After calligraphy, pencil drawings and black and white photography classes, I had finally made it to “designing graphically” classes. It still started with drawing by hand and I soon learned I wasn’t good, nor did I enjoy, having to come up with 100 doodles, or “thumbnails.” But it was all part of the process. From those thumbnails, you had to choose 6 B&W roughs, then usually 3 executions from that, then color executions, sometimes another round of roughs with tweaks, then finally your final.

Below are some of my favorite projects. The zoo signage is from start to finish and after looking at some of my thumbnails, I think I actually want to explore doing Giraffes and Flamingoes (I wasn’t obsessed with Flamingoes yet which is why I didn’t choose them as the final).

Hot Spots was a project that entailed creating not only a fictitious company name, but a business plan, mission statement, mark, business system and brochure. Below are my roughs and the business system.

On the Edge was another pretend business project where we had to create retail tags then shoot them on actual clothing (enlarged on purpose for ease of viewing).

We did a lot of making up of businesses, I made up a telecommunications company called Off The Hook. Yup, sure did.

As part of our final portfolio, we had to create a marks page (marks are more commonly known as “logos”). The top middle was, at the time, my personal mark, but I’ve never been too happy with it. Still working on it. Talking about yourself is always hard, but trying to come up with a symbol, on paper, that represents you, your personality, your work ethic and aesthetic is even harder!

One of my absolute favorite projects was a poster on The Divine Proportion, or Golden Mean. It’s an actual mathematical equation, like “pie” or “squared” that appears naturally in nature, but is also used in musical instruments and architecture. I had a lot of fun just learning about it!

Someday, hopefully, I’ll make a career out of this, whether it’s brand marketing or photography. Need to keep playing, practicing and keeping the creative side of my brain active ;-)