Critical Assessment 

I started as a graphic design student who was not confident about her work and always second guessed her decisions. After four semesters of being a graphic design major, it’s hard to believe how much my confidence has grown and how many skills I have obtained. I am particularly proud with how quickly I can come up with a concept for a project, and that has only happened with lots and lots of practice.

At first, I had a very hard time coming up with concepts for projects. I had either a million and one ideas or didn’t know where to begin. For the typographic poster in my Typography I course, our task was to create a chunk of raw text into a poster that was advertising an AIGA conference. The theme of the conference was “Spaces of Learning” and that should have helped me come up with a concept quicker at the time, but I lacked the confidence and decision making processes to flesh out the idea quickly. I ended up making something like four or five different posters that all looked nothing alike. I am a perfectionist by nature and I never want to show something that I don’t think is worth people’s time; sometimes that comes in handy to produce quality work, but when I was a freshman that trait prolonged the project process. I remember feeling stuck and couldn’t decide which direction to take when my professor sat down and helped me work it out. After many drafts, deletes, re-do’s and tweaks I came up with my final poster that I was satisfied with.

A semester later in Image Methodology, our last assignment was to create a Zine that evoked a statement we believed to be true about ourselves or the world, which is called a truism. At this point, I had created at least four other major projects and had gotten practice with fleshing ideas out quickly and going with them. I surprised myself with the Zine project on how quickly I came up with my concept. My truism was, “Empathetic people must self reflect often.” I knew that I wanted my concept to my very much introspective in design to mirror my truism, so I had the idea of scanning my face to force me literally look at myself. I feel as though I never would have thought of such an idea a year before because I used to always play it safe as to save my ego during critique or peer review (if I took a lot of risks and they didn’t work out, then my confidence would have plummeted). The risk I took of scanning my face, an unorthodox concept, paid off and I couldn’t have done it without what I had learned from all my work as a designer so far; risks can often produce the best designs. After the scans of my face, it was much easier to fully flesh out my Zine concept of introspection through my typeface treatment and graphics.

The Typographic Poster and Zine project are just two comparisons of how I have improved as a designer through being more confident and coming up with concepts faster. I feel that by seeing the way my other graphic design peers have grown has helped me grow as a designer because we all bounce ideas off one another and sometimes that is the most helpful. I have learned to be more confident in my decision making because everyone felt the same way as me in the beginning.