If you didn’t know, I was at D&AD last week…see! More about that later!

Newport Graduates 2010

So, the end of University, I’ve now moved from Newport back to Hertfordshire and have found myself with less time on my hands with the ever growing list of things that I want to get done in the next month. I’m quite sad to have left my life of Education, it’s quite a strange feeling but I feel ready. I’m going to miss everybody but we will definitely meet again, I’ll make sure of it!

To round up our years at University, I’ve decided to list the people I know who have their own websites:

Me

Katie Shingles

Tom Morris

Duncan Gravestock

Michael Lomax

Matthew Dunn

Lisa Holland

Jon Ford

My Website

This Website still needs a bit more work but isn’t everything a working progress? Take a look and let me know what you think:

Sian-Louise Griffiths // Graphic Design

The Graduate Show

So, After the kerfuffle with my not checking my work enough times, My Timeline had to printed all over again. With Thanks to my lovely tutors, who were really understanding that everybody makes mistakes. It just so happened that my mistake was at the most inconvenient time and the Timeline had to be printed over night and delivered at lunch time the next day. So I learned from my mistake and the show looked really good in the end. Here are some photos from the Graduate Show (Spot the proud parents!) :

So, after all of that work, the show had been a success, everyone who I spoke to, enjoyed the show and thought that the work was of a high standard. I was really happy with how it all came together.

Graduate Show Preparation

I know it’s very late to be publishing this but I feel I have to. Setting up for the Graduate Show was exciting, it was good to see all of the work, that we’d all worked so hard for, coming together and looking great.

I learned something really important when setting up for the show: That it doesn’t matter how much you check your work (and I checked my work for spellings, mistakes, and other things possibly a million times) but when you’re dealing with a banner that it almost 2 metres long and full with type, there’s destined to be a mistake. So, it’s always worth checking it one more time. Because noticing a mistake once it has been printed is possibly the worst time to notice it! Here are a few photos from when we were setting up the show.