Month: February 2023

There have been many times over the years when I feel I have failed to perform well at a job or on a particular project. Each has been a learning experience and has contributed to making me the person I am right now. It’s hard to say if all my past failures have fallen into the category of Deliver Quality Work, Create and Foster Trust, or Add Value to the Production/Company/Idea.

I think the example that stands out the most would have to be my first full time job after graduating college. I had moved to the District of Columbia and found work as a receptionist for a massage therapy studio in Arlington, VA. I found out through working as a receptionist that there are a number of things I am not good at. The job did not offer much downtime or room to breathe. One minute I was answering phones, the next folding sheets, then pulling client files, checking in new patrons, and more, all while greeting and checking people in and out of their appointments. Now I know that I work the best when I can focus on one task for an extended amount of time. I can still manage to work on multiple projects, but jumping from task to task every few minutes is more than a match for me.

Needless to say, I was not great in this role. I was taken aside by our manager after multiple meetings to be informed that I has messed up in some way. I was trying so hard to keep up with my duties, but I still couldn’t make it work. I eventually left the company after getting my own massage therapy license.

I think one of the big things I learned through my experience working as a receptionist, though I didn’t realize it until much later, is the importance of hard work. Throughout college I didn’t apply myself well to the tasks and responsibilities that came with attending school and therefore my grades suffered and I had an overall bad experience with school. I mostly assumed things would work out, even if I didn’t apply myself fully to the process. This work experience helped to show me that I have to exert and commit myself to get the results I want out of my work, my personal life, and everything in between.

It is a little hard to write about my hard and soft skills because I have conditioned myself to downplay my achievements and abilities. When it comes to the areas where I have hard skills, I believe I am most capable with Adobe Illustrator, motion graphics, and Figma to create interactive prototypes for apps and websites.

With Adobe Illustrator, the best and most recent example of using this skill is from Jason’s second Illustrator assignment during Fall quarter. I really wanted to challenge myself with the project and I believe I did so while producing something visually striking. While going over the final projects in class, Jason suggested that I could even use the assignment as part of my graduation portfolio.

When it comes to motion graphics, I first began developing that skill while working as part of a very small marketing team. Using online tutorials and resources I learned pretty much everything I know now. While working with that marketing team I produced a number of short animations that played in front of various video and social media segments the company produced. I still use those animations in my current personal website/portfolio. While seeking advice from other professional designers, they commented positively on my animations.

I began learning to use Figma towards the beginning of the pandemic after being furloughed. I had already been trying to find a new job and decided that I should learn app and web design to help make me more competitive as I applied for positions (unfortunately I have yet to be able to use Figma in a professional setting). While working in Courtney’s module, my teammates would often ask me questions about prototyping and because of my experience with Figma I ended up taking on the role of design lead for the project we were working on.

With soft skills I like to highlight my creativity, willingness to learn, and ability to problem solve or adapt to most situations.

I think creativity and adaptability are almost one in the same. I’ve heard some writers say that you never figure out how to write a book, you just figure out how to write the book you are currently working on. I feel much the same way when it comes to design. There are a number of different tools and methods that help you figure out how to start or continue a project, but I often am surprised by the solutions I come up with. I think one of the best examples of my creativity is an illustration I did for Street Sense Media’s 2016 election edition newspaper. I took a lot of inspiration from many sources and combined them using my own illustration style. I was really happy with the results and because my illustration was so impressive it got professional graphic designer in the area to volunteer his time with Street Sense when the company eventually went through a rebranding.

When it comes to learning, I find that it is a never ending process. The last job I had before moving back to Seattle ended up teaching me a lot. I worked as part of the embroidery team for a company that produced garments and other items for various companies. I had never worked with digitizing embroidery before and ended up learning quite a lot from the head digitizer at the company. I am always eager to learn any new skill or tool when it comes to design and am always keeping an eye out for different techniques on social media and online that I can incorporate into the work I produce.

I feel like I’ve maybe addressed problem solving a bit already while discussing some of my other soft skills. When prototyping an app or website while using a program like Figma I find that you have to be able to think differently than with other types of design. Deciding which screens and buttons and icons need to connect to other screens or produce various interactions is challenging, but I find the results to be very rewarding.

For hard skills, I would like to work on user research. It’s a super important part of the design and refining process when it comes to user experience design, but it is one area where I feel like I struggle the most. I lean very heavily towards the introvert end of the spectrum and it is exhausting to conduct interviews and compile and analyze the results.

Another area I would like to work on are my presentation skills. Presentations and meetings are some of the least fun parts of working as part of a design team for me. Being able to articulately communicate my ideas and keep my audience engaged would definitely help me develop into the types of positions and roles I hope to obtain after graduation.

As for soft skills, I think my organization could use some work. For example, I fell behind with my blog posts at the beginning of the quarter. If I had been more organized and on top of everything that bombarded me I wouldn’t have missed multiple deadlines, which is bad and even more so when it comes to a work environment.

Additionally, I believe my persuasion skills and ability to take the lead could use work. I have found myself in lead roles while at school, but it’s usually because the position has been place upon me or because I accidentally stumbled into the position. I feel that my level of confidence isn’t where it needs to be, which affects both my ability to persuade and lead others. Because I am one of the older students in the Creative Academy, I think sometimes others might see me as being more experienced and look to me to lead the way on certain projects. Over all these are skills I believe I would benefit from developing more.

You can watch my elevator pitch HERE.

For my elevator pitch I wanted to focus on a few main points, making sure to emphasize those areas in particular. I chose to do bullet points rather than write out an actual script hoping that it would make my presentation sound more natural.

The main points I wanted to highlight are:

• Working in design and/or related field since 2016:
  • I’ve worked in marketing,
  • created social media posts,
  • learned embroidery digitizing.
• I’m primarily self taught (fortunately, you can learn a lot from YouTube tutorials).
  • I’m back in school now to build up my portfolio and foundations.
• I have a wide set of skills:
  • branding and logo design,
  • UX/UI,
  • motion design,
  • illustration.
• Some fun facts about myself:
  • I can solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute,
  • I was the president of my college’s juggling club for a year,
  • I love board games.

This was a somewhat difficult assignment. I have always found it hard to talk about myself, especially avoiding being too humble and downplaying my abilities. I have struggled with anxiety for a very long time and skew heavily towards introversion. I find the act of networking and interacting with new people very draining. Even when it comes to writing cover letters and applying for jobs I find it incredibly hard to start and follow through.

If anything, the process has gotten harder as I’ve grown older. It is something that I have been trying to work on for a while. I think it will continue to be a struggle moving forward, but at least when it comes to working as a designer, I hope that this program will help boost my confidence, which in turn will make it that much easier to sell myself and my abilities.

You can watch my elevator pitch HERE.

I really struggled with this assignment. I swung wildly from what I thought of making, from packaging to whole brand identities. With the start of the new quarter and struggling to get back into the flow of completing projects for seemingly every class I ended up putting off this particular assignment because it seemed like too much work with everything else that was going on.

Finally, when I made the time to start on this project I decided to create a simple animation using Procreate inspired by the work of Dima Tkachev who does a lot of animations for various brands.

If this had been a more complicated animation I would have begun by storyboarding everything after finding some stock footage. Instead I began by finding the footage I wanted to use and imported it into Procreate. The original clip was 57 seconds long and Procreate automatically cut it down to around 4 seconds with 122 frames at 30 frames per second. I went in and deleted roughly two out of every three frames and reduced the frame rate to 24 frames per second to cut down the amount of illustrating I would have to do. I toyed with the idea of creating multiple layer groups, but when animating something by had I found it was too difficult and time consuming and ended up drawing on top of the existing image.

For the ending splash/wipe I found that using Procreate’s selection too to be a real time saver, especially when combined with it’s color fill mode. Towards the end of the project I realized that I didn’t like how the animation didn’t seem to loop and jumped when it started over. To fix this I duplicated a few of the frames from the beginning of the animating and removed the white lines. After few hours and a few sessions I had something I was pretty happy with. Given more time I would have liked to clean up the animation quite a bit and make the return to start animation smoother. I hope you like my animation as well and that it makes you want to maybe eat an apple.