In my Free Time – 6.28.17

Even though I’ve been keeping somewhat busy with some freelance work I still have a decent amount of time to work on some side projects. I hadn’t done a geometric poly art piece in a while so I figured I would try my hand at another one.

When thinking of subject matter I decided to go with something summery. I chose to do a grapefruit and blend the geometric shapes of the grapefruit with the realistic background. I tried to tie them together further by adding slightly less opaque white geometric outlines over the background.

In my Free Time – 6.13.17

For a while now I’ve wanted to learn how to create clean isometric designs. Today I decided to dive into the process of learning. I began by watching a tutorial on Skillshare by Hayden Aube. He does a great job at explaining the basics and providing you with the tools necessary to get started.

I decided to start with something small and simple as to not get too frustrated while just learning the basics. A table seemed like a good place to start. I decided to add some screws over the legs just to practice with the perspective of round objects. I’m pretty happy with this as a first attempt and will definitely be creating more in the future!

In my Free Time – June 9th

Something I’ve been trying to work on lately is making my designs bolder and more colorful. So today in my free time I decided to play around with bright colors, shapes and gradients. The designs I came up with were fairly simple but I feel as though they are effective. On some of them I decided to do some illustrations on top of them as well to make them more interesting as well as give them a bit more depth.

 

 

In my Free Time

Going from being a full time student, an intern and a manager in a few different orgs to now being a graduate on the hunt for jobs I have a bit more free time on my hands. In this time I plan to keep creating and designing and really trying to teach myself new things. So I’ll be starting a new segment of posts called “In my Free Time,” to showcase what I’ve been working on and learning.

Also in my free time I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks from the beginning. This gave me an idea for a new animation project. I watched a few tutorials on how to morph shapes/images in After Effects and this is what I came up with.

Portfolio Site is LIVE!!

Four years of college have led me to this moment… I have finally finished coding my portfolio site and it is finally LIVE!!! Check it out: http://www.tylerelise.com

You Are Not Your Work

Now that my portfolio site is done and live (ahhh!!) I have finally gotten around to reading again. I’ve picked back up Burn Your Portfolio: Stuff They Don’t Teach You in Design School by Michael Janda. I’m glad I picked back up on this section because what Janda touches on is something that every artist/designer needs to hear.

To put it simply, you are not your work.

You may think to yourself, “I work so hard on what I create, what do you mean it doesn’t define me?” Every piece you create has to start somewhere and sometimes that starting point isn’t so great, but that’s OK! Your work shouldn’t start off perfect and 99.9% of the time it won’t. This is why you should always be looking for feedback and looking for critique. Just because you may create something that needs some work, or that you may even need to scrap and start all over, does not mean that you are a subpar designer.

Janda says, “If you interpret design critique as a character critique, you are setting yourself up in a defensive position that will impede your ability to improve your design skills and adapt to different creative environments,” (11). If you were constantly producing work and never revisiting it, never getting feedback on it, how are you learning? You will never be able to grow as a designer without that critique and you just have to learn to not take is as a “character critique,” but rather as one of the most helpful/crucial steps in your design process.

This brings me to another point that was also touched upon in the film Design Disruptors. They make the point that you cannot fall in love with your work. You can like your work, but if you fall in love with it you’re setting yourself up for failure. Sometimes the best move to make is to scrap what you’re working on and make a complete 360, but that’s extremely hard to do when you love your design. When looking at your own work for a while it’s hard to have an objective view on it. That’s why having a fresh eye look at it is extremely helpful.

So all in all, “In order to grow in your design skills, you have to hunger for critique and advice from wherever you can get it,” (11). This will truly reflect in your work and help you progress into a much stronger designer.

Media Mashup – Brand Identity Review & Job/Interview Advice

Today we had our School of Communications annual Media Mashup. This day is filled with so many helpful resources from presentations, to mock job interviews, to networking events. This is a really useful day for all Interactive Digital Design majors. All semester we’ve been working extremely hard on our brand identities and for today we all had to present our final brand boards. Women from Digital Surgeons in New Haven came in to give us advice and critique our brands. Along with that they gave a wonderful presentation on searching for jobs as well as gave us some great interview advice.

It was overall a really rewarding day and I got a ton of useful information and feedback. It is truly a sense of relief knowing that the finish line is really in sight and it is also really exciting to know that we’re just getting started!

Business Cards Have Arrived!

There is something so awesome about holding something tangible that you’ve worked so hard on. Opening my package from Moo this afternoon felt so incredibly rewarding!

Moo has beautiful business cards and they have many different options. The ones I ordered were the green/eco-friendly ones. These cards are  100% recycled fibre and 100% chlorine free and made from paper sourced from sustainable forests. Even the packaging it came in is made from recycled pulp board!

I was a little worried about these to be honest, sometimes recycled materials don’t end up being as nice, but I was willing to risk it to be a little friendlier to the environment. These cards are nothing short of amazing. They look amazing and I am SO happy with them.

They even came with cute little cards in the boxes 😉

All of this portfolio and branding stuff is HARD work, but something as simple as getting your business cards in the mail really makes it all feel worth it!

Logos and Furthering the Quest of Getting to Know Yourself

A logo is usually one of the first impressions that someone gets of you so creating one might require you to go on a personal quest to get to really know yourself. In my last post I talked a bit about my logo process, but here I will go a little more in depth of how I got to my final logo. My process started with pages and PAGES of sketches. First starting with random doodles to get my creative brain flowing and then onto more elements that defined me. I never really thought of myself as a floral-y person, but I kept gravitating towards those elements and I really had to take the time to think (and look around at all the dried flowers I have hanging on my walls and plants on my desk) and realize that maybe this is who I am! Floral didn’t have to mean dainty, it could correlate with my love for growth and nature. So I had a direction, then it was just left to deciding on which direction to go in!

Below are some of my initial sketches

 

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As you could see towards the beginning there really wasn’t a very strong, singular direction, but as they started forming they started to go down a similar path. I’m very interested in hand made things whether they be drawings or DIY projects and I wanted to portray that in a way that wasn’t too literal (aka the hand sketch).

Now that we had a bit of a direction it was time to clean things up a bit and move further with them. Below are some of those sketches:

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When I first sketched the circle with the floral elements I originally had my name hand lettered in a nice cursive, which was pretty, but it didn’t feel like “me.” I wanted to figure out a way to keep that circle/floral element but make it correlate more to who I am. I used watercolor pens to try out some brush lettering and voilà! The strong lettering next to the floral and light hand drawn elements really related more to who I am. The juxtaposition of hard and soft really resonated with me. So I went for it! I think I drew about 50 different circle/floral elements before I thought one was good enough to vectorize, but I decided to save you the time and only post one of the pages ;).

Then it was time to vectorize the logo and start creating things such as my resumé and business cards. As I started to use my vectorized logo I realized that the circle was fitting awkwardly in places and looked almost too much like a crest of some sort. This is where I brought in some alternates. After creating most of my designs I realized that my alternate, horizontal, logos were becoming my primary logos. At first I was so in love with the circle one that I was hesitant to make the decision to push it back to being a secondary logo, but I did and I feel very strongly that this was a good decision. The horizontal logo felt stronger, and like it was placed on pieces like my resumé and business cards on purpose, where as the circle logo felt a bit accidental and like it was placed wherever because it didn’t fit properly anywhere.

Below is my final brand board of all of my colors, type choices, graphic elements, primary and secondary logos:

This process really took a lot of soul searching, trust in myself and most of all, sketching, and it’s only the beginning!

Self Branding Process or Identity Crisis?

Think you have a good idea of who you are and what defines you? Try branding yourself THEN answer that question!

Truthfully the branding process may come along with a brief identity crisis but if you take some time and a few deep breaths you’ll realize that you do really know yourself, it’s just the stressful process that is self branding that is giving you that brain block! It’s a difficult thing trying to define yourself especially when this is going to be the first impression you give your future employers.

What really helped me was making a list. This list doesn’t have to be just ideas specifically for branding but I made a list of everything about me. My list included things like my love for dogs and brunch to more design related topics as well. When you start to push your thinking process to outlandish ideas that you would not normally think to incorporate into your branding it really stretches your thinking and allows for those reasonable and more rational and altogether wonderful ideas to surface!

If you’re having trouble starting that list it’s also helpful to talk to those who are close to you. Ask them how they’d describe you or what they think defines you. Sometimes it’s easier for others to express that than it is for you to come up with it on your own and can really get your creative mind flowing.

Also your logo does not have to be an exact, literal, representation of you. I know personally I wanted to do something that signified something “hand drawn” or “hand made.” In my sketches I had drawn hands, pencils, etc. But through critique I realized that I could show “hand drawn” without a literal hand or pencil. Post critique I decided to go in the direction of using floral elements. I originally had some hand lettered script among it but I realized that it felt too dainty to define me as a person or an artist. So instead of the script I did a different form of brush lettering using watercolor pens. This felt like a much nicer juxtaposition and balance with the floral elements. Below is currently where my logo stands design wise, it is definitely subject to change after further critique and inevitable editing/redesigning.

This past week in portfolio class we had the pleasure of having a girl who graduated from our program come and talk to the class about what the professional world has been like for her and what we should expect. Her name is Caroline and I was lucky enough to have her as a roommate last year before she graduated and moved on to work at ESPN. One really important piece of advice that I took away from the talk she gave was that in your branding process, especially with your logo, you shouldn’t fall so in love with your design that you’re so attached to it and can’t let it go. Sometimes you may be so set on an idea that just isn’t working and you waste your time trying to make it work when in reality it would be best to just scrap it and find something else. This goes for all your design work but is especially helpful to remember when focusing on branding. When something isn’t working, don’t force it.

She talked a lot about our portfolio review at the end of the year when we present our portfolio sites to potential employers and then meet with them. As stated before I was lucky enough to have her as a roommate last year so I was able to watch her go through her whole portfolio process first hand. From sketching her logos to coding her website to applying to jobs, I got to see what it was like every step of the way and I am very thankful for that because it got me starting to think about all of this stuff at a very early stage. It was so incredible to see that all of your hard work really does pay off.

The branding and portfolio process is definitely a really stressful and scary one, but it is also a really beautiful and exciting one to watch yourself grow and move onto the professional world.