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:

1. Design w/ time limits are tough! Props to people like skilled concept and ISO50 for performing so well in design-offs.
2. With killer deadlines, you really have to manage time so that you don’t spend too much time on just one thing.
3. Must brush up illustrator skills.
4. I have so much still to learn about graphic design.

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.