Month: January 2023

I think I’d love to do a two-person design studio style project. I think my current dream after this program would be after some experience at a larger place, maybe opening my own studio. I think working with a partner to do some branding projects would be a really valuable personal project, just to get a sense of what that would look like, the work splits, and just how much time and effort you would have to put in into just finding the clients, doing a lot of that work other then just designing to keep a business like that afloat.

I think the goal of the project would be to come up with 3-4 unique projects that customers could feasibly ask a design studio. Andrew spoke to the timelines at those studios so I think it would have to be intensive 1-1.5 months where I try to multitask these projects with a partner. The project would have to incorporate feedback sessions with “clients”, and varying the type of projects. A branding project, a website design, album design, packaging design. I think those different projects would cause me to work on different skills, flex different brain muscles. I think working on different styles with different parameters would be really beneficial also. Having client expectations so I’m not just doing what I like to do which isn’t how the real world works, making it as realistic as possible is where I think the true benefit would lie. Me and Jordan Pasek have actually already talked about something similar to this outside of school anyways so I think this might become something relatively real.

I think other than time, the things I would need to make this project possible would be assistance in coming up with the projects. Maybe one from each teacher just to give me parameters for the projects I kind of just laid out and the would act as the clients. Erik could give one for a website design using Figma, Jason could give some sort of menu layout/branding project with a wide scope, Jill could could come up with a album design and I know she does packaging second year but maybe Larissa could give me parameters for those also. We would have to have a final review session where there was a consensus “yes, this is good” and if not the project could continue until we got there, if my “clients” were’nt happy with it I would need to see it through to the end.

I think this project could feasibly be done for free. These would ostensibly be portfolio projects and wouldn’t necessarily have to be reproduced but some of the branding projects I could print out actual deliverables like a menu or figure out how to print out an album jacket. Design and drawing is my hobby, I don’t DJ like some people in class or play in bands. I just watch movies, and fish and do solo stuff so this kind of is my hobby and what I enjoy so I think I could do all of this for nothing and have a great time doing it.

I guess the first project that I could think of which I imagine quite a few other people would choose would be Erik’s first coding project. When I came here that class intimidated the most. I was sure I either; wouldn’t be able to do it, or I would be able to do it but would have to spend an inordinate amount of time working on it, so much so that everything else would suffer as a result. We got into the group project and me and my teamates all listed our coding experience and it was a collective 0 hours. I thought we were screwed. 

Over the next couple weeks of instruction, we started turning out wireframes. Through the weekly critiques we could see the rest of the class for the most part was about where we were. One of my other groupmates was a little further along or understood the core concepts better so we would use hers in our demonstrations of our code which I was fine with but I just wished I was understanding the concepts better. 

As we were making progress through the project, it became apparent that our wireframe would have to be changed or expanded upon. We just weren’t technically savvy enough to do what we drew out originally, so we each just kind of did our own coding for a weekend and came back together to see what we had. I spent the weekend finding a bunch of new CSS that would overall just make the site look maybe a bit more polished and for the last 2 weeks we were using my code for demonstrations which really felt good.

 A lot of help from Erik in reinforcing concepts was essential in that project turning out good. As Abdul said, asking questions when you don’t know something is really important and I’ve always been good at that. I think on first impressions and just appearances Erik was really intimidating for a majority of the students, but he’s been arguably one of the best resources since coming here. Always made time when I had questions and giving the right amount of help, not spoon-feeding me the answers. Asking questions and being flexible and pivoting when the idea isn’t working have definitely been the two most helpful things I’ve done since coming to SCCA.

So I chose Kascadia Kolsch. I first came into contact with this beer on Instagram probably three days ago, the designer of it posted a picture of it that I screenshotted and had on my camera reel for years. I designed a bunch of beer cans after I saw this can because I liked it so much. Cut to, I move to Seattle 3 ½ months ago and I saw this beer at my local corner store and bought a 6-pack and saved one of the cans to have as kind of an idol? I don’t know why I love it so much but the fonts, the colors, all of it I think works really well.

I decided to come in early and take a photo of the beer on the balcony outside. Had a nice sunset in the background, maybe could have misted the can to look even better but with the sun I have in my pick I think the can really pops and looks delicious. I edited the photo a little in photoshop, cropping and adjusting some of the saturation and levels to really make it look better but I think this was mostly a case of getting good lighting at the right moment (with a little help from Bliss’ phone light)