The pieces of work that are showcased above show the areas in which I feel I have excelled in my graphic design career so far. First, for my type specimen book I decided to include this piece because I feel that I did well with color and text placement. This specimen book was created during my freshman year and with that being said I was new to using design programs. This piece embodies my strength in making interesting forms and styles while using type. I feel that I do well in creating interesting negative space as well as creating new ways to look at type when it is interrupted by a mass of color and blending in.

To continue to show my strength showing interesting forms, it is one thing to physically apply forms but it is another thing coming up with the concepts for creating them. You can see that within my cognitive map, I have created interesting forms to represent feelings.While I just pointed out just one thing in which I use interesting forms for, I also feel that I create visually appealing abstract pieces for other uses such as my weather report. Within my weather forecast I show interesting layouts for the information given. I am showcasing my cognitive map to show insight to my thinking process. I feel that I am able to create these visually appealing abstract forms because of my thought process. The way I was thinking about how to show senses was already abstract. Feelings are abstract in our world. Therefore, for instance with showing taste within my map, I was thinking of a blend of tastes that make up one part of the meal. So I then tried to show a mesh of all kinds of taste that make up a part of the meal.

Lastly, on showing my strengths, I feel that my skill at vectorizing images has improved tremendously compared to what I was creating at the beginning of my design career. Looking at my third photo, my vectorizing of flowers is shown. I will admit that I did look at vectors of flowers that were the same as the ones that I vectorized, minus a few details to make them my own such as color, line weight, and some different strokes.  Though, the main aspect about my vectorizing is that I have gotten faster at creating illustrations as well as making fewer mistakes on strokes and making things look seamless.

I am proud of myself for coming as far as I have already, but there are areas, of coarse, where I have room for improvement. I feel that I have trouble in time management because I tend to spend a little too much time on one thing and do not look at time, then I leave things unfinished or having them look like it went down hill at some point. Also an area where I need improvement is my conceptual thinking. With some projects I tend to just settle with an idea instead of going beyond with an idea that I wanted to go through with. I usually put off my big ideas because I fear I will not get everything done for the way I would like my final product to be.