Blog 5: An Exciting Offer!
Before I get into what I did this week, I got an exciting offer from Sadie. On Tuesday morning, while we were going over my schedule for the day, she offered me a summer job working there! She even said that if I had the time, that I could take more hours now and she would pay me. Needless to say, I was (and still am) thrilled. I will now be going Friday mornings in addition to my original hours, and I am hoping to work out a part-time schedule to work over the summer in addition to the job I already have. I never expected this senior project to yield such amazing results, especially so soon, and I couldn’t be more grateful with how things have turned out after such a rough start.
Now onto what I actually did this week. I started by finishing up a design that a woman from my church asked me to do for a women’s conference coming up in a couple months. She really liked what I came up with, and I am actually really proud of it myself! I will share the design below.
At Sadie Sarti Design, I worked on two main projects. On Tuesday, I sorted through thousands of pictures on WordPress for a current website build that the team is doing for a home building business. It wasn’t the most interesting thing that I’ve gotten to do so far, but it’s definitely one of the tasks that has taught me about the more tedious parts of being a graphic/web designer. I had to make tabs with each individual home address, each one having 30-50 pictures belonging to it. There were probably a good 25 home addresses, plus the 6 build-your-own floor plans that I had to organize pictures between exterior and interior–it wouldn’t be so hard if I didn’t have to search every single 1cm x 2cm image to figure it out. Not to mention all the extra time it took if there was even a single out-of-place picture mixed in the groups. Like I said, tedious, but necessary to staying organized and on top of things. On Thursday, I got to design an instagram carousel post for a website that they designed and has recently gone live. Many of you know that I don’t have social media, so this was particularly interesting to learn from scratch. The post hasn’t gone up yet, but I will let you know when it does. Also, I noticed that in a recent post (@sadisartidesignco), you can even see my head hard at work at about 11 seconds.
Since I’ve gotten feedback from Tim on my packaging insert designs, this week I have been working on improvements. One of the main changes that needed to be made was making them more interesting, particularly through texture. With that in mind, I have been working on designs that include more pictures while also retaining some of the stronger components that Tim liked. I will include one such design-in-progress below.
Lastly, I have been doing a lot of research on graphic designers to find ones that I like and can learn from. I’ve found a few so far that I really like, such as Nick Barclay, Lauren Hom, and Trey Ingram. And I am of course a fan of Aaron Draplin, a very famous graphic designer who co-founded Field Notes and created Draplin Design Co. You should all check them out when you get a chance–they all have an incredible, unique style that I could look at for hours. Draplin will probably be my number one influence when it comes to developing my own brand, as I have struggled to find anyone else so far who also does client work whilst promoting their own brand.
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