Tales of designing from the comfort of my home
Today I was getting started on a new graded project.
You see, I’m studying for my Graphic Design Associate’s degree at home. Not only has studying been easier to focus on my work, but I don’t need to talk to instructors.
Otherwise, there’s no particular reason why it’s at home, except that…
- My food tastes better than cafeteria food
- I have my desk to myself
- I have the freedom to plan my day
and most importantly, I’m alone.
A perfect concoction for productivity & creativity.
Credit from Giphy
So after I have officially studied my way through high school and my 1st semester in college remotely,
I was before a new challenge.
This graded project consisted of knowing Adobe Illustrator in-depth (✔️), knowing how to add effects (✔️), and creating an imaginary logo.
You may be thinking,
“All logos are imaginary if you haven’t designed one before!”
That’s true, but this one was truly invisible.
Because there was no information on how to create it!
This logo was called a sponsor logo, which didn’t entail on whether I had to design it from scratch or get it from somewhere.
My college program is great, it really is. But sometimes they skimp on the details.
Keep in mind too, that this is the 2nd graded project I have for Adobe illustrator.
The 1st one I did was about getting the illustrator workspace together (each project is a chunk of the complete design), and there wasn’t a lot of information provided for that project either!
So it was a complete shock when I saw that my grade for that 1st project, was a 90%!
This really confused me at the time, yet I wasn’t bothered nonetheless because my curriculum is flexible, meaning I can keep retaking the project if it’s below a 65% to get a better grade.
Now for the 2nd graded project, this is where I’m either creating an imaginary logo, or finding it somewhere.
Where? I don’t know, they never said!
So when I get this graded project in, I’m expecting,
“Ok I’ll just take the feedback and apply it,”
I’m expecting a low grade (again).
And guess what…
I was right, I got a 59%.
Yeah, it was low — but not the lowest I got (chill, my lowest ever was only a 50% in high school).
In the graded files, I was super fortunate that the instructor decided to provide the sponsor logos that I couldn’t find anywhere. They seemed easy to get actually, just SVG files pulled from Wikipedia… after this maybe I should donate to them.
Anyway, I went through and did all the little corrections the instructor suggested. They made sense,
“Put the files on their designated layers,”
“Don’t bloat the text in the logo with that arch effect,”
They were simple corrections, but I still needed to implement them.
In fact, I learned something new about layers in Illustrator from it.
Then it came to the logo I made (not imaginary), the instructor noted that it,
“Didn’t suit the theme of a theater, try something like a mask or a spotlight.”
Again, this made perfect sense! But I was no logo designer — neither had I signed up to be one.
Yet, as I stared at the sun-emanating, pretty much trash logo I’d created, I still thought that I didn’t need to put much work into it.
After all, from what the grading rubric said, the elements had to correlate with each other. And since the theme of the posters was a summer day, I thought that the sun would be perfect!
So I changed a few things.
Taking out the sunshine rays, placing a circle, taking out its fill and giving it a bold stroke (if you know Illustrator terms).
I looked over the tried spotlight I had created, which had been the instructor’s suggestion to design, I knew that I had done it much too simply.
At this point my energy had run low and I needed to get into my light work activities (Note: Read my article on Deep Work VS Light Work to understand this terminology).
I decided that I’ll get to it tomorrow.
Once I had a fresh start to my morning and got into my graded project — oh wait, did I note that I had procrastinated for 3 days? Yeah, I almost forgot.
I looked back at my project to fix anything needed.
Looking over my logo, I start noting that something didn’t look right.
This doesn’t even look like a spotlight! I need to fix this.
So I look over the instructor’s rubric for my project, and noted that one of her suggestions included adding a mask as the logo.
“Well that would suit perfect with the arch effect,”
I think, trying to keep the text as is for as much as possible.
I have an image of how I want it to look, so I design and tweak a few things here and there to make it flow with each other.
“That looks pretty good.”
It’s simple, but it looks like a mask — unlike my spotlight, which didn’t look like one.
This made me feel content that I was ready for submission, and that hopefully, I would get a better grade.
It took 2 weeks to get the project graded.
Yes, it took a toll on my patience — but fortunately I was prepping things for my solo biz in Notion that it didn’t bother me too much.
I scroll through my page, seeing the message,
“You have new instructor feedback.”
I think, “Well let’s see what I have to fix today.”
Opening the zip file to open my graded rubric, I see:
92%!
I was super excited that I would finally be moving forward! I should note though, that for project re-submissions they deduct the grade to a 70%, which is totally uncool — but I can’t do anything about it.
As a beginner Graphic Designer I’m learning new things every day with time management, work ethic, developing skills on the computer, and the etc.
I still have 3 more projects to do in order to finish my Adobe Illustrator course.
But I’m confident that with learning a little more every day,
I’ll be a better listener to direction as I move into Adobe Photoshop & onward!