The Art and Design of James M-C

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!