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.

Remembering Week 2

Chapters 2 and 3 in HtbaGDw/oLyS and 2 in DDP

I need experience! This first design job I am at now is not working out as well as I planned for several reasons, the biggest of which are the lack of other designers and work. I can’t get much practice if there’s nothing to practice on and no one to tell me my mistakes and guide me along. Oh wait… it says that If I already think like this I should skip this chapter and move along. Guess he never expected it to be required reading in a course did he?

Anyways, yes finding a first job is a pain in the butt. I highly recommend exploiting personal contacts, friends, relationships, family members. I got this job by talking to my mother and high school headmistress. So use those contacts and be yourself in your interview.

Being freelance does not work for me. I may be a creative loner sometimes, but I don’t currently have the motivation to go ahead and find work, nor the sparkling personality and contacts to good clients. This one project I got back in December I’ve been holding off on because I’m swamped with my own personal life is so far in backlog, that I’ve probably gotten my brother fired over it (it’s a REALLY bad job). I really, really need a professional environment to feel professional, and other people around me to keep from straying way off subject (I can’t tell you how often these days I catch myself just browsing the web because there’s no work and no one else there to help me find something to do) and frankly, get stuff done. So I suppose I work best in the studio environment, and my work is enhanced by the fact that there are other people giving me input. I certainly have asked my classmates enough “what do you think of this” and then sending them a link. I value the input of other professionals, and really think I need it. Secondly, I’m no specialist. If anything I’m a broad ranged generalist with multiple skills to bring to bear on any project. I particularly liked when I was able to combine my 3D and Photoshop skills in one particular project on a scale model, but that’s a story for another time.

DDP – Adaptation – Not just a bad movie with Nicolas Cage anymore.

OK its confession time. I love to introspect, but the amount of work I perceive myself as having is miniscule. The amount that’s good is even smaller, the amount that will be representative of me, even smaller. I’m going to have a fairly tiny portfolio! Yeah I wanted to have time free this semester to do a few bits of reworking, and focus on new projects, but all my time is being sucked up in distractions like blogging, going to conventions, making new friends at Yale (would you believe I’ve fallen in with a group of Christian board gamers?), and finding a date (0 for 3 now). This checklist is pretty nifty, but something at the end leaves me feeling like the right adjectives weren’t there to describe my work beyond playful and funny. I’ll have to rethink that one and get back to it.

I need to produce more work. I wish there were a class called “Building UP your senior portfolio” so I could have a structured assignment with some vague outlines that would point me in a direction and pressure me a little bit.

I can’t draw very well due to a mild disgraphia, so I feel uncomfortable making sketches, but I can do them when needed. I hate to cut this off like this so abruptly, but I have a few more posts to do before noon, and this just reached the second page in Word.

DDP Chapter 1

I totally forgot this in my last post (I fell asleep and posted what I wrote last night) so I’m going to try and keep this short and sweet.

I need to figure out what I’m best at! Like I haven’t thought and rethought what I think my best skills are a hundred times on my own. I know right away that my skills in 3D are lacking when compared to many of my other classmates, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use those in my other works. A still 3D image can still be useful in other areas, like web design or print & graphic design. Web design is something I’m ok at, but I know so little about the back end architecture that I’ve had to tell a few clients “Sorry, I don’t know how to do what you want, I only build the graphical user interface and basic structure of the pages.” One guy actually wanted me to find his content for him, but that’s a story for another time. Print & Graphic design is perhaps my strongest suit. I am well versed in indesign and illustrator, have a good understanding of Photoshop, and have received a smathering of quark training. It seems I’ve been making posters and flyers and other printouts since I was in elementary school and we had Broderbund’s print shop. You remember old dot matrix and daisywheel printers? Now you had to be really creative to get anything designed worth looking at on those old clunkers! Besides, people will always need print designers, as long as there are still products on shelves.

Remembering Week 1 - Introduction and Chapter 1 in How to be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul (yes I realize its not capitalized on the cover... it should be)

I hate this book.

Not because it takes me a while to read, but because the messages contained within it I fear are true, and if that’s the case, I’m out of luck when looking for a job.

I guess my only choice is to lose my soul.

I chose to be a digital artist because I thought I could earn more money doing this than in evolutionary biology, my original love. I was wowed my all the work done in Jurassic Park, and since I grew up in a household with some early home computers I felt all I had to do was learn to use the software. I’ve been literally obsessed with creating a 3D T-rex since June 11^th 1993, until two weeks ago when my dream was simultaneously realized and shattered.

Anyways I was off on a tangent there. So yeah, I have some issues with cultural awareness. Having a non-verbal learning disability puts me at a disadvantage in not being able to perceive of some of the various forms of communication, including body language, and makes me rather nervous when dealing with people I don’t already trust (I’m still scared of talking to my boss after 9 months, and he’s one of the nicest people I know). I don’t feel the urge to create brilliant graphic design either. Just mediocre or even hackneyed, anything to earn a living, because honestly, I still can’t tell typography from a hobo’s crayon-drawn cardboard sign saying “will work 4 food”. Maybe I should design one and see if I can’t get work that way!

(I was mildly disturbed in the intro by the name Paul Rand, who worked for IBM. I looked him up online, and to my dismay, I found an image that I thought the company I am now interning at had created, the famous eye-bee-M logo of 1981, which hangs prominently in our lobby. Perhaps it’s because my boss was once a student of Rand’s at Yale, or because we too had design accounts at IBM during that era. I don’t know, I’ll have to ask about it at work on Friday.)

I was about to go into tirade about how my learning disability is holding me back, but you know what? I don’t want this whole thing to be a downer. Suffice to say, cultural awareness and communication skills are important to have. If you don’t have them, perhaps you should consider a different field, like working for the DMV.

I just realized I’ve made a culturally aware joke, commenting on the conditions at DMV’s across the nation, while trying to make the point that I don’t have much cultural awareness. I have failed miserably in this attempt to make a point, but succeeded in cracking wise. What I really wonder, is how I would express this in a non-verbal or graphical context so that it could be conveyed in the media of graphic design? Surely jokes can help me bond with my various clients, perhaps even sell myself as a fun loving designer, provided I don’t become insulting or racy.

Chapter 7 - HGD

Ugh, I read this chapter and one client in particular came to mind when they were talking about bad clients. Fitch Ratings. Fitch has given us at design trust no end of troubles. Every single design was reviewed by three people who all had differing opinions on what the finished work should look like, to the point where they could never agree on anything, esspecially not if they should go ahead and use the work we had done for them. This has gone on now for several years if the horror stories are to be believed. Unfortunately for us, so much of our business currently relies on this one company, that we can't afford to drop them. I doubt David, my boss, would ever drop a client unless they did something truely dispicable to him, like run over all his pets. The point is, we can't get rid of them, so we're stuck doing constant revisions for all eternity, like some designers tartarus.

Designing a Digital Portfolio – Chapter 3

This chapter left me confused early on. Was it talking about me building a portfolio around a demographic, or around a possible client, and if the later, why would an individual designer realistically be doing that kind of search?
The more I looked into this though, the more I realized this was another chapter about finding yourself and building your portfolio to maximize your chances of getting a job in a particular field.
This book, like the “How to be” book, stresses the importance of the elusive mistress that is “word of mouth” and your own personal contracts, although in this case in more of a recon sense than the previous book mentioned.
I am beginning to like the way this book thinks. Being a more impersonal person, I prefer to do a lot of my communicating online. I’ve met several good friends this way, so it can’t be all bad. The book seems to think that the web offers too much information, but I believe that a person skilled at using search engines can skim through much of the chutzpah and get to the good stuff quickly, but then again what do I know? Have I written a book? Nope… and this person managed to get us all to read it too.

How to be a Graphic Designer without losing your Soul – Chapter 6

How to get work, the one thing they never taught us in design school. Good thing we were liberal arts majors. What’s that? They don’t teach you how to find clients either? Well then we’ll have to rely on your contacts for that won’t we? Eh? You’re a computer nerd whose entire social life went down the drain during college? Do you barely have any real friends? Never attended a drinking party or other social gathering while in school? You halted a promising college career in biology because you thought you could make a better living as a graphic designer?

Oops.

I find myself at the end of my college career mooching off the charisma of the people I know around me. The only reason I got the nice internship I have today is because my brother happened to go to the same private school as the President’s son, where I was an alumnus and never even met this guy’s progeny. Connections are the biggest single source of work in the graphic design field. We employ several people whose sole jobs it is to bring in new business to us through their own connections.

The book says that we all need to be new business people. This scares the ever-loving **** out of me. I am somewhat (read very) afraid to talk with, much less deal with, new people who I perceive to be in a position of power over me. The same with making phone calls of almost any kind. I am the kind of person who desperately needs a personal assistant to take my calls for me. This business with the pitch making, count me out. No way do I want to be in a meeting selling myself. I always think my work is worse than it really is, and my ideas often stretch beyond my own means. Why weren’t we warned about all this earlier in the curriculum? This is potentially life-making or life-breaking stuff that’s being discussed here.

I’m just not cut out to be a graphic designer this book is screaming in my face. My work stinks, therefore no one will hire me, my marketing skills stink, therefore I won’t be able to get work, and my interpersonal skills are lacking, so I won’t even meet the people who are willing to look at my work. It even insulted me about my poor handwriting. Let’s face it. I’m not cut out for this line of work.

Where has all of James’ “I’m amazing” attitude and egotism gone to I wonder now. Back when I first started to get interested in digital design, I was working on horribly amateurish projects all the time. I edited video, drew in illustrator, and photoshoped false parking tickets. I even made my own newsletter at one point which was ordered destroyed by the college I was going to for being defamatory. I used to have a drive for this sort of thing, but now it’s just a job to me, something I’m going to do to earn money and nothing else. I pine for the days when I would go out into the woods to look for deer tracks or draw (even if I wasn’t good at it) for fun. I’m busy doing nothing, playing games, watching TV, and eating my way out of the terrible depression I experience almost constantly, interjected only by the occasional grandiose statement brought on by an amusing bit of work from the comics and TV which I admire and hoped to emulate, but which drew me in and never let go.

But I suppose this lack of feeling adequate is what happens to most designers, as the book states. I don’t believe in my own works, so I’m apologizing for them all the time, saying “well this could have been better” or that or the other thing, and they’re wondering “well if it could have been better why didn’t you fix it before bringing it to me?” Laziness, lack of motivation, perhaps it is that I really don’t care all that much. Maybe I’m just desperate for a job (like I was when I met with Connecticut Magazine) and didn’t think it through closely enough. My mother ended up making the call to get me my current job. How embarrassing. I feel lucky though that I had had the foresight to put together a portfolio in 315 as my final project, because it was that piece which wowed them the most. To this day the boss still thinks I’m an expert in flash.

Some of the best work I’ve ever done has been to do with digital portfolios. I’ve built more of them at my current internship than anything else, and built the entire identity section of our online portfolio, from dredging up all the old logos, resizing them, creating thumbnails, and over three hundred links that all had to work and be hand coded, as well as working within the stifling framework of the overall site design, yet making it all work as a separate section. I had them put it up here at the Design Trust Identity Site. Keeping the site looking like its parent site was a difficult challenge to overcome, but in the end it lends an air of continuity to the site as a whole, however lacking the original design may be. Both I and the previous senior designer were chomping at the bit to be allowed to redesign the site from scratch, but the boss is married to it for financial reasons that have to do with external printed materials, and the continuity of our own self branding.

Maybe in the long run we need to let good design get out there and be our best advocate. I still don’t really know how to create good design, but I know it when I see it. Maybe I should become a critic…

How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing your Soul - Chapter 5

This chapter put my entire experience as an intern into a new perspective for me, namely that of my boss. Since I have been at the firm, we have hired and let go a number of people, including all of the design staff aside from myself and the company’s president.

We currently have three account managers, one of whom were fired and mysteriously came back once all the work dried up. We haven’t had any real work in ages, and have been sending me in to fix problems left in designs by old staff during older projects, such as Dannon’s Celebrate Healthy Eating site where it was my job to fix errors in old files such as words on the wrong line or in the wrong language (two identical sites in English and Spanish are hard to pull off), missing images or pages (in flash sometimes), and to replace all the pictures of the old food pyramid with the new one the USDA put just out (don’t get me started on the design flaws of that little piece of work), but I digress.

Point being, according to what myself, the old designers, and the accounting staff knows, the company is in trouble, and the boss isn’t helping with his particular style of running a design firm. My dilemma being, I have a job, I get paid to do what I like, but I’m terribly afraid of losing this job before I can finish this course and then enter the real world. I just know however, that once I’m done with school I’m just going to goof off and not find a job until it becomes really dire that I do, but enough worrying about that for now. Everything in my gut and this book tells me that he’s running the company into the ground, but how do you break that kind of news to the guy who owns the company?

Other issues raised by this book made me think, if I’m not that good of a designer, who the heck is going to want to hire me, and should I even bother going into the design field? I know it’s a little late to start questioning that kind of thing now, but let’s face it; all I really have to show is what I’ve done for classes. Everything I’ve done for anything else was either ill conceived, poorly executed, or I never followed through after the idea phase. My portfolio is a dump, and contains just as much work by other people as myself.
Is there any place in the design world for a man who has amazing ideas, but no talent or ability to realize them?

Perhaps
If I can hire people better than myself at various key skills, then maybe I can pull off running a design company instead of actually going through the physical labor of creating it myself. But where would that leave me in terms of artistic fulfillment? Probably a little ahead of where else I would be, overworked and underpaid. Even the great artists of the renaissance had help on their greatest masterpieces. Perhaps I just need some experience and time.

I regret that I am hopelessly lost as to the nature of the blogging assignment for the previous two weeks and all future weeks. I hope to have this issue resolved as quickly as possible through discussion with my professor in the classroom.

The Logo assignment however has proved quite fruitful, and I have come up with 24 various sketches, and 20 comps and variants, some with final results.

Here are some examples of my work.






I will add to this blog later today after discovering the nature of the assignment.