Month: March 2023

Who am I? Simply put, I am nuanced, just like everyone else. Far from perfect but trying hard as I might to strive to be the best version of myself I can be. I am but a person. A person with passions, hardships, baggage, ambitions, and goals. A person who loves freely and intensely. A person who wants to make the most out of every moment in their life.

What is it that I want to do? Make a difference. Specifically in autism activism. I didn’t realize I was autistic until I was 16 years old, and it took another 3 years for me to get a professional diagnosis. Had I been born a male, it likely would’ve been spotted instantly. I want to help educate and inform not only parents but also young girls/people assigned female at birth in identifying if they’re autistic. To spare them the same heartache I have felt of wondering, “What is wrong with me? I should be just like everyone else but I’m not, why am I not?”

Why? Because I know the ache I went through, I know it is an ache many others like me go through, and I don’t want that to be the case. I don’t want people assigned female at birth to go their whole lives feeling like there is something wrong with them in the same way I have felt. I don’t want there to be a feeling of isolation followed by extreme confusion as to why they don’t fit in. Years spent wondering, aching, and questioning if they are the problem. I want to spare them that pain and teach them to embrace themselves.

Where do I want to go? At this point in my life, I can’t be sure. I’m only 20 and I have a whole life ahead of me. While I am not entirely sure where I want to go or end up, I do know that I want to live without regret. I want the intentions behind my actions to be ones I stand behind wholeheartedly. I want to be able to sit back and appreciate everything I have done and gone through, even if it has been hard, and recognize how hard I have worked. I want to be proud of myself.

What would I want to say? One word — breathe. Breathe in every moment, every emotion, every second spent living. Enjoy it. Embrace it. It isn’t going to always be easy but that’s okay. Hardship hurts but those wounds heal. Take time to love deeply and without restraint. Romanticize everything. Laugh and cry and smile and dance. Revell in the phenomenon that is being human. Keep those you love close to your heart and don’t be afraid to indulge. Don’t live life in the shadows, turn your face up to the sun and soak it all in.

During my time at the Seattle Central Creative Academy, there was a time when I had to pivot due to circumstances I had not anticipated in order to finish a project on time. A few weeks into this quarter, I started having problems with my health. I had a debilitating headache that would not go away and only got worse as time went on. It was preventing me from physically attending class, and I ended up having to go to the ER because of it. Because of this, I fell a little behind in a couple of my classes. The assignment was for my Interactive Design class. We had to design an online magazine with a linked webpage to an article. The choices of category for the magazine were music, food, and travel. I had decided at the start of the project to make my online magazine about music. The parameters for the project were to first create card-based elements in Figma. After that, we needed to lay out the card-based elements into a wireframe for both the homepage and the article. Finally, we had to transfer the design we had created in Figma to Dreamweaver as a final website.

My health interference meant I was about a week behind in the whole process. When my classmates were starting to lay out their wireframes, I was finalizing my card-based elements. Despite this, I wasn’t worried. I was confident in my ability to push through and complete the project on time. I knew my understanding of html and css meant the actual coding part of the project would take less time for me than it might for my classmates. After being behind for a couple of weeks during the check-ins, I finally transferred my design into code and just as I had expected, I was just fine. I was able to fully code my homepage to a quality that was at the same as my peers by the weekly check-in despite having been behind prior. By the next week, I had completely finished my project. I had faith in myself and my abilities and knew that despite my hardships with my health I could produce high-quality work. At the end of it all, my website came out with a quality I am proud of.

A personal project I have already started working on is self-publishing a poetry book. I have been writing and collecting my poems for about 6 years at this point, and I have always wanted to publish them in a finished book. What I hope to gain from it is personal fulfillment — I have loved writing poetry for years because of how therapeutic it is and it is something that brings me genuine joy. The ability to add some aspect of physicality to that aspect of my life would be a feeling unlike any other for me.

I think I need around 10 months–a year to finish the project. Although I have a majority of my poems already typed into a master Google doc, they’re truly scattered in a plethora of locations. I have had several journals at this point, and there are poems in all of them. It would take me at least 2 months to locate and transfer all of my writing into my doc.

After that, editing is a lengthy process. I have over 100 poems already typed up, and I imagine I have close to the same amount scattered throughout the journals I have kept. Between editing them all and scrapping the ones I don’t want to include (at least in this book) will take around 3 months.

Once all of the poems have been edited and sifted through, the next thing I would need to do is compile them into an order I feel flows nicely and tells an overall story. This can be done somewhat quicker, I’m estimating 2–3 weeks.

In addition to just the poems, I also want to include simple, single-line illustrations for a majority of them. This task alone will take 2-3 months, between deciding which poems I want to draw them for, sketching them out, and finalizing them.

After this, I would need to lay everything out in InDesign. Due to the sheer mass of text and images, I am going to have, I estimate this will take me another 1–2 months. Finally, I would upload the final file to Amazon self-publishing. I already have the front and back covers done, so that is a task I don’t need to worry about. Uploading everything to Amazon is free, but I would like to buy my own copy of the book for myself to have. I can’t imagine the final price would be anything more than $15.

Elevator pitch:

Hi! My name is Charley Gracie, I’m a 20-year-old graphic design student at the Seattle Central Creative Academy. Something I’ve been working on recently for school is designing an album cover, combining imagery and effective use of typography. Design is a really big passion of mine, I love every opportunity I get to deepen my understanding and learn something new. The ability to create and learn with other designers is something I am truly grateful for. I am hoping to enter the professional graphic design setting to further learn and showcase my skill set. Thank you!

Out of my hard skills, my top three would be Adobe After Effects, hand lettering, and writing. Out of my soft skills, my top three would be inquisitiveness, genuine enthusiasm for learning, and what my dad has told me is called “radical candor.”

I’ve used After Effects for several years now, probably close to 8 at this point. I started messing around with it when I was 12–13 and have continued to do so since. I’ve self-taught myself how to do a lot of things, and in the areas I got too confused YouTube tutorials were my best friend. Over the course of years, I became incredibly comfortable navigating it and creating videos within it, and I can easily produce a video of high quality with no difficulty.

Hand lettering is something I have been interested in since I was a kid, but I went through the effort of teaching myself calligraphy around the age of 14. I’ve always had decent penmanship but stylized lettering has always interested me. I’ve practiced for several years at this point, learning how and when to add emphasis to strokes to create the desired effect. At this point, hand lettering is something which is fluid and natural for me.

I have always excelled at writing, both in a formal, more matter-0f-fact form and in a creative, expressive way as well. Being autistic, the English language and the rules around it are intriguing to me so it’s something I deeply enjoy. Grammar conventions are something that comes easily to me, so editing or proofreading papers is a favor many of my friends have asked of me throughout my school years.

In terms of my soft skills, they can all be summed up pretty quickly: I’m a curious and matter-of-fact person. I’m not afraid to ask questions even if they’re “embarrassing,” because I want to be able to complete things with the best quality. Additionally, this furthers my love of learning. Knowledge is an important thing, and the process of learning and expanding what I know is something I love. In regards to “radical candor,” I have often been told my advice given during critiques in school is valuable and useful. My peers have told me that they really appreciate my critiques because I don’t censor my thoughts on things but I’m also not rude about it. I simply say things that need to be said because saying them helps everyone.

Out of hard skills I would like to improve during my time at SCCA, I would like to improve my understanding of layout design and typography. Out of soft skills, I would like to improve upon time management and communication.

I believe furthering my understanding of layout in design is crucial. Everything has a layout if it’s designed. Being able to be good (or even just better) at layout means all of my designs will be enhanced. I want to be able to make engaging, interesting, and functional pieces. Adding onto this, typography is crucial to how we receive all information. On top of this, I’m dyslexic and I see type in a different way than most people. Understanding typography will not only help me communicate more effectively within design, it will also help me create designs that adhere to standards while still being accessible to people like me who see the world differently.

Time management is needed for everything. How long to work on things, when you start a task and when it’s time to finish it — it all depends on time management. While it’s something I’m not bad at, there’s always room for improvement. Getting better at time management ultimately will alleviate stress and allow greater productivity. Communication ties into this as well. Communicating effectively, openly, and honestly is something everyone can improve upon their entire lives. There is never not a chance for someone to be a better communicator. Communication builds connections and empathy, and these things are essential to the human experience.

An interesting concept for a video that would be interesting would similar to one of Cut’s Side x Side videos where two people are interviewed separately but asked the same questions to see how their answers differ. For the two sides that are interviewed, it would be visual media students and design students. The video title would be something along the lines of “Do visual media and graphic design students think the same?” and it could be a way to showcase the different ways students think about creative aspects that apply to both fields.

I think it would elicit an interesting response because while both sides are creative, we see and experience creativity in different ways due to the paths that we are in. Some of the questions that could be asked could be:
– How important is creativity versus logic in a project? Is one more important?
– What makes a piece of work good? What makes it bad?
– Is it more important to conform to industry standards or to stand out? Why?

I think having 10 people, 5 being visual media and 5 being graphic design, would be enough to create an interesting video. I think that this video would be funny and interesting because as similar as both halves of SCCA are, there are differences. And it would be insightful to both halves to see how one side’s thoughts differ on certain subjects to the other side’s.

The Metaverse online experience I attended was the AlUla Hot Air Balloon Tour.

The experience was pretty simple. You start by spawning into a room which was an outdoor desert area. You see your avatar and a hot air balloon in the distance. There were prompts at the bottom on how to use the controls. Next, you walk over to the hot air balloon, and interacting with it gives you a prompt to go on the balloon tour. Getting in the balloon and going on the tour was a fairly swift experience: the balloon ascends, makes a loop around the room, and then descends again. During the loop, you can see the entire map of the room as well as some of the outlying areas surrounding it. It also puts you in 1st person POV so it emulates more of the feeling of doing it yourself rather than watching your avatar do it. It was overall enjoyable, the only complaint being that it was very short and took only about 15 seconds from ascending to descending.

I think this could be something I have an interest in moving forward if the options were more diverse. When scrolling through the lists of experiences, it seemed as though most of them were geared toward the NFT crowd in some way or another. I am personally very against NFTs, so this aspect was more of a deterrent than anything. I think the potential for very engaging and interesting experiences is there, but the audience they’re catering to seems somewhat singular.

I do believe that this could be a useful tool in advertising as well. For example, a car company planning on releasing a new car could make a room like this with a model of their new car inside it and allow people to take a look at the interior of the car from the comfort of their own home. This is just one example but it proves the potential it has for advertising. It would allow customers to move through a simulated 3D ad experience for a product/brand rather than just seeing a picture or video online for the same thing. It would allow for higher connectivity with customers and feel more personal.

I think this would work well as an entertainment tool as well. There was the option in the room to turn on the microphone and type into a chat bar. This means in fuller rooms there is an aspect of socializing which is inherently a form of entertainment. Aside from this, I think it could be an interesting way to launch premieres of TV shows, for example, in a cinema-style room where many people could watch something together. Not only this but there could be many team games that could be made in one of these rooms.

Overall, my experience was positive and proved the potential online metaverse experiences like these have.