Ben Kim

my two cents.

My video is too large to embed so it can be viewed here.

Oh gosh, I could go on about the changing of the seasons. How the actual vibrations of my body’s cells are elevated with the power of the sun. There’s a material shift in my chemistry. And that includes my creative forces. I find that I can just see more. Last summer, when I awoke one July morning, the first thing I saw was the morning light filtering through the trees and casting an undulating, refracted shadow on my bedroom wall. And I was so inspired to look upon that image, that shape, that I photographed it, processed it in Illustrator, printed it as a tattoo stencil, and inked it on my body. All before noon. Last week, I went to the dock for the first time this year, and thus the first time since I had begun school – begun my journey of professionalising my interest in design. And until I did, there were just so many tasks and duties to be done, swirling in my head. Then, I dunked myself into the lake. When the cool water engulfed me, it was like a reset. The reason for all of this became clarified once again. I remembered why I was doing this. A welcome reminder, given how grueling the present moments had become. But all it took was the gentle sensory-emotional induction of Mother Nature for me to recall that an aesthetic and creative life is worth living and pursuing. Thank you for that.

Here is my moodboard for Petcube.

This campaign for Petcube is all about beautiful, high-tech luxury. Our target user is the savvy young professional in a big coastal city like Los Angeles. They are keen on treating their pets like the luxurious kings and queens they are. They live in beautiful, high-tech homes, and shop in beautiful, high-tech stores. They expect minimal, tasteful product design, both in the digital app for Petcube, as well as the packaging and retail experience. But most of all, they want only the best for their pets. And they’re willing to pay a premium.

I researched the difference between Freelance, Agency/Contract, and Fulltime jobs. The main difference is between stability and flexibility. Freelance and contract jobs are more flexible in that you can take them on a by-project basis. They also offer more variety, in that you can pick and choose projects that are interesting. Agency jobs are similar but you have less of a choice if you are employed by the agency. Fulltime jobs offer the most stability as you have a consistent and predictable income, but the projects feature less variety.

I think I would prefer a fulltime job that is in-house. Ideally, I’d want to work at a big company, somewhere with a creative team, like Starbucks or Microsoft, even if they are not a creative company. That way I can benefit from the job security while also having my day-to-day work experience be similar to what it would be like in an agency.

Here’s some cool contract/agency job listings I found:

Startup

Pokemon Company

Agency

This week I designed a jersey for the Coachella Valley Firebirds.

The inspiration for this was the colorways of the Do Lab stage at Coachella, which often utilizes a very vibrant cool scheme of purples and pinks and blues. It felt like a nice nod to the iconic Do Lab stage, and it was able to work well with the existing colors of the Firebirds’ logo. I think it’s a good solution because it stays true to the Firebirds’ iconic look, while providing a little bit of an interest.

I think an interesting video idea would be “Second Years at SCCA explain their application portfolios to First Years”. I think it would be shot in an intimate conversational style similar to the way Cut does the Truth or Drink videos. I think that it would be a good idea because it’s something that many of us are secretly probably curious about. And it’s something that could bring us closer together. The format of having second years do it appeals to me because they are more experienced and closer to the end than we are – therefore it seems more meaningful to have the application portfolio be explained by them. It’s like, they get to share this full circle piece of themselves.

Also, it’s kind of a tender mentoring moments between the second years and the first years. Like, encouragement that you can do this.

An alternate idea could be – alumni explain their SCCA application portfolios to second years.

But I like my first idea better because it would be easier to produce. Ostensibly we have everything including the cast, that we need to make the video on this floor.

Some vulnerable prompts to get the conversation flowing between the two:

1. Tell us about the piece you are most proud of and the least proud of in your portfolio. What about in this program so far?
2. Where were you in your life when you applied to this program? What were your hopes out of going to school?
3. Was there ever a time that you doubted yourself after starting this program?

I’d imagine that were this video to be produced, that all of the second years/first years would be paired together and have some footage. Ofc some will get more screen time than others in the final cut.

One of the factors that Adam talked about was Delivering Quality Work, and I feel as if I have many examples from my early twenties when I was a high school math teacher that I could draw on to exemplify this tenet. But across all of those examples, there were some generalizable conditions that I now know to avoid. Basically, the situation was that I was too overworked in order to do a good job. The last year that I taught, I had such an intense workload that even though I was working 7 days a week, sometimes from 8am – 8pm, I would still not be able to get everything done – that was, even the basics of preparing a lesson that I felt totally confident about. Often times this meant I had to teach when not fully prepared, which caused me to have severe anxiety and stress me out to the point where I would become physically ill. I think it was more like, I was stressed because I was so anxious about not meeting my own standards. In that situation, it felt very much like the end of the world to me, because I took the job so seriously and I put so much of myself into the students’ education that any failure on their part felt like a failure of mine, and me not being able to execute at what I knew to be my best felt like I was betraying them or ruining their life.

Luckily I have a different relationship to myself and my paid work now, and I am also choosing a career where I don’t have to shoulder the burden of the government’s failure to provide basic resources to a healthy society (the reason I was so overworked was because there weren’t enough teachers hired, so I had to take on more than what a single teacher should take on). Today, I have no fear in leaving a job that isn’t allowing me to do my best work. I already know that I have the highest standards for myself, and I feel very competent and capable of meeting them. I mean, I will stay up all night if I have to. I take great pleasure in doing a good job, that is something that’s always been me. But if it’s due to unfair working conditions, then I say, f that. I think the reason that I am this way now is that between those early days as a teacher and now, I’ve really built up my confidence as a creative. Now, I know what my best looks like, at any given time, because I know my limits. And I know how to protect those limits as an artist, and it requires me to constantly say no. I hope I transmute this knowing when I again return to the corporate world, since that is different from being an artist. But I think I will.

It’s honestly hard for me to have a self-assessment of my own skills because I have always felt insecure and inferior about my work history and career in general. I’ve never felt truly validated or appreciated for what I can bring to a workplace. Perhaps it’s because I have just not found the workplace that is actually a good fit for the skills I have. Or perhaps it’s because my skills are actually just not compatible with the kinds of work that are available in the corporate world.

Of course, me being in SCCA at all is a symbol of my optimism that it is the former. I would really, really love if this were the last career switch I attempted. At least for a while. It was honestly super cool to hear Brit open up about her experiences with burnout and leaving jobs in her responses to my questions, because it’s something I relate to a lot, and it tempers my expectations. Maybe it’s not worthwhile for me to expect that this will all end in something that’s forever, and that I just need to believe in my ability to take everything one step at a time, and trust that I’ll course correct when the time is right.

Anyway, I digress. This blog assignment will be a good exercise for me because I really do need practice in identifying what it is I actually do have.

For hard skills, my strongest would have to be:

1. Web Design – I worked for a web development coding bootcamp for several years, and I also have experience with this in my undergrad degree, and now finally at SCCA I’m bridging the technical/coding side of that with the design side of things, so I think I’m really solidifying my skills here. I have built web apps from scratch, though none looked very pretty, I thought they were very cool. Now I can make them look good and have a good user experience as well.
2. Project Management – I used to be a high school math teacher too, and honestly I could just put that as a hard skill “teaching” but if we’re going by hard skills that could get me a design job, I’d frame it this way, because teaching 6 classes every year, with 4 different preps meant I had to be really good at managing my time and deadlines. I also have project managed in other contexts, like in my other life as a DJ where I have produced several parties which required coordination of many moving parts with a deadline.
3. Content Creation and Art Direction – This is the way I’m going to frame the sum of my visual design experience and skills. Mostly because I’m still at the beginning of my design education so I don’t really feel qualified to say that I’m skilled at Adobe software, but it’s definitely coming. And I think I’m skilled at the entire life cycle of content creation in the sense of ideating a piece of media and making it come into existence with whatever tools I am able to employ, or ask/hire someone to help out with it. I have a couple years running a pretty popular instagram account and art store and I have dabbled in graphics/video all my life, though not to the intensity that I am now.

For soft skills, I would say:

1. Agreeableness – I’m honestly a fun person to work with. I truly like people, and it’s easy for me to be authentic and see others as whole people outside of their roles at work. It pains me to not be humble about this but since this whole blog assignment is about bragging, I have been beloved by all of my coworkers I have ever had. (as for my bosses, that’s a different story, because on the flip side I really stand up for the little guy. I sometimes have a chip on my shoulder in that regard. I would always go to bat for my students, or direct reports, even if it meant having unsavory relationships with my bosses. So maybe, that’s a soft skill I will want to work on, is being agreeable with my superiors. IDK if I will ever get over it though, I used to be the site rep for my union :/ lol)
2. Organization – I have good organizational habits and I like being precise. It really bothers me when things aren’t written down and put in the right place or if process is confusing, so I usually end up taking on the labor of making sure that they are.
3. Persuasion/Presentation – I think I’m a pretty good presenter. I have a lot of experience speaking to groups, and that doesn’t intimidate me at all. It’s kind of fun, actually.

Hard skills I’d like to work on:

1. Branding – I really really want to get good at this. I love what we learn in Jill’s class and I just have so many questions because it can go so deep. The execution and production of design, I feel like I know I can learn easily, because it just feels straightforward and linear. But the branding aspect, like why you make design choices on behalf of a business and what choices are good ones, is such a fascinating and challenging wormhole for me.
2. Motion, photo, and video – I want to develop these skills purely because I think they will really benefit me in my career. I don’t expect to become an expert but I want to feel fluent enough in them so that I can employ them easily for my own design work, or know enough about them to be able to make directorial decisions about who to recruit.

Soft skills I’d like to work on:

1. Collaboration – frankly, I am not good at working in groups because I can be really opinionated. I think I can turn people off because of that and I would like to build my skills of being able to tell when I should double down and when I should be open to compromise.
2. Agreeableness – I know I put this as a soft skill I’m already good at but I’d like to work on this specifically with my bosses. I want to be able to navigate business politics and do right by my work and the company I will work for, in other words, without compromising my values.

For this week’s blog assignment we were tasked with presenting a food graphic in the spirit of Steve Hansen who was our guest speaker for this week.

I chose to take myself out to my local restaurant Ba Bar which is a hip neo-Vietnamese place and order their Phở Dặc Biệt to photograph and prepare in Adobe Photoshop.

I took the photo in diffuse natural lighting by being sat near a window on an overcast day at lunch. Typical Seattle weather. And the photograph came out wonderfully, in my opinion, even though I’m not a trained photographer. I don’t have a camera other than the one on my phone, so I used it. It would definitely not be satisfactory for an actual print application because it’s a low quality phone camera, but all things considered, I think it works for the web.

I then brought the image into photoshop and added one curves adjustment layer and manipulated each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels to bring out the colors of the food. I had to consider the greens in the herbs floating atop the soup, and the deep red of the soup and sauce. I focused on making those colors pop. Then, I felt that there was too much green brought out in the image overall, so I added another photo filter adjustment layer to bring out more red in the whole photo to try and balance it. Honestly, I don’t really know what I’m doing in photoshop, but I tried to apply some of the concepts we’ve been learning in our color class. In retrospect, I should have masked out the parts in the curves layer that didn’t contain the color I wanted to bring out.

Here’s the final photo: