Self-Promotion Piece

As a graphic designer, I have to be able to leave something behind or send something to somebody who I'm interviewing with that will catch their eye and remember me. Sometimes, if you can't get an interview, you want to send something just to remind them that you're available. It should include some of your work so they can look at it and know what you're capable of. Another way of using your self-promotional piece, like I mentioned before, is to leave it with the person who just interviewed you. If they interviewed a bunch of people, they will remember you by your piece of work that you left behind. Now, some of you may be confused by this because some people think a self-promotional piece is just a piece of their work that they designed. It CAN be this, but its better to be a little bit more creative so people are more likely to remember you.

Here are some examples.

Now you have to be careful with what you leave behind because it needs to connect to you or the business you're applying to somehow. For example, the first one may have been a designer applying to work for a health company or something along those lines. It needs to click with the person accepting the self-promotional piece. We'll see where I end up with this...

Back to Typography

Bourbon Street

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been working on my own font based off of neon bar signs. Well the whole font is completed and now we have ANOTHER assignment even though this project has already taken over 3/4 of the semester... The next part of the assignment is to design a poster with our font. One side has to explain our font: why we chose it, our thought process, the different measurements we used, and so on. We have to explain our thought process in about 200 words (haven't written more than a few sentences since I became a graphic design major so this should be interesting). The other side of the poster has to show our font being used. So, my idea was to draw out kind of a replica of Bourbon Street in New Orleans and have all the bar signs be illuminated with neon and in my font. This is a lot easier said than done obviously but I'm going to give it a try. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Portfolio Evaluation: The Aftermath Part II

The Eisner Museum

After that amazing lecture the guy gave us, we went on two studio tours that were right down the street from the Eisner Museum. The first was Hanson Dodge, a small studio with about 50 employees. This reminded me of the creative studio that I had my internship with but it was a lot more laid back. I love these small studios because its more like going to see a family rather than just a company. Everyone is so tightly knit because everyone works together so much. Something I learned there was that its really hard to sue somebody for copying work in the graphic design world. The owner showed us many layouts his designers had created and then he showed us some designs an Italian company made and a Chinese company made within a year and they were the exact same designs except for a few things. You could tell how frustrated the owner was with this but he said it was almost impossible to go after them for it. After visiting Hanson Dodge, we went to another studio for a small tour and then headed to lunch.

After lunch, we had our portfolio evaluations. We were told we could either approach the evaluations as interviews or we could lay our work out and describe each piece a little bit and have the professionals tell you what they think. This was probably the scariest thing and I was shaking during the first and second evaluation but then I realized this was only going to help me with the advice they were giving so I was just myself and was honest about my work and it was a lot easier.

Overall, my work was accepted by most of the professionals, there were just some tweaks I need to do but it made me feel a lot better about going out into the real world and applying for jobs.

Portfolio Evaluation: The Aftermath Part I

This weekend was the portfolio evaluation and I surprisingly felt pretty calm as I left my house that morning. I felt pretty good about my work and apparently it is normal not to feel completely proud of your portfolio. We're reading a book that Stefan Sagmeister wrote and in it he explains how most designers hate the pieces that are inside their portfolio so that made me feel a little better! So, when I got to the Eisner Museum in Milwaukee, I realized I was in the group where we had a lecture and a couple of studio tours in the morning first and then had portfolio evaluations in the afternoon.

So we're all sitting in the auditorium and this guy starts telling us how he used to be one of the professionals critiquing everyones' portfolios but they asked him to step down and give a lecture instead because he made too many people cry in the past years... Awesome. So he starts to give his presentation and none of us are impressed. Every image he had pulled up on the screen was pixelated and he kind of gave the lecture as if he didn't care at all. He kept on saying how when he got his job, he was only lucky and that probably won't happen for us. It wasn't much of an enthusiastic lecture at all, more than anything it put us back in the dumps about going out in the world and finding jobs. The only thing that I found amusing was one clip that he showed about finding jobs and here it is...

How TO Get a Job - The top video clips of the week are here

Portfolio Evaluation... Dun dun dunnnn

So, this weekend is the big portfolio evaluation in Milwaukee and I'm freaking out to say the least. About a month ago, we had an interview convention at this same place and it was very intense but now they're actually looking at our work. These people don't know us personally, they don't care who we are or what kind of people we are, they're looking at our work and that is it. Our teacher told us to be worried because they are going to be brutally honest. I guess this is something that is going to be very helpful because we've only had our peers and our teachers look at our work and they never want to hurt anyone's feelings so it'll be good to get an outsider's opinion but its also going to hit home a little bit when they're tearing apart our work.

Lets just say, I can't WAIT for this weekend to be over!!

Putting Together a Portfolio

Every graphic designer has to put together a portfolio and this is where most majors differ from graphic design. Most majors at Carthage have to write a thesis and of course every senior dreads that time that they actually have to take the thesis class and sit down and write their 15-30 page paper. Most people, at least people I have talked to, believe that being a graphic design major is a lot easier than say a business major because we don't have to write a thesis. Well, that's not exactly true.

Those in the graphic design major have to put together a complete portfolio and present them to professionals in the business world at the end of the year. Each student has to have 12 complete pieces (each single piece can consist of 5-10 pieces so total there may be up to 80 pieces of work). Each piece needs to be mocked up on a piece of black or white cardboard (each piece takes about 15 minutes to make presentable) and there needs to be a written out description of each piece and what your thoughts are behind them. This whole process should be a process done over four years and not done in a semester but that is the way Carthage has put together the schedule. I think the rest of the seniors in my senior seminar graphic design class would agree with me that we should have been taught these things along the way starting freshman year.

To check out some of my work in my portfolio, click here.

Question for you