As far as my slide set for this contest I had a theme that I wanted to work from, the tale of the ugly ducking.

Using images from Flickr that are Creative Commons licensed I tried to portray a journey where it doesn’t matter where you start or where you end up, it’s what goes on in-between that counts. For me that fits into so many things in life, and if I remember my times in school, really expresses how I feel now about my education.

I also wanted to use the show to project a message of hope for people, some people may feel like they are eggs, trapped and very venerable, but when the shell is broken the real show begins (as the peacock displays his feathers).

I agree with the judges about the thematic difficulties with colours, but I feel that impact of the last slide is greatest, as it is such as contrast to the other relatively close-up images.

I really struggled with the wording for the final slide; the one used is one of several captions that I tried adding. I really wanted to say “look at me, I know this isn’t easy (life, school, work, etc) but we can all shine and be good at something, we just have to let ourselves”.

The final thing I was aiming for with this slide set was to let people read what the slides were saying without having to look at each slide individually, I know this isn’t strictly necessary, but it helped me see the link between the slides, so therefore, it must be helpful to the viewer of the slides.

As a soon to be trainee ICT Teacher, I am going to try and use this reflective, highly constrained but strangely liberating project idea somewhere if I can, and I have learnt some really nice design ideas from Ethan and the other competitors in the contest.

Finally, congratulations to Ethan, and to all the other contestants that entered this contest, fantastic work done by one and all.