So I created a WordPress Blog on my website the other day. Haven't fleshed it out as much as I did with this one, so I suppose for the time being I will continue to blog here when I am feeling in the mood to do such. Not really sure what I would want to blog about other than recent art and griping complaints.

For instance, my finances have taken a signifigant hit recently, and my freelance job is quickly slipping through my fingertips. Dave can't get his site to work for some reason, and I am having trouble figuring it out as well, as it wasn't a change I implemented for him.

Testing this along with an RSS feed today. Lots of stuff to update you all on in the near future.

I got a Mac. My boss gave it to me at work. Said he wanted me to take it home so I could get the work done that I couldnt get done at the office. Wheee. It died yesterday. I paniced, and came out ahead a little bit. I bought a late 2004 model Mac iBook loaded with Adobe and Macromedia stuff on eBay for 495 dollars including shipping. Big investment for me. I might turn around and sell it, (because I found out that Mac Mini's are only 569 dollars this week for a brand new one, monitor and peripherals to be provided seperately (easy for me to do, seeing as all thats working are my peripherals...))

In any case, its been a long week, and I have some work and play to get done. Ta Ta for now. Oh, and here's a sample of what I've done lately. Enjoy!

Posting a new version of my logo for my website, which I call my "Solar Logo"

Remembering Week 7 (I’m behind a week still… better than some?)

DDP Chapter 7

Digitizing your artwork.

If at all possible, find a high resolution scanner to do this work with. It will save you countless hours of trouble and frustrations. Cause low rez looks cruddy, and batteries and photo processing cost a bundle. I work with an HP ScanJet 4670, it has a unique design that allows me to scan any surface, be it a piece of paper, a work of art on a wall, or even the Sistine chapel should I be so inclined. This is because the scanner is a single sheet that can be moved pretty much anywhere as long as its connected to a power supply and a computer.

However some places a scanner, power supply, and computer (didn’t you invest in a laptop?) can’t go. For those places (grand canyon’s new glass bridge for one) you should have a handy dandy digital camera. Perfect for all sorts of odd jobs (like taking pictures of 3D objects) that your scanner simply wasn’t designed for. Add in a few memory cards (which are prohibitively inexpensive these days) and you have in your hands the best friend you will ever have. I use a Canon S2 IS camera, professional grade with 12x optical (you need this!) zoom so picture quality doesn’t degrade. You can do all the digital zooming and cleaning up your little heart desires in our old pal Photoshop.

So now your physical art is digitized, now what? Touch it up of course. Chances are no matter how good the lighting and quality you got on the conversion, there’s stuff that could be better. Photoshop to the rescue again, you can play around with levels, brightness, and thousands of other settings until you get it just right.

Building Design Portfolios 41-74

I am praying to all the gods and demons who’s names I can remember to please please please, let my portfolio be able to take on extra content. The planetary form I’ve chosen leaves some room in the moon phase animations for me to add extra portfolio samples or “moons” as I call them which will all rotate around the planet and be a bitch to click unless I figure out something clever… wait a tic… there was that wonderful little thing Garvey had us do in 315 that might just work… Well anyways the presentation of it will be awesome and very innovative. I got inspired by a recent trip to the Peabody Museum where they have a new exhibit on Alien Worlds, resulting in this little beauty of a planetoid right here, and the rest of my orbiting bodies. Heck, maybe It’ll even teach someone something.

I had a pretty good cover letter, it was created with help from a career advisor who knows me very well, and the resume was fine for internships and desk jobs, but PB says it lacks the pizzazz and the proper information that a graphic design employer is looking for. Mainly I need to spruce up my activities and give them a more professional feel. That and give the letter head a nifty upgrade. I’ll have to discuss this with her today.

Lastly, my promotional pieces are coming along nicely, I’ve got designs for shirts, baseball caps, playing cards, and stickers all lined up already. I hope that’s enough, and that I have enough for it all.

Week 6

BDP pgs 1 - 40

DDP Chapter 6

BDP 1 - 40

I dislike this new Building a Design Portfolio book, mainly for the reason that it has a freaking magnetic strip running the length of the cover. Magnets scare me, especially because I carry around so many magnetic data storing devices that I don’t want wiped or corrupted. You may say that the magnetism is minimal, but that’s what they say about X-rays, then BAM, one day, you have cancer.

The first thing they go over in the book it seems is that this is not going to be your final portfolio forever. Duh. I’ve gone through 3 different ones already (the first one stank so bad they didn’t even call me back and reject meL) and expect to go through many more before I finally give up graphic design one day in a fit of scientific inspiration (“Darling!” I’ll say “I’ve invented the Whoseywhatsit!” then make a fortune off it.).

Like an earlier chapter in a different book (coughDDPchapter4cough) this chapter details the various methods that one can put together a portfolio in, ranging from DVDs to Websites and physical portfolios. I prefer web based ones, simply because I can put them online (and on my business card) or on a CD, and then distribute ten thousand copies if necessary. That reminds me… I need to cancel my old bad site and buy a new one within a few days…

Also! Never do free work just to get an in. I made damned sure to stipulate in my contract that I would do no work for free on my internship, and that I retain copyrights to all work that I do. I need all the portfolio samples and sources of revenue I can legally get my hands on!

DDP Ch 6

I have a problem with getting some of my more traditional pieces into the digital world. My work is… Large, and does not fit well onto scan beds. I did some work with stitching together stuff with my wonderful scanner (no bed, just the scanner, you can put it anywhere) but it came out badly because of different light conditions. You can see it (two faced artist) here http://ryjak.deviantart.com/gallery/ .

On the topic of copy stands, I once did some photography for my mother’s ebay pursuits, photographing some sixty odd pieces of makeup and makeup paraphernalia. I didn’t have a professional stand, so I used my Wal-Mart tripod, an ironing board, and some crushed velvet pants my mother had lying around to create a more sophisticated illusion for the background of the pieces. It helped to accent the lighting greatly, and since none of the photos ever made it online, I can only tell you how awesome they were, proving that you can do great photography without much skill or professional equipment (mind you I have a high end camera, but that’s another story). The same techniques can be applied to books, pamphlets, and other things with folds or creases in them, to keep them from becoming too distorted in the scanner.

Also, collaborating with other designer is acceptable when designing your portfolio (and even when creating pieces for the portfolio, as this is often what happens in the workplace where various jobs are assigned to various people, yet each has put their own brand of work into the project) If I could have any two types of people to collaborate with, it would be a professional illustrator, and a web programmer. I have difficulty with high quality drawing despite years of practice, and programming has become less and less something I want to deal with as my skills in design progress. Mind you I have tried my hand at both of these and know a fair deal about them, but lack the necessary skills to do them with a great deal or quality, or in a time efficient manner.

Remembering Week 5

HtbaGDw/oLyS chapter 9 Appendix

DDP Chapter 5

The creative process is a weird one for me. I never can seem to get started. Inspiration just hits me sometimes and I feel the urge to get something done. But more often than not, I benefit from guidelines. This is where the brief comes in. I have never done one myself, but have often benefited from having one provided for me by professors. It’s a basic outline of the requirements of the project. If I don’t think I can do it with my current skill set, I go looking for information that will lead me to a solution I can use in the creative process.

Maybe it’s what I’ve been doing wrong all along.

Don’t copy other peoples work, its bad and dishonest, and worst of all, doesn’t allow you to grow as a designer. Using another person’s work in your art and crediting them is another story however. As designers we are going to be responsible to get all the rights to use photos from places like online where we find things like photos and film clips, if we don’t create them ourselves.

DDP5

As for collecting your work, never let the client have something he can edit! PSDs, FLAs and other such media are easy to copy and can be altered, especially by people of our profession so that no one will know who created it. I do a lot of editing original files at work (so I can’t claim any of it in my portfolio) and I know how easy it is to get ripped off.

Use all sorts of graded work since we’re just students. However stay away from offensive things (i.e. anything involving say, nazi’s, no matter how avant-garde you may think it is) and anything that looks sloppy or unprofessional. Tweak it if you can.

Make sure you have high quality and original copies of your artwork, AI files and such. I started a folder a few months back and began slowly collecting all my works into it that I have worked on over the years. Unfortunately, I have three computers and 2 external drives to go back through, and 2 dead or missing jumpdrives with irretrievable work on them. Make many many many many backups!

Remembering Week 4

Chapters 7 and 8 in HtbaGDw/oLyS

Chapter 4 in DDP

Chapter 7 is covered in my February 21^st 2007 post.

So it turns out my stunning personality and lackluster work will only get me so far in this business. I need X. “What is X?” you say, its self promotion. Going to conventions and conferences, doing pro-bono work for organizations you belong to. I work for ConnectiCon and have signed on to do some free graphic design work for them, like the commercial I made for them in 2005, which never saw the air because of budgetary constraints, and I also redesigned the website for my high school, which helped put me in touch with all sorts of people from that network.

That’s the kind of attention I want, I want people to recognize I’ve done good work for them and to be appreciated for it. The website I just pointed you to has had some of its content updated, but they were kind enough to leave my name in the footer at the bottom and I even received an email from an old professor recently praising my work. That’s what makes this job worth it. Having people I care about notice me. Not some article in a fancy design magazine about how great my work is. I’d rather be the one who designs the typography for some other poor schmucks article on how they rose to fame (and perhaps the one about their fall too).

On to the DDP

How do I want to format my portfolio?

Personally I want to do a cool planetary thing in flash, so the vectorized images won’t lose their luster when I put them on the web. I had moderate success with this when I was looking for my last job. I just put my flash portfolio on a CD, wrote the website on the outside cover (don’t do this, especially since mine was at the mywebspace site and still is)

I was going to put them on Mini-CDs with my business card logo and info on them, I even designed a fairly good layout, but alas, I forget that most designers use Macs, and Macs hate mini-CDs, because most Mac laptops are slot fed, and will bust their computer. Nothing says “you’re black listed” like destroying their computer during an interview. Knowing me, this would actually happen.

Zip Disks are right out. I had the boss ask me what the heck this “thing” was one day. I only knew because at one time it had been how I backed up all my data after a bad crash. When a designer of 20 years doesn’t know what an archaic piece of machinery is, you know it’s in trouble.

DVDs are nice if you have a demo reel. I don’t. Next!

I could do the laptop thing, if only because this one has little side to side glare, and I always make a CD anyways.

The personal website, CD and Laptop combo sound like they will work out well for me, after all, if they lose the CD, they’ll hopefully still have the business card, and if I just drop off the CD and business card, chances are about 50/50 that they look at it when I’m not there, and then I can’t explain the work.

Never bring in a portfolio with all your work in it. Organize and be prepared. I brought in a bunch of sketches to my Connecticut Magazine interview. I botched that one right good. Too much bad work and not enough focus. Make sure it’s organized and preferably digital.