Imagine you are a Swiss Army Knife with at least 8 to 10 tools you will need to be successful in your career after SCCA. List the tools you will need, in the following three categories:
Tools you currently have.
Tools you have that need development.
Tools you do not have that you need to learn.

Tools I currently have

• Illustration
• Basics of Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop
• Some real-world experience as a graphic designer
• Some real-world experience working with clients

Tools that need development

• Effective use of my illustration skills in design work
• Adobe CC keyboard shortcuts and other time-saving tricks
• Organization skills (for files, layers, tasks, invoices, etc.)
• Building a portfolio
• Tips and skills for communicating/setting expectations with clients

Tools I need to learn

• All things Figma
• Accessible design
• How to create effective, balanced color palettes
• How to integrate type into my designs
• Working with a creative brief

Our project this week was to use an AI image generator of our choice to generate three rounds of images. The theme I chose from the provided list was “taking the bus to the roller rink,” and I used Microsoft Bing Image Creator to generate my images. After writing my first prompt, I made this quick sketch of what I wanted my image to look like:

The first prompt I wrote was:

A pop art illustration of a teen girl on a city busy. She is wearing tennis shoes, cutoff jean shorts, and a colorful windbreaker. She is listening to a walkman and looking out the window. She is sitting slouched down in her seat with one foot propped up on the seat back in front of her. On the seat next to her is a color-block duffle bag and a pair of pink roller skates. Out the window of the bus is a blurry cityscape. The image is rendered mostly in aqua blue, bubblegum pink and fluorescent yellow.

With this prompt, Image Creator generated the following four images.

I was honestly pretty surprised by how close this got to my initial vision in color, style, and mood. However, these images were missing a few details, including the big hair (which I forgot to write into the prompt) and the roller skates (which I did not forget to write into the prompt). For fun, I also decided to add a different setting in the second round—in my head, she’s a fun-loving girl stuck in a stripmall town without much going on, so the roller rink is her outlet.

A pop art illustration of a teen girl with big hair on a city busy. She is wearing tennis shoes, cutoff shorts, a giant hair bow, and a colorful windbreaker. She is listening to a walkman and looking out the window at strip mall. She is sitting slouched down in her seat with one foot propped up. On the seat next to her is a color-block duffle bag. On top of the duffle bag is a pair of roller skates. The image is rendered mostly in aqua blue, bubblegum pink, and neon yellow.

In the second round, I think the AI did fine with the hair and decently well with the strip mall (even though most of the buildings literally have “STRIP MALL” written on them), but it had a lot of trouble with the roller skates.I tweaked the prompt to try to get some of the details closer to what I wanted:

A pop art illustration of a teen girl with a bored expression and big hair on a city busy. She is holding a pair of roller skates on her lap. She is wearing tennis shoes, cutoff shorts, a giant hair bow, and a colorful windbreaker. She is listening to a walkman and looking out the window at strip mall. She is slouching with one foot propped up. On the seat next to her is a color-block duffle bag. The image is rendered mostly in aqua blue, bubblegum pink, and neon yellow.

Well, at least there was a minimum of one skate in each of the images in the last round. Not important, but I thought it was interesting that instead of STRIP MALL, it’s pulled some other text (variations on “city bus”) from my prompt to put on the sides of the buildings.

This was fun and challenging. I tried to make the request even clearer in the third round, but the skates were on her feet no matter what, sometimes missing wheels or combined with the tennis shoes or suspended in the air for no reason.

As far as usefulness, these are not images I would show to a client or use for any final product. They just have too many little anomalies—and because they are generated images, they wouldn’t be very easy to tweak. Where I do see this tool being helpful is in generating ideas and helping to flesh out my original vision. The small differences in mood, color palette, style, and composition of each of the images is helpful to me in visualizing how I could take my very rough sketch and turn it into a fleshed-out final illustration.

I’m pitching some equipment today: a riso duplicator!

I picked this piece of equipment to research initially because I sell some zines that are printed on riso (by Paper Press Punch in Georgetown), so I wanted to take this opportunity to better understand the production process and equipment. In the process of researching these machines, though, I’ve come to believe that a risograph duplicator would actually be an amazing addition to the production studio at SCCA for their beauty, efficiency, and technical edge. The big caveat is the price–but more on that later. 

Riso is a brand of duplicator designed for high volume, limited color, short run printing by the Riso Kagaku Corporation. Riso machines use soy-based ink and uncoated paper to produce vibrant prints very quickly. The machine prints by burning tiny holes in a thin master sheet, then pushing ink through those holes onto the paper used for printing. Riso come in one and two-drum models, with the number of drums corresponding to the number of colors the machine can print in one run. Prints with additional colors require running the same piece of paper through the machine more than once.

 The production process is more complex than a laser printer, but less technical than traditional offset printing–and the resulting prints are beautiful and vividly colorful. The layering of spot color and slight variation in registration also give riso prints a certain retro aesthetic, which I think is part of why they are so popular with zinemakers and artists right now. It’s definitely why I’ve chosen to have the zines I sell printed by Paper Press Punch. Here’s a quote from a video I watched (linked below) that describes the joy of printing with riso: 

As a design major, almost everything we do ends up being a laser print… you design something on a computer and it looks one way when it’s on a backlit screen, but then once it comes out [of the laser printer] it’s just dull. But with riso, it’s literally the opposite experience where you’ll design something and it comes out and it’s, like, bright and punchy and saturated and really unique.

In addition to the look of riso prints, I believe a riso machine would have value for my education and that of future students because of the opportunity it would afford for production experience with an ink printer. When I worked at Pride Foundation, I was the contact for our print vendor, Girlie Press. The experience of working with them to submit our design files, keep our printed materials on brand, and eventually design for the organization with their specifications in mind gave me a tiny glimpse into the world of offset printing. I don’t think I would have considered production as a career path before that, but once I started to learn how technical and physical as well as artistic that work is, I was fascinated. Riso is not the same as offset printing, but based on what I’ve heard from local riso shops and from a very excellent video out of the School of Visual Arts in New York’s RISO Lab, I think a risograph duplicator would give students like me to get hands-on experience with some of the key skills involved, setting up files, to working with spot color, to registration. 

Riso Kagaku makes many different models. Their M line of 2-color printers seems to be the most popular, but their S line is (presumably) less expensive and can still print multiple colors if you have the drums and the time. Additional materials required are ink, master sheets, and drums. The Riso Kagagu website does not publicly list prices, but I did reach out to them and will plan on updating this post (or the SCCA faculty) when I hear more. Friends have also recommended keeping an eye out for used or refurbished machines. Hallagans (based in Chicago) sells refurbished risographs and also sells other supplies necessary for printing. Local print shops like Paper Press Punch might also have leads on where to look for equipment closer to Seattle. Used machines online range from $1500 to upwards of $5000, depending on the model and condition. 

All in all, I had a great time researching riso. This is likely not something I’ll ever be able to buy for myself, due to space as well as price, but I would love to learn how to use one and to have access to a machine for projects. I believe a riso is something I and future students at SCCA (in both Graphic Design and Visual Media) would enjoy using! For further learning, I’ve included a few links to resources and local riso artists below. 

Links

RISO Lab: School of Visual Arts, NYC (video, 10 min) – great video on a dedicated riso lab in a school setting, featuring interviews with faculty and students about why riso is such a great fit for the school environment 

All About Riso (video, 13 min) – gets into how the machines work and why

Paper Press Punch – they print, teach classes, and run a Zine of the Month Club that I think SCCA students would really enjoy! 

Risograph Printing by Push/Pull Seattle – super cool art shop in Ballard with riso printing 

Anemone – zine resources, software, and collabs

Bear Bear – not local (they are based in Wisconsin), but their work is gorgeous (look at this one!)

My path to design hasn’t been a direct one, but my varied personal and professional experiences inform my work and give me direction.

My love of illustration, my care for other humans, and my desire to leave any place I go a little better than I found it are all lessons from my early life that I bring to my design practice today. My father is a fine woodworker, naturalist, and environmental activist, and my mother is a physical therapist. I grew up in rural northern California in a little hippie artist town, going back and forth between their two homes. From my parents, I learned the importance of caring for people who are hurting and caring for the water and trees and animals we lived alongside. I also learned how to be flexible–maybe a little too flexible sometimes–and to listen and adapt quickly to change. I was a creative kid and was lucky to grow up surrounded by creative adults, from my dad’s woodworker friends to encouraging teachers to painters and printmakers. I was encouraged to draw, and I did that a lot growing up, especially during the summer when I would go with my dad to the Alaskan bush for a month or more at a time for his work. I kept an illustrated journal there to help me remember the plants and scenery I saw when we were out hiking. This instilled in me a desire to draw and write in a way that was not just pretty but also accurate and informational. I never felt like much of an “artist” for this reason, but looking back on it now, I can see the seeds of my interest in graphic design.

When I first came out as queer and trans to friends and family, I was recently divorced and living far from my hometown. My workplace wasn’t a safe space for me to be out. I found refuge in my off hours through volunteering in LGBTQ+ community. I’ve been a volunteer at Lambert House, an LGBTQ+ youth center here in Seattle, since 2016. My experiences as a drop-in center volunteer had a huge impact on me I got to witness the youth building connections with one another and supporting each other through all of the things they were going through,including the average teen challenges of navigating relationships or the less average (but sadly still not uncommon) experience of familial rejection or homelessness. I got to share little moments with them, like learning how to put on a chest binder for the first time and watching them dye their hair. It sounds pretty cheesy, but they taught me way more than I ever taught them. In particular, the experience of connecting with queer and trans people much younger and much older (the staff and some of the other volunteers) than me helped me feel rooted in my own community’s history and gave me a sense of connection and hope for the future. Seeing how vital and life-saving something as simple as an old house with some comfy couches, art supplies, and an army of volunteers convinced me that I wanted my work to be in service of something like that.

I was eventually able to take a position at a more affirming workplace when I started working at Pride Foundation in 2018. At that job, I really started to see how my love of illustration and design could intersect with community-building work. My work at Pride Foundation focused initially on event planning and written communications, but I had a hunch that I could do more, so I started asking for small design projects. They were well received and led to more, some of which were, in retrospect, far bigger and more complex than I had the skill for at the time. My proudest moment was when our “Community Care Package,” a printed year-end fundraising piece I designed and laid out in Illustrator and InDesign went out to hundreds of our supporters at the end of 2020–and people not only wrote back to us to tell us how much it meant to them, but mentioned it specifically when they made donations to our organization. It felt good to know that people liked my designs and illustrations, but even more than that, it hit me hard to think that something I made gave people a sense of community and even inspired them to give. My design translated into concrete support for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities across the Northwest. Sure, I hadn’t used global swatches and had to go back and recolor every little piece of every flower vector illustration individually before we could publish the digital version. And sure, I didn’t know anything about color theory or kerning. There are things I would do differently now, after just one quarter at SCCA. But I think this experience taught me that there is a massive need for design and effective communication outside of the corporate sector.If anything, I am more proud now of the Community Care Package and my other design efforts than I was in the moment.

I decided to drop everything and return to school because of these experiences. I’m here to build a more robust professional toolkit so that I can take those tools back to my community in some way. I’m not sure where my path after school will lead, but it’s been interesting and helpful to hear from guest speakers who incorporate their own identity, social justice, and activism into their practice. When I feel overwhelmed or frustrated, I think about their work, and the impact my work has already had, and it gets me excited for all of the new possibilities ahead.

I had a lot of fun with this and couldn’t pick just one.

For this project I researched graphic design and UX/UI jobs in and around Tokyo, Japan. I picked Tokyo because I have lived in Japan before, I speak Japanese, and I have close friends there who I would like to be able to spend time with. I also think that the quality of life there is overall good. Japan has national health insurance, which means that medical care is accessible and affordable. Social systems and public infrastructure are also good. One challenge as a non-resident, however, is finding work and obtaining a visa. My Japanese used to be fluent, but I haven’t had much opportunity to use it over the last few years, so I’m pretty rusty. I was curious to see what jobs, if any, would be available that fit my situation.

Graphic Designer (Asus Japan) – 4,000,000-6,000,000 Japanese Yen

UX Designer – 4,800,000-6,000,000 Japanese Yen

Website Production – 3,720,000-4,243,200 Japanese Yen

Graphic Communication (IKEA) – salary not listed

Given the current exchange rate, these salaries wouldn’t go very far in Seattle, but even the lower range is more than enough for an apartment and other living expenses, at least outside of the Tokyo city limits. I checked out apartments along the train line I used to live on in Saitama Prefecture, and it looks like average rent is around 50,000-60,000 yen. Add to this another 70,000 to 100,000 for other living expenses and the salaries listed above would be comfortable. Only one mentions visa help, so I’m not sure how viable this fantasy really is, but it’s fun to think about.

Task: track everything.

Frankly, I absolutely hated doing this, but I see the value in the exercise. I get sucked into projects and lose track of time frequently, so seeing the last week mapped out this way is helpful. My big take-aways are:

1. I could probably be more efficient with my schoolwork outside of class hours. Maybe setting a timer when I start a project would be helpful.
2. At least I’m getting enough sleep and making some time for fun.
3. Do I really spend that much time eating??