Month: February 2023

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:

I experienced some technical difficulties recording and uploading a video to this blog post, but I have an audio recording for you to listen to that is what I would say if I was stuck in an elevator with someone who could hire me 😂

This blog post is in response to the prompt: “Talk about a time when you had a plan but had to make changes.”

The example that i’m thinking of was in first quarter, for the final Illustrator assignment which was to make a recipe infographic. I use this example because it was the first time I had to really go off course from my plan, while also not having that much time (a tight deadline). Up until that project, I had managed my time perfectly, but it was at this project that I took my sweet time asking for feedback until about halfway to the due date. I thought I was going in the right direction but Jason’s feedback was basically to tell me that I was not, and that I would have to really course correct. This of course was stressful because my plan assumed that I would have the whole time and be making progress steadily. I hadn’t accounted for the scenario where I was going to have to scrap my entire initial design drafts. In the end, I still made something that I’m pretty proud of and that satisfied the communication goals of the brief, but I suffered for my project mismanagement.

Now as I’m writing this, I’m thinking of another, more recent example of where something similar has happened. This is a design project from outside of school. A couple weeks ago, I was hired by my friend to create a poster for her. Again, I mismanaged my time and showed initial drafts far too late. Well, it wasn’t too late. But it was too late under the assumption that I wouldn’t have to revise any of the drafts and start from a totally new concept. Eventually, I busted my ass to produce the poster by the deadline, and once we got past the initial ideation stage (getting down the general aesthetic direction) it was a breeze, because all I had to do was to tweak the copy and make other slight changes.

Here’s the first draft I gave her:

Then, I produced two more drafts.

My client seemed still not too happy with what I had made, but they said that the first option was the best so far. I asked them why, and they said they liked the “distressed look” and the “vibe of the fonts”. So I then went further with the direction. Producing these two subsequent drafts took another day.

This was the fourth draft I made, and my client was still unhappy, saying it was too difficult to read. So I produced another draft to overhaul the layout, while keeping everything else the same.

This is the final version of the poster that got approved. Upon seeing this version, she was extremely happy with it, which also made me happy. I really spent a lot more time on this entire process than I was planning for, and it caused my schoolwork to suffer as I had a monetary as well as social incentive to prioritize making this poster.

Anyway, this is all to say that the lesson I have learned about planning in the project management sense, is that I should start my initial drafts and concepts and get feedback as early as possible, and set myself up to have enough time and flexibility to account for changes in direction. Additionally, I should be hasty with ideation, because it’s probable that I may not be going in the initial direction I set out for.

Now I know.

For this week’s project we were tasked to create an AR tour experience.

My group decided to do a series of panels that can be activated at Sound Transit stations around the city. I did mine at the King Street International District Station near my house.

The process we used was to create a template on Figma that had a unified color scheme, lifted from the Sound Transit branding. We then modified each of the templates in our own unique creative directions for the stations we wanted to do.

I wanted to keep it simple, and so I focused on wayfinding. I imagine that someone could activate this AR experience at one of the station maps and it would show you clearly which direction you need to go.