This is a video I found while browsing through peoples’ twitter networks. It is a teaser for a design company called Cause+Affect in Vancouver, BC. When I saw this, I had to put it up. It’s inspiring to see designers working to achieve nothing less than the highest quality work. Now I just gotta keep working harder and harder. There are way too many talented designers out there for me to be slacking.
Great quote I stumbled upon via Nubbytwiglet. This is especially relevent to myself and I think anybody who is or has been on the journey towards being a graphic designer.
A little brief introduction about myself. I’m a self-taught graphic designer, but I don’t feel I’m worthy of that title yet. I’m a relatively new designer and only in the past year decided that this is what I want to pursue. I guess it took me around 4 years of college to figure that out, but nonetheless I’m happy and excited to follow this passion of mine. So now I’m going back to school for graphic design at California State University, Sacramento. Due to the current budget crisis, my options were pretty much narrowed down to 3 or 4 public universities in California.
So that now brings you up to date on today’s post. Lately I’ve been looking for an entry level design position or some kind of design internship. I’m getting really tired of writing cover letters and going to interviews, but hopefully it means there’s a better opportunity out there. Just yesterday I had an interesting interview with Lojo Group. The first 30 minutes went pretty well and as expected. The interviewer asked me several questions about my professional life; you know how it goes. I also presented my portfolio and talked about my concept and design process for each piece. After that was done, I was surprised to hear he had one more thing for me. He continued to elaborate that it would be a 1 hour test to come up with a logo and home page design for an artificial company.
First of all I’ve never done anything like this. I’m used to designing in the comforts of my room by myself with music. This time I had 1 hour, people talking on the phone, foot traffic, doors slamming, etc…Anyways, I spent most of my time roughing out the logo. I brainstormed some ideas, sketched out pictures, looked up related imagery and cranked out the logo. Being a perfectionist didn’t help as I found myself wasting way too much time on the minute details. After ~1 hour, I had a decent logo with an okay home page. I learned a few things:
I also interviewed with some other companies for internships and I’m still waiting to hear back from them. I’ll keep them posted on this blog as soon as I find out. I’ll probably tweet it faster though.
Yesterday I spent a good part of the day taking photos of my printed portfolio pieces. It was quite a tedious task as I had to use whatever light was coming in from the outside. I took several shots of each piece, usually a wide low angle, paired with a few close-ups. By the way, I was using my semi-new Nikon D80 with a 50mm 1.8 lens. This lens is great for achieving the depth of field you want, whether it’s super shallow where only a small range is in sharp focus, or a deep DOF, where everything is in focus. Also it’s really fast lens so it’s excellent under low light.
After I finished taking all the photos I needed, I imported them into Photoshop as RAW images, and slightly tweaked them to improve colors and contrast. Then I had to re-size them, one for the full screen preview, and one for the regular smaller preview. Next I optimized them for web and linked them to their corresponding html pages. Also I continued to flesh out the page so that now there’s a shortcut navigation sidebar on the left.
Keep checking back as I will continue to update this blog frequently about the process of creating my website as well as other design related topics. Leave a comment too so I can get to know you and get some feedback.
