Dunham Deremer

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.

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)

So this is actually my 2nd run on this one. My first one was making the doors on the building more naturistic (not a word but a feeling) but it wasn’t working at all and looked terrible so I had to try again. Ultimately I decided that the hallway towards the north stairwell was where I wanted to direct my efforts.

On our floor at the creative academy we have lots of tables and standard chairs but I’ve always preferred something a bit more comfortable. I thought of turning this whole hallway into a sort of long booth on both sides, there could be cafe tables throughout with power outlets underneath. Make it a homier feel, give it a sort of coffee shop aesthetic. And then behind the long booths I thought that maybe adding some larger imagery. Some of the Seattle Skyline that we can’t see as well anymore with all the high-rise construction, and then also a Pacific Northwest Forest for a calming effect. I really just would love the floor to be a place to hangout and calm down from the rush of some of the projects.

Also apologies, I’m not very good at Photoshop so I tried adding fabric and stretching the images to perspective but it didn’t turn out the best but this is a good representation of what I was thinking.

Well, I feel like I haven’t learned too much yet honestly. In my Friday class, we only have one visual media student, and the previous module and current one I’m in are definitely geared more towards the design track, so the exposure hasn’t really been there yet. That being said, there have definitely been some takeaways from their program.

 The one conversation I’ve had with the Visual student in our Friday class was about how they hate shooting people because people move, they’d much rather prefer shooting products which I thought was really funny. I think it’s really interesting the range of interests in that department. Also sidenote, I think I’d agree with that student. The certainty of nailing the lighting, placement of a product and just executing would be super satisfying. The execution of ideas is just completely different, it is a creation but it’s the preparation and planning for a single shot, and that shot is the culmination of the work (using phtography as an example)

One major takeaway/impression I have on the visual department is the level of knowledge and level of equipment required is really different. For the Design track, give us a Macbook and maybe like a Wacom tablet and it’s off to the races for us. For the Visual department it takes an intimate understanding of how a ton of different pieces of equipment work. Just reading in the slack channel Design students asking Visual students questions on equipment, without the Visual students even being there they can offer really sound advice and have a good knowledge of the equipment already. I’m honestly really curious to know what all their backgrounds are and the level of experience had prior to coming to SCCA.

I get the sense in the Design track that experience and backgrounds are incredibly varied, and while someone might have a high level of competency in one program (Adobe Illustrator for instance) the Visual track seems like maybe they have a better basic grasp on their craft going in. I could be completely wrong, and wouldn’t doubt if I am, but just having a camera in your hand or doing videos on the weekend and just constantly being able to work on your craft just out and about seems like it would be huge advantage. Maybe not if you were into videography you couldn’t take a huge camera everywhere and you can’t really experiment with lighting too much, but just the ability to practice out in the wild and not requiring you to sit down at a table with your laptop seems really cool/convenient to me.

I’m honestly very interested in the visual media course and would love to dive deeper into videography, photography and animation so I’m very much looking forward to the film narrative and After Effects modules. Animation is probably the career I wish I could do more then any other but for a variety of reasons I don’t think it’s very practical for me to pivot to that at this point. It would have been cool to experiment more with that as a kid or in hs figure out thats what I wanted to do. But maybe After Effects can reignite that passion, hopefully som eoft he other visual media students can help me out with that.

The most obvious example of any of these principles I can remember would be the one on having a backbone. I used to work a production graphics job, just setting up whatever art file our customers sent us on table throws, tents, etc. One day, the art I received for an order was about black-on-black crime, some made-up statistic that would be going on a flag. I knew this wasn’t going to be used for anything other then racist messaging. The flag itself wasn’t overtly racist so while our company agreed to print the order, I did not agree to work on it and passed it off to my boss to do.

Invent and Simplify is also something I did several times at my previous job. We had these really long SOPs on how we were supposed to do our work. They could get really complicated and for new hires, it was a lot to sift through. So one day I took it upon myself to re-write them all concisely and clearly, showing examples. I also formatted several of our file types to be more of a template in nature, allowing other graphic artists to increase their speed and time spent on each order.

For thinking big, that reminds me of our mural class in college. The class was just about potentially designing something by taking a look at places on campus it could go and photoshopping our design onto our chosen spot. I went really wild with mine, and I spent a lot of time on it, more than any of my friends in class. In the end, I had this really cool geometric bluejay, made only out of triangles. I was really proud of it and my teacher and classmates liked it a lot also, and they petitioned the school president to put it up. Ultimately he didn’t because he was extremely conservative in terms of public art but it was very cool to see a big idea almost pay off.

As far as one’s I could stand to work on, I’d say most of the principles listed require some level of authority. I’ve really only ever had entry-level positions. I’ve never had enough power to voice my opinion and have any real expectation of enacting change. I think Frugality, Customer Obsession, and Are Right A Lot are things I could stand to work on when I find a job that I’m invested in and take the time to grow into a more senior role.

I’d been working at the same company for 3 years, I planned on trying to leave back in 2020, but then Covid happened. I got laid off for a bit but brought back on shortly after, and I didn’t look for other work for awhile because I just felt grateful to have a job. A lot of people had it worse than me, especially in the pandemic, but I just felt like I was in a rut and that all I was gonna do with my life was that job. It’s hard not thinking about where other people are in their life and comparing yourself to them, and I always just thought I’d be doing something more by that point. 

Around this time when I was feeling really low, me and my parents went on a trip to Seattle and I was miserable the whole time. I kept getting rejected for jobs and really didn’t know what to do, but talking it out with them I realized I wanted to go back to school to get some of the experience and technical skill I needed. Originally I looked at schools in Minneapolis, but they were really expensive, and I didn’t really think they were what I was looking for. But, as fate would have it, we had family friends whose son was an alumni of Seattle Central, and after looking at the program I thought that’s what I want to do, so I applied and got in.

 But now I just had to uproot my life back in Minneapolis. I had a girlfriend of 6 months that things were going well with, didn’t know how that was gonna work. Was gonna have to move halfway across the country in a U-Haul, and only have my roommate in Seattle as a person I know. I never really expected I’d be doing this a year ago, this is the first thing that wasn’t just like a planned part of my life. It’s supposed to go high-school, college, first job, better job, but then it felt like it plateaued. I guess I don’t really know how this will work out, I think well. This first month makes me think this is the place I should be and I feel great about my choice, but ultimately that will come down to how hard I work

For our final project, we decided to tackle a really socially-poignant, responsible topic tackling the issues of our time, which is how we arrived at birds of the pacific northwest. We wanted to do something highlighting the beauty of the state and focus on the wildlife.

 We each picked a different bird and then went our separate ways to work on our projects. I picked an Osprey, I love their cry and the look of them. I think as far as raptors go they always just looked really unique and the research I did on the birds actually backed that up. Fun fact, they’re so specialized at hunting fish they have their own genus and family comprised solely of them. I know, that’s pretty sick.

I began with just thinking about how I was going to present my topic. Similar to the whale tutorial and the concert venue example shown in class, I went for a 7th grade science project presentation vibe. I began gathering cool images, gifs and information. Once I had the research, I styled it in Illustrator at the recommended panel sizes and exported all those out as PNGs. I grabbed some audio of them online to have loop in the background. Honestly the hardest thing was compressing this gif of an Osprey diving into the water. I had to have fumbled with that for an hour before messaging you and it was solved instantly.

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Ultimately it took me probably around 2 hours, 3 panels, 2 pictures, a gif and an audio track. This was a great project to do, and you were right after using Aero this was a lot easier and even though Aero really made sense to me by the end of it, EyeJack Panels was even easier in comparison and it’s a really cool program. I used it for one of the other blog posts a few weeks ago because I liked it so much and I’ll probably keep using it. Thanks for a great first module Stephanie. Attached are some pictures of my assets.

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