During Abdul Kassamali’s talk about his experiences producing films, he brought up the need to pivot and change direction when real-life challenges presented themselves. As a student in the SCCA graphic design program, I’ve thought a lot about how to both set high expectations for myself and let go of perfectionism, which has prevented me from taking risks in the past. During fall quarter, my approach to many of the projects was to try out as many directions as possible, then commit to an idea and work intensely before the deadline. Even though I feel like this approach has allowed me to explore more and test out lots of ideas, I recently encountered issues which made me rethink my approach to managing deadlines for projects.
For Jason’s Indesign class, I found myself tasked with creating an illustration of a word made entirely out of letters from that word (I decided to make a hermit crab out of hermit crab words. I spent the whole weekend before the Wednesday due date exploring different options, but caught a fever on Monday that left me exhausted and concerned about the project, as I had tons of work to juggle and also needed to rest to feel better. On Tuesday afternoon, I took an hour-long nap then spent tons of time on two different reference images: one image of a shell which I had tried to render in a photorealist fashion and another on the hermit crab itself, which I had pulled from an Illustration. Because I had another assignment also due the next day, I gave myself a 9pm deadline to complete everything. I decided that the style I had used for the hermit crab could be used for the shell and take less time, then I created the shell and decided to simplify the crab’s body. While I wish I had planned for personal circumstances such as getting sick, I feel good about how things turned out.
