Tutoring

What do you do when a former colleague of yours comes to you with a slight (large) career change in mind with no interest in getting a whole, brand new four-year degree, but is willing to work alongside and under you to learn your trade?

You laugh and say tough cookies, my man.

…

NO! Absolutely not. You help them and give them the tools they need. I would never encourage someone to go and get a second bachelors degree to change careers unless they were absolutely passionate about it, but I wouldn’t also turn someone away who asked for help that genuinely wanted or needed it. If I can provide, I will.

My friend, former colleague, and now pupil, has been in touch with me to see if i could teach him things about graphic design for a couple of months now. The good news is, he has a creative base to work on, especially when it comes to composition, which is what we’re working on now. I’m not an educator by any means, and honestly, I don’t want to make this boring for him. It’s crossed my mind to take what I learned in 15 years of self-education and 4 years of formal and condense it into months of learning. Some would say that’s really unfair, that I had to pay thousands of dollars and push through four years of constant judging, belitting, and the utmost drilling of information and ideas just to hand it to someone to do over, say, 8 weeks time.

Nah, it’s all good. I have knowledge and skill and if I can share it, I will. I did it at my last job, and the job before that, and the job before that.

He’s not going to become a master graphic designer under my guise. In fact, that’s a task he’s going to take on by himself. There are TONS of graphic designers who are successful, but self-taught.

I need to start by having him understand what graphic design is. I showed him the course path LinkedIn Learning has on graphic design and the first module available in the course is “What is Graphic Design?”

Today’s email, I saw he sent back his latest assignment. After a few weeks on the pen tool, with the ellipse and marquee tools peppered in, I decided he was ready to start learning about composition. Yesterday I emailed him an assignment briefly explaining depth (which should be a refresher, as his degree is in photography) and asking him to create a composition using color and shape to show me depth. He emailed back to me a correct, but very basic and boring assignment.

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I didn’t specifically tell him to jump through hoops, but I also didn’t expect getting the bare minimum back, especially from someone with lots of fire. So, I emailed him back and said, “Do it again, but this time let’s think outside the box.” I showed him a couple of photographic examples of depth and two examples from design (on top of the other examples I originally sent with the assignment) that show depth and hierarchy. I also attached the image on the left. I did it in 5 minutes, but I used color, shapes, and layering to try and show something that’s not just a bunch of triangles in a size/gradient order sitting atop a box with another gradient effect.

I told him for this assignment, his piece didn’t need to make sense or have a story, though if it did (both make sense and have a story), I wouldn’t be mad because it would further prove his understanding and help define his thought process.

The piece I did to show was done in 5 minutes using about 4 layers and some doodling around to make it make sense. To me, I was thinking of a stylized galaxy, with a ringed planet. This isn’t the Mona Lisa of my portfolio, but I hope he sees it and is inspired to make something much better.

Welcome to Animal Crossing

330+ hours later, today, I have a 5-star island, am quickly learning all of the hundreds of villagers’ names in the game, getting upset over people plucking my flowers without permission, and eagerly awaiting the next big update, which promises us crops, from what I gather.

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Hobbies of Quarantine

Quarantine. It’s something we associate with lepers or someone who is insanely contagious….aka lepers.

But, alas, the good lot of us in the States and around the world are in quarantine to help flatten the curve, as they say.

Things are different. I’ve more or less slowed down my job hunt, as no one is really hiring. Their postings are on auto-renew for the most part, while other are looking for cheap labor or are scraping together work to create a job. Both are good for those who are just starting, but for me? I need to pick up where I left off.

Anyway, while enjoying this newfound time at home, I was able to finish up my spring semester at Temple, thus knocking out a whole year of graduate school with only one and a half left. I was able to maintain my 4.0, so I’m looking forward to doing it again in the fall. I also picked up a new hobby, which I’m going to turn into sales in my Etsy shop: creating wax seals.

The idea is to illustrate greeting cards and sell a card, a similarly decorated envelope and a self-adhesive wax seal as a bundle to those who enjoy buying those things. An example is the card set I made for Mother’s Day for my own mom, as shown in the photo on the left.

Tied in with the wax seals and card illustrations is embossing. I watch a lot of creative stuff on Instagram and see a lot of people who hand-letter using embossing powders and heat-transfer foils. They looked neat, so I decided to try. I’m only as far as embossing, though, I haven’t made it to foils yet, but it’s coming!

Alongside those things, I’ve been trying to read more, but being sucked into the Animal Crossing hole has sort of commandeered that extra free time I had. The good news is, I’m coming upon a duration of boredom with the game, so reading may reclaim that spot for a few days. The book I’m currently engaged in is called Eyes of the Grave, written by a high school friend of mine, Chelsea Callahan, with whom I still keep in touch. It’s an interesting fantasy about a woman, Rebekah Devereaux, who is partnered with her estranged husband on a murder case where she sees herself as the murderer in these visions she gets when she touches the skin of the other person. I’m not giving this story any justice, and I’m sure I butchered the story a bit, but it’s worth a read and is only $10 on Amazon. I’m a little over half way finished and am pretty pumped to read the rest to find out what happens.

There’s been some freelance work sprinkled in here and there. I currently have a media kit I’m working on for a friend, a new logo design for a mobile cigar business, and the usual EGD stuff.

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Finally, I’ve been super interested in racking up as many certifications as I can until things “go back to normal”, or at least, as normal as they can be. I finished up my HubSpot Academy social media cert today, so that’s exciting! I totally added this onto my LinkedIn page. I also found that Harvard University is offering free courses, so I’m going to be working on one course at a time with them. I won’t get a verified certificate (though you can for a fee), so I’m just “auditing” the class. Wonder if it made more sense to pay the $90 for a certificate… Anyway, my first course will be in computer science! It was between advertising/marketing and computer science for me when I was deciding what graduate program to pursue, and in this case, ADV/MKTG won the fight. But this way, I’ll be able to learn about CS and maybe have enough background to achieve something bigger in the future!

I’ve opened up comments on this post because I want to hear what all of you have been doing this quarantine season!

Design Quickie: Last Minute Business Cards (Real Life Application)

While texting a fellow classmate/friend about tomorrow’s career fair, I asked her if she needed me to print anything out for her: portfolio, resume, etc. She said she has all of that, so she’s good. I reminded her, “Don’t forget your business cards!” This was assuming she had at least gotten ones from the school of business when they were offered to us last semester. “I don’t have any!”

Feeling like business cards are important, I asked her, “Do you want me to whip up some quick ones for tomorrow?” She gratefully accepted and I decided that for today, this would be my design quickie. I had to raid my stash of papers and stocks to see if I had any white cardstock. Unfortunately, I only had light gray, and because I have a 6-cartridge photo printer that does not employ white ink, gray was not an option. However, I did have a pad of bristol vellum. Although it’s textured and not ideal for inkjet printing, it was the best I could do with short notice. I pulled out that pad, a cutting mat, my light tablet, my last pack of Letratac and a box of laminating sheets.

The front selections for Jojo’s business cards.

The front selections for Jojo’s business cards.

I went to work on these cards, keeping in mind what I did for her writing portfolio—she used gray, black and red. Although red can be beautiful, I felt like it would have been too strong of an accent color here, so I just went on with grays and black. When i finished a selection of three fronts and three backs, I emailed her a screenshot of her selections and let her pick. She liked “1 and 2”, so that’s what we went with.

I had her confirm her information was correct and went to work printing. The ink did just as I thought it would: it bled a little bit and the texture of the paper made the ink look spotty. It didn’t look terrible, but it didn’t look as good as it would have on a smooth, coated paper. An option I had would have been to print the faces on presentation paper, then adhere it to the bristol, laminate, then cut. However, I felt like for a quick, last-minute project, that would have been a bit extra.

Of course, my printer decided that it would not listen to my computer’s settings and print these sheets double sided, thus rendering more work for me in assembly. No worries. I printed the first set on two separate sheets, forgetting that I could just flip the sheet, re-feed it and it would be A-OK.

I took paper tape—you know, the kind you buy at Walgreens in the bandage section—and after using my overhead snake-neck lamp to put the sheets together and line them up, taped the sheets together on one end like a hinge and attempted to apply the Letratac to the back of one sheet.

I learned the hard way that my Letratac is so old, it doesn’t work as well as it would have ten years ago, brand new. Luckily, I had Tombow adhesive dots in that little pink handheld doodad and, with the help of my light tablet, applied adhesive on the backs of the cards, around the perimeters and then in the middles for reinforcement. I closed the papers onto each other, and decided it would be safer for me to hand cut these rather than use the guillotine for fear of squishing the ends.

I hand-applied the laminate to both sides of these now two-ply cards and began to cut them out by hand.

48 plus cuts later, the first dozen was done. For the second set, I decided to flip the paper this time for printing, which allowed me to have single-ply cards, and to cut down production time on them. Print, laminate, cut, done.

I’m pretty happy with how they came out for a quick 10-minute design and hour long assembly process. They’re not professional and if I had my way, I would have had a better stock of paper to choose from, as well as a printer with a heater so the bleeding would be minimal, but alas here we are. I worked with what I had, and after a few photos were sent, my classmate/friend is a happy camper and now she has 24 business cards to pass out at the fair tomorrow.

Throwback Thursday: EGD Workshop @ Penn Museum

Who remembers how University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology didn’t have a cohesive signage/wayfinding system? Anyone? Just me?

It’s funny how things come full circle. When I was a junior at UArts, we were split into groups for a mandatory week-long workshop with an industry professional who volunteered to come in and show us what they do. I was in the group that worked under Virginia Gehshan of Cloud Gehshan, an EGD design firm seated right in Old City, Philadelphia.

At the time of this workshop (2010?), conception and possibly even design finalization was going on at Cloud Gehshan for new wayfinding going up at UPenn’s famed museum. Since that was the hot topic at the firm, Virginia thought that’s what we could do, also. So, she scheduled for us to take a field trip to the museum (sort of, we had to all pile in cabs or ride the subway to get to our destination—all of which we had to figure out on our own) and reconvened in the courtyard before splitting up once more. Our group opted (by majority consensus…or maybe Virginia voted for it) for cab ($8 one way per person, about 21 blocks), although I very much voted for subway (roughly $2 for one way, I think, at the time). I thought the subway would be quicker (and cheaper), we’d just have to buy tokens.

I remember my group: Marty, Leandra, John (who literally showed up once) and I think Sophie. Marty was our group leader and instructed us to take as many photos as possible. We went around and took photographs of signage (shown above, pin letters on the brick wall of the museum’s perimeter) of all types whether or not it belonged to the museum (yup, SEPTA bus route signs, too), decorations, wall patterns, murals, vinyls, floor tiles, etc. You name it, we photographed it. The idea was to get as many different ideas of any motifs or schemes we could find. The problem was, there was no correlation between the exterior and interior wayfinding and signage.

When we were done, we headed back to our studio in Terra, the building we called home as GD students, and had a group discussion about what we saw at the museum as well as what our task would be for the rest of the week. We worked for a few hours before Virginia called time and we disbanded for the day.

The next day, we congregated into the studio, segregated in our assigned groups, and worked quietly. John, the member of our group who didn’t attend the first day of the workshop, showed up so I began going over with him what we were doing to get him up to speed.

Virginia thought I was being disruptive, so she looked over and told me to stop talking, that it’s not a social hour. I looked at her, slightly embarrassed as everyone stared at me, and said, “Virginia, this is John.” She goes, “Who is John? I don’t know who he is.” She’s clearly still annoyed. I responded with, “He’s in our group and was absent yesterday. I’m catching him up.” She felt bad, I could tell, and said, “Oh, okay.” She later apologized for calling me out when I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. I told her it was fine, and we moved on.

Despite that hiccup in our work time, our group spent the day sketching and discussing colors (sheet shown below provided by Virginia!), common shapes, potential schemes and how we were going to use everything.

After that day, John never came back. We knew this would happen, so when we divvied up the work, we gave him something non-critical, despite his promise to show up daily. We pushed through without him over the next three days, and our visions came to life.

By the end of the week, we had a full package ready to present. As instructed, we pinned up our process book showcasing our thought process throughout this workshop alongside the other groups.

It was interesting to see what everyone did, especially when color palettes and other ideas were similar but used and executed very differently.

Each group got to present their signage and wayfinding package, and at the end, we all clapped and celebrated with pizza. It was the last time I saw Virginia, but not the last time I worked with Cloud Gehshan.

Three years later, I was hired by Urban Sign and worked there for five years. One of the first projects I got to see go out the door was none other than the signage designed by Cloud Gehshan for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

So really, my experience with EGD begins when I was still in college. I never thought that’s where I’d end up, but alas, I spent the last six years immersed in signage, murals, wayfinding, ADA, interactive displays, etc. It’s an incredible field, and I’ve learned so much being in it.

Below are some of the things we finalized as part of our wayfinding package for the museum: