Tuesday, Jan. 24

Have you experienced fear based reactions to your creative career choices?

Yes, many times. Growing up my parents would always mention to my older sibling how their career choices would not give them the life style my parents came to this country for. They always said they wanted more for us and more stability. When my turn came around to apply for colleges and to make decisions on my career choices, my parents questioned everything and tried to have me reconsider my decisions. Eventually they figured out that I would not be moved and my decision had been made about what I wanted to do with my life.

How are you successfully overcoming these reactions?

It is difficult to deal with the reactions at times but I always try to remind myself that I made my choices out of love and passion for the career. It is easy to lose sight of that especially with the instability of the economy and and scarcity of jobs but if I learned anything from my dad and choosing a career is that a job you love is not a job. The idea of being able to do something I enjoy and making a career of it keeps me in my tracks and filters out the negative reactions that can come my way.

The video we saw on Tuesday gave me a new point of view to an issue I often have to deal with. Getting stuck in an art project can be very frustrating and usually thats when my worst work is made. Being able to take some of that weight off of my shoulders and understand that blasts of creativity come at their own time. Clearing my mind and putting in my share of the work is all I need. If I have the creative genes then everything else will come when the time is right.

Thursday, January 19

Network, network and network. The more I learn about the design world the more I see that networking is essential. We learn from our peers and give each other a hand as we come together for a common cause/goal. Thursday's class gave everyone a wide range of emotions. Some of us were frustrated, others might have been feeling bad about their work while others were feeling proud of it. I typically have a hard time working in groups because for some reason I end up having to be the one to step up to do the work because I don't want to risk my grade. However, when we were given the task of having to organize tour work from best to work, the opposite happened. Too many people stepped up to the point of what seemed like utter chaos and people judging each other for their ideas of "good work". In the end, we all reminded ourselves that we are too old to behave that way and we had a task that needed to get done, and so we did it the best way we could (or at least the best at that moment).
I particularly enjoyed this class session. It gave us a chance to get to know each other. It wasn't so much about what the stories our cartoons told or how good our drawings were, but more about being able to criticize our work and other people's work in order to improve. Instead of dealing with who's drawing technique was more creative I enjoyed watching our group get into a discussion about effective cartoons and together coming to a realization that the criteria for better work was actually quite simple; we were presented with a problem and we needed to solve it in the most efficient and creative way and the best work had to do just that.

Tuesday, Jan. 17

Tuesday's lecture opened my eyes to things in my daily life that typically went unnoticed. Although I haven't throughly studied it, I know that colors provoke certain emotions in a person and that companies use that psychology in order to attract their customers. However, because I knew very little about it, I only questioned advertisements over the surface as to why they were designed they way they were. After Tuesday's lecture it is safe to say that I will not look at Jack-In-The-Box logo the same way anymore. Now I look at other advertisements and logos throughout my day and look for similarities and ask why the designers chose that design. With Tuesday's lecture, I began to understand that good designs (especially for marketing) are hardly ever accidents, every detail is meant to say something and make the viewer feel or think a certain way and attract them to their product or ideology.

Week One

Art 220 been very different in comparison to most other art classes I have taken so far. I took my first art class when I was about 5 or 6 years old and even up until last quarter, class was always about learning new techniques to create art or learning how to use the tools we purchase properly. I should've expected it to be much different just by the name of the course. Each person has a different way to approach a project but I never really thought about the things that needed to happen within a person in order to have a successful project. I subconsciously knew that there is usually a problem that needs to be solved when you are presented an assignment, however, having everything the process laid out step by step somehow gave light to things I would normally overlook. I can look at a flyer and say how it can be improved by changing the size or location of certain things but I couldn't explain why. Doing the excercise of breaking down the design of the flyer that was posted in class helped me understand why certain design methods are better than others, whether because it creates a focal point of because it is the way our eyes are accustomed to reading. Listening to more personal stories from the professor also gave me a glimpse behind the scenes of the graphic design field that I rarely get. Even if it was very brief, hearing about experiences of people who have already been through the path I am trying to go down with my career helps to keep me motivated and seem more attainable and realistic.