Spring Semester '12 Start Off

So I know I said in the previous post I made about a month ago or so, that I would be trying to post more in here. Well that was a lie. The plus side is that I have a lot of stuff going for me this season. I landed an internship last minute at Rockbridge Studios as a design intern, but most of my work consists of copywriting and blog posts for their website. It's my first internship, and everyone has been very nice and helpful, and I realize that they attend a lot of events.

This semester I'm working in a Digital Photography class, and a Visual Design and Typography class. I really enjoy my instructors in both classes; my visual design and type teacher has had a crap ton of experience in the industry, and my photography teacher is laid back and the stereotypical traditional photography graduate.

I took traditional photography back in high school, but since it's been 4+ years since working on a camera that's on manual, this digital photography class is a good refresher. I also got to work with a flash tube and modeling lights for the first time, and it was a fun and frustrating experience.

In visual design and typography, so far I've had to make a 3 page ad campaign for ice cream, a book sleeve for David Carson's End of Print, and now we'll be working on a 5 page editorial for San Francisco's Bay Area. This class is fun but very challenging. It definitely makes me plan out a lot more before executing my assignments, which I think is essential. I'm very used to procrastinating and rushing through it two days before it's due. Instead, this is teaching me to slow down more and look at everything, work on one piece and then the other until it's done.

So enough of this text block, I'm at my internship now and they're wanting me to make blog posts all day, so I figured this would be a good practice run before I go back to that.

New Year Resolutions and some other things

With the big bad 2012 coming up, I figured it's time I put some actual resolutions into action. While I am a girl that says she'll exercise and never does, hopefully that'll change. BUT ACTUALLY, I have bigger and better ideas too. In order to try and encourage myself to study more, I bookmarked a series of web pages that I'm hoping will become useful. Some are Photoshop Tutorial websites, some are just public forums for visual design.

That time of the year again where I update with stuff I did

A stressful semester has paid off quite well. I enjoyed most of my assignments (minus making the ferry building look like it was made out of legos because it ended up looking like a pinata), and I definitely learned a lot.

So Fall Semester Started

So this is going to kinda be a lengthy post just because it's been a while since I updated, but here it goes! If you don't wanna read any of this, just scroll on through I guess.

I'm already going into the fourth week of my classes, and I can't help but feel like this is going by incredibly fast. I only have two days of class too, which makes time go by even faster since my free time is going into my assignments and my part time job.


Well, my classes have been fun so far. In one class, I'm making web site prototypes, and I'm really enjoying it. Rather than coding, it's a class dedicated to the layouts and the aesthetics of websites, putting a focus on what you can do to create easy interactivity between the website and the user, and making it simple but still visually appealing. Our only assignment so far was re-designing the Netflix website. We spent two weeks doing that, and now we're moving onto our midterm where we have to come up with a website proposal and design it within 7-8 weeks.

My other classes have been well too. I'm taking a Motion Graphics 1 class, where we unfortunately are going to be putting our focus all into Flash and not After Effects as well. It's a little disappointing just because Flash is actually slowly getting the boot, as HTML5 makes its way in the scene. However, I managed to take it easy and have a little fun with the assignment, making a pregnant cartoon lady out of geometric shapes.

And then there's a photoshop class that I'm not too proud of just yet to post the assignments for, maybe next time.

Summer semester is almost over

and I hate gradient meshes

So apparently I'm halfway through the Summer Semester

It's been going by relatively quick. Nothing really worth mentioning in my classes; I've just been doing busy work but I actually just finished my midterm. We had to create an Illustrator file that had a magazine cover, using a photo of ourselves and vectoring it. I just submitted it today, so let's hope it gets a good grade. I had fun looking for fonts and trying to figure out a good layout for it, so I hope for the best.

Still kinda iffy on the placement of certain cover lines, but if nothing is wrong with them in the end I won't bother changing it.

New Stuffs

As I mentioned in previous posts, I was changing my major from 2D Animation to New Media and Web Design. Well, I'm taking my first class for that this summer, and already I feel like I made the right decision in switching. It's a pretty basic Illustrator class, but it still consumes a good amount of time (at the same time, I'm working nearly full time right now so my free time has been limited during weekdays and weekends).
So far our first assignment and second assignment has been pretty simple. The first was to do an illustration of an insect, in any style just to show what we were capable of already in Illustrator. I chose to do an Orchid Mantis for mine.

Unfortunately due to a housewarming party for our new apartment and work, I rushed this assignment because it was already a day late. However, I was still happy to do it.

 

The unfortunate thing about Summer Semester is that you only have like 2-3 days to work on things, meaning if you procrastinate you're screwed. My second assignment for this class had given me hell. While it was fun to do, I had a series of problems the day it was due because I needed to get it done within a certain amount of time before I went to work.

We were to trace an image of our choosing and fill it with vector shapes.
Here's the WIP:

 

Original photo