graphic design – CA Work Experience Program

Generate Design Last Day

Today was the last day of work experience, and I want to say it’s been a wonderful experience, something I never really thought about doing, but still very insightful and a fun opportunity. Mr. Barth, Tyler, and I went to a cafe to have our last lunch, and we talked a little about the different types of clients that GD receives, and how they appeal to them.

This card was actually given to Mr. Barth when he went to a training type event for business managing and such. It talks about the different types of clients, what category they fall into, and how to deal with them. It talks about things you shouldn’t say and things you can say or ways to act to appease them.

My last assignment was to finish the article on Alessandra Criseo, about her art and how she’s gone about going into art as a profession. I have written many pieces during these two weeks, and it’s been an interesting change of pace. An amusing thing was that I thought I wouldn’t be as interested as I am with graphic design. While it is still not my ideal future major and career choice, I definitely see the appeal and interest in it for others. I hope I can apply what I learned here in my future interactions and projects.

Image result for alessandra criseo

Generate Design Day 7

Today was a little less eventful, but I still had fun building off the feedback from yesterday about the logos. They said that it would be cool to have a difference in pen pressure and size of the lines so I took the designs I had before and i made the lines thicker and neater where they connected, and I made the lines defined in where a chunk of hair was. The left two are the previous designs and and design on the right was the one I completed today. They will be putting it next to text to see how it looks overall as a logo.

As part of my next project which I hope to get completed soon, is the article i’m researching on an artist, Alessandra Cresio. Above is one of her pieces, I find many of her works to be very simplified yet stylized, and I wanted to take inspiration from her art to write a small blog piece. I DMed her on instagram and she replied this morning, so I can use her interview replies and such to write about her.

Generate Design Day 6

This morning, Tyler worked on variations for the Bugg Elementary school posters and picture formats. He said it was important to not give too many options to the client, because then they won’t be able to decide easily. You need to give them something to refuse, but keep it a concise range of options.

I met with Mr. Barth, Travis and Tyler after to discuss the Logo designs for Mark Christopher. They both had a range of designs they we discussed about, and they also talked about my designs, which they seem to like, so that’s a W for me. We talked about and gave feedback, and are going to continue building off the strongest ones to give in a presentation later on.

In the afternoon, I went with Brian and Mr. Barth to a presentation meeting for a report cover and content design discussion.

They gave them 3 design covers, and 3 inside designs that correlated with the covers. The client discussed which ones appealed to them the most and which ones were weaker for them. It was very insightful to get to see the whole process of the meeting, and understanding what tiny details to focus on or what they picked up on that I might not have. I’ve been able to go to a couple of the meetings that they’ve had, and i’m very grateful for the opportunity to observe these interactions.

Generate Design Day 5

Today, I helped with a few writing pieces. So far, i’ve definitely done more writing and articles than I have art and design things, but it’s an interesting change, and an experience i’m still glad to have. I’ve been building on my formal/approachable writing style, having it appear in things such as future advertisements, reflection articles for blog posts, or small reviews. Tyler was working on some logo sketches for the same hair salon I was also sketching out for (below), his were really nice (above).

They’ve set me a task to help revitalize their social media page such as on twitter or Instagram. I was looking through some magazines of really nice art and art advertisements and collected page numbers or article titles for interesting topics to post about on twitter.

They asked me to write a small bio for myself, so that when they post the article i’ve written, they can make like a small text that colleges or programs can look at if i’m applying anywhere and I wanted to list some of my experiences.

Generate Design Day 3

Today I helped work on the logo I mentioned yesterday. We drove to a hair salon called Mark Christopher Salon, and got a feel for their vibe/aesthetic, and confirmed with them what they had envisioned for the logo. They knew they liked the text and the logo by Oribe, a hair product brand.

Their colors consisted of grey, black, and white. We wanted to create something that would work well on that scale. We walked around in there for an hour or so, and then returned with some ideas in mind and to start sketching possibilities.

This was a photo of my process during the layout and sketching. Oribe’s logo had included lots of wavy hair and one solid connected figure, so I tried to implement that within my design.

Aside from logo work, I also helped work on some small blurbs for a website for an interior designer. The website had lots of photos and works but not enough words and details for google to latch onto, so I created some paragraphs for them to implement into the website format.

Generate Design Day 1

Today was my first day at Generate Design. It is located in Six Forks, Raleigh, and up in a small office building. The person I shadowed is Tyler. He is one of a team of 5, who all take on design projects for their clients. He showed me around the office and explained the importance of certain aspects of a design factor, such as something as simple as the type and texture of the paper used. They use a website called Trello.com to help plan and organize their social media posts and their current projects.

Tyler explained that graphic design is all about culture and technology; you have to know your audience/client, and they best way to give what they want to them. From PowerPoints to business cards to logos, they meet with their client to establish an outline and clear goal, so they can start designing and putting together different drafts to be approved. He also explained the importance of making the buyer feel like their in charge, to always give them a design they’ll reject, so that they have a more satisfactory feeling of contribution to the process. He discussed my future interests for a bit, about what I hope to do in animation, and recommended a few tasks I could do to help add to my experience. He was familiar with animation and was able to give me advice on some aspects of art school applications.

Currently, one of the projects Tyler is working on is designing and formatting a PowerPoint for Governors Club. It is important to note the audience, which primarily consists of older, wealthier residents, and the aspects of their newsletter that they enjoy so he can implement those design factors into the PowerPoint itself. I’m pretty sure we will continue to work on this later this week, as well as look at some other things.

Day 2 – More and More and More Statistics

The second day began with a nice 10:30am start, but the late wake-up time still didn’t prepare me enough for that day’s statistics lesson. Today, Dr. Laber introduced us to the programming language R, and gave us several examples of how it can be used. We first looked at a massive spreadsheet of data taken from about 20 different dogs suffering from induced paralysis (from a getting hit by a car, falling, etc.), with cells including the time since incident, presentation, gender, breed, location of source, and biomarker proteins such as pNHFP and S100B that were measured. Dr. Laber asked Suki and I to find the primary causal factor that would determine a dog’s ability to walk after both 6 weeks and 6 months before setting a timer to 5 minutes and stepping out of the room. While a little daunting and stressful, we were able to deduce that if the average level of protein GFAPP exceeded a level of 0.31, the dog would have roughly a 92% chance of remaining paralyzed. He agreed, then showed us how R could be used to come across the same conclusion by comparing statistical algorithms of recovered vs. non-recovered dogs. He continued with these short exercises where he’d give us time to converse before explaining it in code, with examples such as latent states of depression of terrorists vs. non-terrorists, as well as methods of finding demographics of a population with just a small sample. It was quite the hour-and-a-half long hyper-speed presentation of applications, but our work felt important and our conclusions felt meaningful. Later that day, we went to the Laber Labs at BOM to meet with the team’s graphic designer, Lisa, to speak with her about a potential project for Friday using 3D imaging before we helped train the chess-bot Nona through about 600 more actions. Our time today felt pretty long, but the lab is full of so many interesting people and projects that each day is something completely new.