Sophomore Portfolio Review

These past two years I have grown as a designer, incorporating my own design illustrations and imagination into my work. Throughout the year I have focused more on making designs that have meaning and my own childish views incorporated into them. The struggle was getting these thousands of ideas in my head onto the computer or paper for me to work with. Learning more about the adobe programs and how to utilize them have brought me a long way and allowed for a major grow in my final design projects that I have turned in. My incorporation of my ideas and growth as a designer I feel are most presented in my Zine and Visual Map projects.

Out of all the projects that I have done, my Zine project is the one I feel most connected with. The assignment was using a phrase that we chose, create an interesting way to present it in a zine form printed from a Rizograph. At the beginning I knew I wanted to use the phrase “My imagination is the key to solutions” because using my imagination was always a big push from my parents. I started out the project trying to generate ideas on the computer of how to present the phrase but I had a very hard time deciding on a way to go. I decided to just draw down ideas instead and realized that imagination starts in your head and is magically transferred to paper when we draw. From that point on I was determined to use hand drawing of things that I would have imagined when I was a kids. There was a while where I did not like the idea and considered scrapping the whole concept but I was encouraged to continue with my idea and use other materials instead of just pencil. Once I started to experiment with different weights of pen strokes, I grew to love the design again. I hoped with my hand designs to bring life to the idea of imaginative and have the viewer remember what it was like as a kids to think of super ridiculous ideas for a problem in the world and realize that today’s amazing things were once imaginations as well.

My Visual Map project is another project that I feel shows how I have grown as a designer, not just over the two years but in the time that we were doing this project. This assignment was to create a visual representation of data in an interesting way that provides an array of different important areas. My main struggle for the project was finding a way to make the graphs that needed to be there original and not boring. I decided to use bright colors to emphasize the charts and added my own designs at different sections to work on my ability to create designs in Illustrator.I also changed the layout of where all of the different charts and graphs would go so that it the page would be easier on the eyes and more legible. Although this project was a bunch of ups and downs, the overall final produce shows major change and improvements of my design ability.
Although I had previous experience of the Adobe programs from high school, I have grown in my knowledge and experience of the programs that are presented in my projects. I have started to realize that my design style comes from my crafty nature and my childlike mind.  I know that I still need to grow to create products that that all have a feeling and element of life in them but I feel confident in my progress so far. I hope to find a balance in my style of designing and all of the different projects out in the world that are just waiting to be designed for.