Professor Nic Clear
Word Count: 483
On the 10th of February 2023, Professor and Dean, Nic Clear, who is a qualified architect, academic, writer, teacher, researcher, artist, filmmaker, curator, designer, art technician and builder came in to talk to us.
During Clear's talk, he spoke about his experience of a Paradigm Shift. He spoke about how one of his students stole all the work off a shared network and animated it, which changed everything. Clear realised that with the skill base he had as an architect, he could become a filmmaker and animator, which was something he'd wanted to do due to his interest in music. Clear worked with his musician friends to make pop videos, which helped him to expand past his creative field of architecture (Clear, 2023).
Clear also spoke about the book 'Educating Architects' by Neil Spiller (Spiller & Clear, 2014) which he edited. In this book, he wrote about architecture and the idea that the skills we learn and acquire in our current field can allow us to move into other disciplines, enabling us to expand our creative horizons. For example, as a photographer, I learn skills in Photoshop which helps me do retouching and some basic graphic design, I learn skills in InDesign which helps me with publishing. Clear asked 3 questions to prove this statement, 'Do you know what fonts are?' 'Do you have a favourite font?' 'Do you know what kerning is?'. Although, I personally only related to the first two questions as I did not know what kerning was yet, a lot of people in the room knew and they spanned over different disciplines from animation to interior design and many more. He then went on to talk about how 30 years ago, these questions would have only been answered by people in very niche and specialist fields, whereas now, within our disciplines we learn a range of skills (Clear, 2023).
From listening to Clear's talk, I felt very inspired to push myself out of my comfort zone as a photographer and explore graphic design work. I volunteered to create our social media posts for our team which involved designing appealing layouts by creating shapes and arranging different elements and text on the canvas. I am happy I decided to push myself and try this as I have really enjoyed it and gained graphic design skills that will help expand past photography after graduation. There is more on the skills I honed in graphic design, in my social media posts shown here.
I created this post, shown in Figure 2, that combined my photography skills with graphic design using Adobe Photoshop. I created lines and shapes which is something I had never done before, and I am happy with how it turned out. I am inspired by Nic and excited to continue exploring and experimenting with different elements in the layout to improve my skills which will definitely help me after graduation.
Illustrations
Figure 1 - University of Huddersfield. (n.d). Professor Nic Clear [jpeg]. University of Huddersfield. https://research.hud.ac.uk/art-design/events/adaresearchpracticetalks/
Figure 2 - Morley, J. (2023). Creative of the Week Post Mockup [jpeg]
References
Clear, N. (2023,02,10). Nic Clear Convergences Talk [pdf]. Art, Design and Architecture. https://brightspace.hud.ac.uk/d2l/le/content/220703/viewContent/2125895/View
Spiller, & Clear, N. (2014). Educating architects : how tomorrow's practitioners will learn today (Spiller & N. Clear, Eds.). Thames & Hudson.