Month: January 2023

I have been working on an outside/personal project since my first quarter began at SCCA. I’ve been designing a usable typeface for a juice bar located in Palm Springs called Jugo Y Chisme. The owners contacted me after seeing some other lettering projects I had worked on via Instagram. They asked for a hand drawn “juicy” font that would be legible from the road when displayed on their building, but also work for shirts, menus, all kinds of branding.

I enjoy hand lettering and type design is one of the main reasons I/ decided to enter into the design program. So, this project is fun, but it’s very time consuming and hard to focus on while I’m busy with so many school assignments. It took me three months to finish all the capitals. I am currently working on lower case letters, glyphs and numerals. Luckily they’ve approved everything I’ve worked on so far and I expect to finalize the rest of the typeface by the summer. Once that’s completed I can move on to some character designs for the company.

So far working on this project has been a great experience and it pays well. The most stressful part is finding time to work on the letters. The owner of the company works in architecture and interior design so it’s been really eye opening to see all that goes into opening a restaurant: construction, interior design, choosing color schemes, fonts, font weights, menu layouts, uniforms, etc. etc. etc.

I’m grateful to be working on this while I’m learning about type, but I suspect I’ll have a much easier time if I get hired for similar work once I’m out of school. Also, eh, does this count as an internship?

I got really sick this week. When I am sick I generally crave spicy Thai food and nothing else. So on my second day of illness I decided to treat myself. I didn’t want to leave the house so I used Doordash. I only use delivery services when I am ill due to the fact that my food generally costs double the asking price and this time was no different from the rest!

I used procreate to create this gif. I have become interested in making short animations since starting the program. I would have enjoyed trying something out in After Effects but my skill level in that program generally cause my projects to take forever. I am much more proficient in Procreate and on a sick day I went for speed and precision over a skill bolstering session. Thanks.

The first module I was assigned to in New Media was After Effects. I really enjoyed the class but it got off to a rough start for me. The first week or the first quarter of my first year in the SCCA Graphic Design Program I was stuck at home with covid. I attended all of my glasses via zoom and in most situations I felt I was still able to participate with relative comfort. During the first After Effects lesson the zoom connection repeatedly dropped. When I was able to zoom in the connection was very choppy and hard to follow. After Effects can make that happen. I was pretty distraught over this due to the fact that I had never used After Effects before and I really wanted to do well in the module and understand what was going on.

Luckily Erik Scheel recorded the lesson and I was able to follow along and complete my assignment – creating a basic graphics package for a newscast. It turns out following along with the videos at home was my preferred method of learning After Effects. I made my way through the assignment with some hiccups and the end result might have been a little shaky but not bad for my first effort. Cool.

The day before the assignment was due I decided to watch my finished video during a lunch break just to see if I needed to go in and refine anything. I couldn’t find the video. It seems ridiculous but I never found it. I searched my computer, used every key term I could think of in finder, searched all the After Effects files I had and it wasn’t there.

So I just made the whole thing all over again during that lunch break. The second pass came out better than the first. The project originally took several hours and the redo took about one.I was able to remember how I had made the original video and even learned a few new things. So I started the project ill with covid and a bad internet connection, managed to create something half way decent, promptly lost that thing, and to my surprise was able to remake it with some slight improvements.