Blog 7: One Big Project Down and Some Other Cool Ones Too
I have some exciting news concerning my flyer insert for Tim: I finally finished the project! It was pretty slow going with both he and I being quite busy most of the time, but I learned so much along the way. At Sadie’s, I’m getting to experience work in a small studio where things are more fast-paced and there’s lots to do. With Tim, we’re really taking our time working through the timeline of a project with a lot of help along the way. When I meet with Tim, he encourages me to ask any questions I have, and I am super grateful for that. So far, he has taught me about important project details like the creative brief and brand guide as well as many tools in Illustrator and design in general. For example, as we met to discuss final steps for the insert, he just had a few things to add, including an exclamation mark after the word “purchase.” This probably sounds super easy, until you realize that the font we used didn’t have an exclamation mark. My first thought was to just use a similar font that had one, but he taught me that I can make an exclamation mark for the font we already have by using similar-looking letters. We determined that the lowercase “i” was the closest, so then I had to do something called outlining the letter so it was no longer text, but a shape. Once the letter was a shape, I could alter the paths by moving around and adding anchor points to make it look more like how I wanted, thus creating an exclamation mark with the font by using a similar-looking letter. That’s just one of the many cool things that Tim has taught me so far, and I will continue to learn from him with my new project, which will be some kind of web graphic.
Luckily for me, I was able to go to Sadie Sarti’s over spring break because I didn’t go anywhere, and therefore I got to do even more stuff to tell you about right now! Last week, I did a couple social media posts as well as some other really interesting tasks. A man walked into the office a few weeks ago asking about some consulting on his band’s website, which can be found at oncebitten.band. The first task was to go through his website and write down some changes that could be made to make it look and work better. That was a fun task as I obviously don’t know much about web design, but could approach it more like a consumer at what things clearly worked and didn’t work. If you look at the website right now, several changes have already been made. I also ran some errands one day, taking pictures from different angles of an empty sign that they will be designing a graphic for downtown, as well as making two copies of the office key at True Value. Then this week, I worked more on the art book that I worked on week one or two. I have actually really enjoyed this project, despite its being so tedious to make edits to certain pages amongst a roughly 150 page book in Indesign. I have learned so much about Indesign, and although the project isn’t super creative, I get to do lots of the educational, technical things. With such a big project, it makes more sense to have someone more experienced make those design/style choices, and I am just happy that I get to add the vertical lines next to the quotes, or align words to the margins, tasks which, although tedious, won’t be changed, and I can show people this cool project that I was a part of. One quick interesting fact about book designing is that you have to align everything to the margins, which are not equal. At the spine of the book, you have to have a larger margin in order to account for the curve. If you made the margins equal, then the pages would actually look uneven with less visible margins toward the center that look smaller than the flat margin on the outer edge.
Lastly, I got to explore my creativity with a project bigger than a social media post. Sadie and the team are working on a website rebuild for a company called Stockell Custom Homes based in St. Louis, MO, and they have a couple of packets outlining the timeline of a custom home build and the process that they go through. It is a PDF, presentation-style, and it is basically the worst possible looking document, outlining the information in the worst possible way (not to fault Stockell Homes–the design aspect was not their priority). That is why Sadie asked me to redesign it just a little bit because any improvements are a huge step up. I struggled to not go overboard with my changes, but Sadie assured me that it wasn’t an urgent project and that there was a lot of freedom and room to experiment. Currently, the packet displays information with no color and in giant blocks of tiny text that take up every page, so I have cut a lot of info and added lots of color and design elements, following the style of their new website that the team is working on. I am almost done with the “Building Process” packet, and will share it below. Keep in mind that I truncated a lot of the information in their current packet, so all of that may be subject to change if they aren’t happy with how much I’ve left out or how I worded things, though I feel I did a pretty good job of emphasizing what was really important and necessary.
To finish things off, I am making some serious progress on my personal brand. I am currently working on logo design, and I will share more about that process once I have the final logo–most likely next week!
Stockell Homes Building Process Packet
Check out Sadie’s instagram (@sadiesartidesignco) to see some of the recent posts I’ve worked on! Some things were changed from what I did for the Andrea Wojciak Interiors and Vote Sadie Sarti posts, but the website announcement for the Highlands Center was all me!
Comments:
All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.