When I started as a freshmen, I thought of graphic design mostly as image making with some text. Now I see the various tangent areas around images that can be used to take something past just an image and into a full piece of interesting visual information. Understanding hierarchy, grid, font choice, etc. has transformed my understanding of what I thought was a much simpler and clean career.

Starting out straight out of less than stellar high school, I had little understanding of art past simple traditional methods. I had never even used the Adobe Creative Suite. I had only used Illustrator once for fun and I created this. 

This was a self initiated drawing depicting music. I drew it in my own style but on the computer I literally had no idea what I was doing. I just hit buttons after tracing the sketch and the filters made it look good. At least to me. And this was enough to make me know I had to follow through with Graphic Design.

Coming into St. Edward’s, I still had no idea what I was doing but I quickly caught on. Type 1, Image Methodology and Graphic Design 1 was extremely helpful to tell me, “Here are the tools, this is what they do.” I became familiar with the programs and how to make design decisions, and in the following year I was able to use this knowledge to create my own original work.

My first noteworthy project at St. Edward’s is my very first GDES project here: Type is Sound. I had no familiarity with Adobe CC so this was the eye opening course that showed me my first understandings of design. The project had a simple goal: design a visual representation of sound, using the word. Mine was “Klick.” At first, I was stuck in my “Design is visual images” mentality so I tried to crudely illustrate.

Eventually I was able to break away from this and create interesting design without having to add illustration. Understanding that there is more to design than images helped me focus in on how varied Graphic Design techniques actually are. This was my final image:

My final image shows how I was able to break away from my previous mentality and simplify design to get more out of it. It isn’t as noisy as the first image. Instead of adding, I took away to better fulfill my purpose.

Another note worthy project at St. Edward’s is my Weather Report.

This project took me away from the print media we had focused on and trained me in methods of type in motion. Adding this new dimension to design helped me explore what I could do. Before this, I had never done any type in a video but Tuan guided me to see how smooth motion can make an immense difference. With this project, I see the realization more that design is opposite to what I had been doing before. As an artist, I wanted to be interesting by being visually noticed. As a designer, I want to be interesting by being unnoticed. What I mean by this is that many of the techniques in graphic design are subtle. Hierarchy, grid, positioning, etc. All of these things change everything about how something can be perceived but if you don’t know about them, you probably wouldn’t notice them. Still, between a well designed piece and a poorly designed one, anyone will see a difference, even if they can’t explain it. The extra work I put into this video to make smooth transitions and a linear flow helped me see this concept more, and what a difference it can make.

Overall, I know I’ve grown since starting here. Conceptually, I’ve learned a lot. I think learning these concepts is where I am strongest. I see how I can apply GDES techniques now when before, I was just hitting filters in Illustrator. My weakest points are applying these techniques fully. I have to get a lot of feedback before seeing how something can be its best. This may not even be a weakness, just part of the process. Thinking that I need to be able to make something great completely by myself may be egotistical. But just in terms of the time it takes and the number of renditions necessary, I think it could be seen as a weakness if taking too long.

Type is Sound

Weather Report