Design postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last Saturday I trimmed two hundred wedding menus on the guillotine at the print and copy shop where I work, and every one of them had the dessert course set in pale grey script at seven points. The couple had approved the proof on a phone screen. On paper, under the restaurant lighting they described, I suspected half their guests would not read it. I said so, gently. We reprinted with darker ink at a larger size, and the bride told me afterwards that her grandfather had read the whole menu aloud at the table. Small moments like this, where a design decision either reaches people or quietly fails them, are what I want to study more rigorously at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree in Graphic Communication gave me a solid grounding in typography, layout and image-making, but the work that has shaped my interests most was my final-year project. I redesigned my local council's recycling collection calendar, a folded A4 sheet that many people in my block of flats admitted they simply ignored. I began by asking twelve neighbours, ranging from a student to a retired bus driver, to find the next glass collection date while I watched. Several hunted for the key before they looked at the dates; two read the colour coding the wrong way round. I produced three alternatives and tested each with the same group. The version that worked best was the least decorative: one week per row, bin types shown by shape as well as colour, and the current month printed noticeably larger. It was not glamorous, but it was the first time I had evidence that one layout served people better than another, rather than a tutor's opinion or my own taste.

That project sent me to Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, and his distinction between affordances and signifiers helped me explain why my neighbours stalled: the original calendar gave no visible cue about where to start. Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information pushed me the other way, towards cutting decoration that carried no information. I do not agree with Tufte on everything; some of my testers found a little visual warmth made the calendar feel less like a demand from the council. Working out where that balance lies, and how to justify it with evidence, is the question I would like to pursue.

The print shop has turned out to be useful training. I handle files from people with no design background as well as from local studios, and I have learnt to diagnose problems quickly, from low-resolution logos to bleed that was never set up. I also explain those problems to customers who are often anxious and short of time, which has taught me to give clear choices rather than lectures. My manager now passes most of the trickier proof conversations to me.

Outside work I knit, and for the past two years I have written and sold my own jumper patterns online. Writing a pattern that a stranger can follow without messaging me is a surprisingly strict exercise in instructional design: charts, abbreviations and sequencing all have to work together. I swim twice a week at the local pool, mostly because it is the one hour in which I do not look at a screen.

At postgraduate level I want to move from intuition and small informal tests towards a more structured design research practice: learning how to plan studies properly, how to involve people ethically, and how to write about design decisions with the same care I put into making them. I am particularly interested in information design for public services, where clarity is not a matter of style but of whether people can get on with their lives. I bring practical production knowledge, patience with real users and a habit of checking whether my work actually functions, and I am ready for the challenge of deepening all three.