The last two or so months…

Hi all, here’s the final update…

My year away was wonderful. I feel re-energised and can’t wait to be back at LCC, which is very, very, very soon. I’m sad that it’s over: it was hard to pick up the pace of it, and now that I have mastered the limbo of freelancing, interning, competitions, dissertation writing and personal projects, I have to stop it all to dedicate myself fully to university. To anyone who’s reading this who might be considering the same or about to embark on your year out, do not despair, it takes practice but it all be worth it in the end. Looking back at January, straight back in cold old London after three months in Brazil, I saw very little hope of doing anything productive during this year: failed interviews and already booked up agencies, a couple of freelance jobs with clients that were so painful that I thought they were made up by friends as a joke. With time, patience, lots and lots (and I mean unreal amounts) of hard work and dedication, it all came together. It all came beautifully together!

Over the last couple of months I’ve been struggling to keep up with everything: I learnt a lot about many things this year, but I still haven’t mastered the art of saying no to interesting projects or to well-paid bad ones. So I dragged myself in a loop of work where I wasn’t able to manage the amount of stuff I had to do: I’m now slowly getting out of it. Slowly. (I’m not sure exactly how, but I met all deadlines.) It was the most rewarding time of the year, and I loved every single minute of it, even when I’m on my 21st coffee because I’ve been working straight for 36 hours and can barely tell the difference between magenta and cyan. 

So what have I been up to?

I printed and bound a lovely book for the wonderful Kim Walker.

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The animations I did at Provokateur for Regal Egg Cups went online on The Sabotage Times website.

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I volunteered at the Paralympic Games.

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I started a project for a fashion brand which the client decided to abandon mid-way, so all I can show you is a bunch of colour swatches.

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I worked with Nuno Santos, for his company Savant, to make up one of the best branding projects I’ve been involved with to date! The image shows the contact sheet of our final PDF presentation as the project is not live yet.

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My shop and notebooks got featured on Creative Boom, which I was absolutely stoked about!

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I applied and got accepted to be part of HTC x Capture Collective collaboration, snapping pictures with a phone that will get exhibited in London later on! (Mainly thanks to my phone-photography blog,here)

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I started learning Chinese at SOAS, which I’ll be doing weekly until June.

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I collaborated with Isobel Williams to present a proposal to hold a stall in Pick Me Up 2013.

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I did lots of little freelance to pay the bills. And attended a bunch of conferences/talks.

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Made and sold more notebooks, which you can check out here if you haven’t already.

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And I’m now finishing the poster announcing the DPS talks in December, down in letterpress.

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I took two weeks to dedicate to the dissertation and research for the self-initiated project, which are now starting to take shape.

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And I managed to squeeze two weeks of sunny holidays in the between!

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Marta

• Marta Santos