These past two years, I believe I have grown has both a person and as a designer. Coming into college, I had a rough time adjusting to moving away from my home in Singapore; I had lost fourteen pounds in two weeks, I couldn’t stomach food, I could stay in bed all day. My design work took affect in my state I was in. It was weak, rough, and was not as cohesive as I wanted it to be. By the time I was doing first project of creating a type font on FontStruct, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to even pursue design in college anymore. However, as I got stronger in myself, I’m glad I decided to continue my commitment to design. It was a whole new territory for me. In high school, I had taken all three AP Studio Art classes in Drawing, 2D, and 3D, and played around with photography on the side. The reason why I chose to pursue Graphic Design was because I wanted to learn something new and plunge into the unknown, where I had to learn from the bottom up. My work reflects the state of mind I am; in the beginning, my work was unstructured. More recently, it has been filled with zen and spirit. And boy, am I glad I stuck with design. I am so much stronger now, both in my skills and myself.

My typographic poster in Typography I was the first assignment in the design project where I had felt a connection with, and started to feel passion for the program. The assignment was to use another classmate’s generated font and create a triptych displaying the font. I saw this project as a chance to interact with my classmates, who were majority all freshmen at the time and gained my first interaction with my peers. Within the project, the first poster was the quote the font was based of: sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody though we had, actually turns out to be wrong. This quote really hit home to me, since I thought I was wrong about my decision to attend St. Edward’s, without even visiting the school beforehand. I imagined a picturesque school and how I visualized my college experience to be; it was far from that. Hierarchy was used in this poster with the different size of fonts. Having the different sizes as well was great, so I could show off the detail of the font. Next, the middle poster displayed the alphabet of the font, which I showed in a cascading fashion on the right side of the poster, making a triangle. With each line, I started the alphabet over again, highlighting the specific font in each row to how the order in ABC’s. This was my first way of experimenting with design; how could I show the alphabet, but more? I left holes in the shape, to show randomness but also my own fragility and lack of confidence in a strong structure. Finally, the third design was just the Q letter, which was my favorite letter because of all the detail it had. As a designer, my growth shows in this piece, as I started to take risks and breaking away from structure in this assignment.

Another project that showed growth was the symbol methodology project in Graphic Design I with Tuan. Going into GDESI, I was not completely sure about my technical skills in Illustrator. How can that be, I thought, I have been a design student for a year now. The main topic of my project came from my love of yoga. Finding yoga halfway through my freshmen year was one of the things that helped me find happiness in life and myself again (reading this, I know I sound very depressed, but being 15,812 kilometers away from home does take a toll). With a world that tries to make things quicker and faster, yoga embraces the idea of slowness. This project was also the first time I used Illustrator, and it enforced a lot of trial and error. In the project, we were to generate six words that revolved around a specific word (in my case, zen). My final images included the Buddha and lotus, and we were to create multiple logos based of one word. Gaining technical skills was probably one of the most important skills I reached from this, as pathfinder taught me how to massage images together to create harmony. Also, I enjoyed seeing my work on vinyl, a new medium.

Finally, I chose my Cognitive map, as it is probably my favorite out of all the maps I created. I used what I learnt in the symbol project which I explained before prominently. This final project was a great way to end the GDESI class cohesively. The objective was to create a map that would help someone make a decision. It didn’t take me long to thing of what I wanted to do: where to live. By the time I was eight, I had lived in three different continents. I grew up with a travel bone in me, and I know that despite my love for Austin, I could never see myself settling down at one place. For me, I wanted to search out the best place for me to live in as well. I left many answers open ended, especially since I could only choose a limited number of cities. I could see this project expanding into a website flash version, with a more variety of countries to choose from (going global). This was another step in my personal growth. Though moving to Austin terrified me and left me in a state of sadness, I have grown so much as a person that now I look forward to my next move, and do not fear it anymore. Instead, I take it as a challenge to myself.

 

I chose to go into the graphic design program because I wanted to challenge myself in unknown territory. Although this is only my minor, I have been very committed to the program and have grown an attachment to the community of peers I have. My skills have improved dramatically, especially in my use of video and type. Though I know I have room for improvement, I hope to continue doing so with practice and exposure to the design community.