Month: February 2023

Justin Bernardy

Last week we were visited by Adam Knight, who spoke on the core values he brings into every job, no matter the scope of said job. These included delivering quality work and creating trust with the client. Adam elaborated on this by explaining the importance of accountability and transparency. This resonated with me, as there are often times where I feel as though I might not be measuring up to the expectations of my peers or teachers etc. Some of that can be attributed to issues with self-confidence and varying degrees of imposter syndrome. However, there are times where I have genuinely failed, and must accept the results of that failure.

A very recent example of a time where I failed to deliver quality work comes in the form of submitting an assignment late in my InDesign class. For this assignment, we were tasked with formatting menus using paragraph and character styles in InDesign. It can be quite a time consuming and involved process, and as such requires attention, effort, and time. I managed my time around this assignment quite poorly, and submitted it late. Not only did this bring my grade down considerably, but I was also unable to create a final product that was reflective of what I can actually do with genuine effort. In layman’s terms: I submitted crappy work late. This situation put the very real fear of being dropped from the program in me. I started to think “If I fail, then I moved across the country for nothing, and wasted my best chance at a good education, and that CANNOT happen”. As a result, I have since tried to stay as on top of assignments as I can, so I can always account for anything that may happen, and always submit high quality work.

Justin Bernardy

Listening to Brit tell her story was a great experience. Not only was she very transparent about herself, the realities of working in the industry, and her emotions and experiences, but she offered powerful advice. “Hard skills will get you the interview, but soft skills will get you the job”. This is simple but powerful. You can possess all the qualities of a good candidate , but if people can’t see the qualities that make you a good person then you are far less likely to succeed.

Since then, I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on my own hard and soft skills. Some of my hard skills include illustration, packaging, and 3d modeling. I enjoy the learning process immensely, and practice every single day. These are the skills that I hope will get me an interview one day, be that for an internship, job or etc. In terms of soft skills, I would say I have a strong work ethic, accountability, and respect/listening and understanding. I think I’m strong in these areas because I want to be a productive, respected, and responsible person. I want friends, coworkers, and peers to know without a doubt that they can trust and count on me, whether it be for work or just an open ear. That said, there are a number of soft and hard skills that I lack that tend to make my professional life more challenging.

In particular, the soft skills that I want to develop most are confidence and communication. I would even venture to say that my lack of communication stems from my lack of confidence in a lot of ways. I want to feel confident, so that I don’t always question my work and compare myself to others, so that I’m able to network and make friends, and so that I’m not afraid to present my ideas passionately and enthusiastically. Being confident will help me communicate more effectively, and communicating more effectively means being more effective in almost every other soft skill. For instance: with confidence I will be better at persuasion, and I’ll FINALLY be able to answer the questions of “How do I convince future clients to work with me?” and “How do I convince them that my designs are exactly what they are looking for?”. If that wasn’t enough, then I start to think that I would also be better at networking in general, and thus more able to find work, or inspiration, or even just make new friends.

In terms of hard skills, I am currently quite weak in typography, and not very well versed in a lot of industry standard software. For instance, I know the basis of adobe Illustrator and InDesign, but nowhere near enough to succeed professionally. Deeper than that though, is my need for development on the principles and theories of design. Knowing software is great, but more than that I need to understand composition, color, space etc. Essentially my goal is to develop an understanding of design that become like second nature to me, so I can be more independent and confident with my designs.

By Justin Bernardy

We were recently tasked with giving a short ‘elevator pitch’ to practice talking about ourselves in a networking situation. For this assignment we had to strike a balance between professional, personal, and genuine. I say ‘genuine’ because after all, the goal of networking is to secure employment, but the process should not be purely transactional. We should aim first and foremost to make friends and connections, and as such should try to present ourselves authentically. Here is my video of me trying to do so. Socializing, and articulating my thoughts are two things I struggle with tremendously, so this was quite a challenge, at least for me. It can also be a little more difficult when not engaged in an actual conversation, using only a monologue. Anyway, here is my best effort!

Justin Bernardy

For this project we decided to keep it simple and local. We chose various popular restaurants in the Capitol Hill area. Our AR experiences for each restaurant detail things like the menu, mission statement, and so on. My particular restaurant was Ian’s pizza. To accomplish this project, I first recreated the logo into separate elements in Illustrator. Once I was finished I imported them into After Effects for animation. This would serve as the main panel.

After that, I took screenshots of things such as the menu, to serve as other panels and provide the user with some information about the restaurant.