Month: February 2023

So I chose to do an art exhibition from the Department of Digital Arts/Ruth Schnell at the University of Applie Arts Vienna. I just stumbled across that event posting looking online for metaverse events. The metaverse I was in was Voxels so the same one that Michael was showcasing on Friday. I hung out for awhile, walked around to see different student submissions. There were DJs and some interesting blocky moving sculptures. I think it was probably just interesting to me but not something I’d ever do of my own volition in my free time.

I think there is a real appeal to the metaverse for people. I think Michaels enthusiasm for the space and it’s potential is probably appropriate, this seems like something if you got on early could be hugely beneficial in the long run, but at this point in my life and the metaverses life, I’m just not interested. My experience was fine but as someone with older devices it just didn’t run smoothly at all. I understand rendering anything other than blocks would be way too hard on most peoples machines but for all the metaverses potential benefits, I just find it very ugly to be in. It’s just unappealing, I don’t like feeling like I’m getting advertised to in what appears to be minecraft with artists marionettes as my avatar.

I think the concept itself at this point seems kind of muddy to me as well. The accessibility of it as a browser and not an app is a boon to it, but it’s combination of social media, extension of the internet and video game feel make it fairly unappealing to me. I’d rather do any one of those things individually, because the individual experiences are more enjoyable at this point. The metaverse feels like when you go to a restaurant that’s doing too many different things on the menu, and you’re like, they can’t have good pizza and sushi. This just feels like it’s doing too much, so I don’t even think I could use this as entertainment at this point. I’d rather just browse the internet, go on social media or play a game. Maybe when this hits like ‘Ready Player One’ fidelity I’d be into it but just not there yet.

I guess it would be easiest to talk about this when discussing my old job. Before coming to school, and honestly what probably pushed me to coming to school in the first place was how much I hated my old job. They called it production graphics but that wasn’t really what is was, it was just setting up art supplied by our customer on our templates and making sure it fell within printing guidelines. I think at various points in the process of that job, I would have been guilty of not meeting all three of criteria. Some of these factors I feel like coule be mental more than realistic, kind of like imposter syndrome though. I think for my first job, I constantly thought I wasn’t doing enough for whatever reason but with time you just kind of learn what it means to be a good employee and how to feel secure in your position.

None of that is to say I thought I was a bad employee, I think I was actually a really good one and one of the best ones they’ve had. What comes with a job like that that encourages and necessitates speed is that you do a lot of the same type of work. It’s just trying to get through as many orders as you possibly can during a day while keeping the quality really high. With the high volume of monotonous tasks, it becomes hard to always pay attention and make sure everything’s perfect, so sometimes there just were mistakes.

We had a metric called claims, and you strived to have less that .2% of all your work come back in a claim, and sometimes it was honestly the customers fault, but for 1.5 years I was terrified of that metric. I thought every time I got one I was gonna have a meeting with my my boss and I was gonna get fired. That wasn’t the case, it was all imaginary, so in a way I’m kind of grateful for that job. Not all mistakes are equal but I think it taught me a lesson in comfortability and job security and if you’re a good, hard working employee who owns up to their mistakes when they happen, you shouldnt have anything to worry about if you have good bosses. And if they aren’t good and you’re not treated fairly, it may be time to step away.

I think my top three hard skills would be branding and identity, Illustration and drawing from outside sources, and the Adobe Suite. I think for branding and identity, these are the kind of projects I’m drawn to most and enjoy doing. I did them in my free time and had a couple examples in my portfolio that I submitted. These are the kind of internships I’m working towards, so while I think it’s a current strength, obviously much room for improvement. I think illustration is another strength, I’ve always been pretty good at drawing (with a reference) and I’ve made it a part of a number of projects in the past and view it as kind of a secret weapon. While I really love clean vector graphics, having the ability to draw in my back pocket is really nice to have and bring out when the project calls for that touch. Lastly, while I would say most of my familiarity with the Adobe Suite is Illustrator, I think I have a knack for the suite in general and picking it up and understanding things quickly. That goes for InDesign now and I’m hoping Photoshop which I’ve had less experience with. I think these skills will grow but I feel competent in my ability to learn and use the suite.

My top three soft skills would probably just be that I’m hard working, creativie, and I would say emotional intelligence. I think I put a tremendous effort into the things I care about. Right now, that’s school, I wouldn’t say there’s assignment so far I haven’t given my best effort conceptually or practically and that’s something that translates to sports, schoolwork, real work, anything I want to excel at. Another would be creativity, I think that just comes with maybe being in this program, I’d hope most people could count this as a strength but I think being able to come up with different, cool and exciting ways to arrive at solutions in the design world is a major boon. Separating your work in terms of thought and quality is something I try to do, don’t succeed always but always trying. Lastly I would say emotional intelligence is a strength. It might be douchey to say but I feel like I’ve always been pretty good academically but maybe since my first run through college and some maturing on my part I’ve developed more of an understanding of others and people I’m working with. How to collaborate, when to bend on something, when not to. I think that’s probably the most important skill you can have because it can branch in a bunch of different ways. If you have that skill you can fight for your ideas.

Some hard skills I’d like to improve upon would be UX/UI Design and probably just competency with the equipment we have at our disposal. I’m genuinely surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed Erik’s class. I can’t overstate how hard I thought that class was gonna  be for me, but it really was just a lot of effort early on and now it just kind of feels like it’s making a ton of sense. That being said, Eriks said a number of times that the landscape in this field is changing quickly under our feet so I’d just like to get better at the UX side of things, with Figma and just understanding users. I don’t know if thats ultimately what I want to do as a career but who knows. I also think just working more with the equipment, printers, cameras etc couldn’t hurt. Making myself more well-rounded and knowledgable about the equipment in our field.

Some soft skills I could work on are teamwork and adaptability. I think I work well in a team, I think the thing I need to work on specifically is not taking on too much work. I think sometimes if I’m with someone who’s really deferential or less-experienced, I’m more likely to kind of go solo with things or take on much more responsibility with the work which makes things harder for me and doesn’t help them get better, so just doing better splits of work and trying to trust my partners is something to work on. Lastly, I think sometimes adaptability can be an issue, pivoting can be hard when you really like an idea and rejections and editing is going to happen a lot in this business so I think this will come with class and more experience but right now it’s something I’m looking to improve upon.