Competition

Recently Professor Speyers assigned us a logo competition with the possibility to win a contest for 500 dollars. I think its great that we can have these opportunities to compete with other people and for us to gain experience in turning in designs to the contests. The only bad thing is the intimidation factor. Knowing that most people submitting designs for this competition already probably have years of experience in design can be intimidating. I might have creative ideas, but putting them onto the page may be harder to do than imaginable. Hopefully over time i will learn the many tools i need to and how to use them all to express my artistic ideas. I have a feeling that their will be many competitions and that many let-downs are possible simply due to the fact that their are so many different ideas for the same concept.

Free lance

Professor Speyers told us the other day that hopefully most of us will be able to find and do free lance work by the end of this semester. I think this would be a great way to get your name out their, and to add some artwork to your portfolio. I have been trying to do my best on each of the projects, because I know if they look good, they can be used for the portfolio. I have already had several designs used for different things like t shirt designs or logos for events, but im curious to know if they are worth of being put in a portfolio. I hope that we start putting together a portfolio soon. The sooner we do so, then the sooner we can add our designs to it. I hope to do some free lane work over the summer while I have some free time. I would love to earn some extra cash if possible, but I am many steps away from learning how to charge for a design.

Sketchbook

Recently I saw that many students have been using their sketchbook to come up with ideas for projects. I suppose for some people drawing on paper is easier and allows more control over what you want to design. I think it is vitally important that you can draw things in a sketchbook, and still be able to design them on a computer. Having really nice scanners in our lab is going to be very useful to the class. By putting an image that you draw on the computer, you can directly trace the picture just as it was drawn. The difficult part of that will be trying to get the feel for the texture in the traced artwork. A pencil or lead can have multiple types of strokes that must be mimicked to get that realistic copy of the image. Being able to put drawings on the compute can also be beneficial in combing a recent project and blending it with a drawing. Its going to be sweet.

Logos

Recently the class was assigned to make a logo for a company called Mr. Sparkle. This project is very realistic in the fact that the logo could very well be used for the company. I have found that the hard thing with making a logo is that you do not know exactly what the client wants while you are making a logo. From what I hear, many logo ideas will be scratched or edited multiple times. I took the approach of making multiple copies of the logo and making minor adaptions on them to give the company more options. I figured it would increase my chances of being chosen if he likes any one choices of the options I provided. I very well know that my design could not be chosen because of the many talented students in my class. I look forward to making more logos for different companies.