City College ARTG100 Grace Anello: December 2014

Visual Asylum

The Visit to Maelin's design firm was inspiring. It is always nice to see workplaces that are aesthetically pleasing as well as creative. It was interesting to see the physical models that the company produced to show to the clients, as well as the sketchbooks filled with a physical presentation of different concepts for the client. I really enjoyed that Maelin has continuously tried to instill the idea within us that our ideas for creative concepts are better than the clients and that we need to pick the right vocabulary to help explain why our concept works better than theirs, in an appropriate way. I really enjoyed seeing all of the print design, I feel like people are moving away from doing this but its true, I love getting a physical thing in the mail, especially something I can keep or something that has purpose. It made me realize that although I enjoy creating in the computer, I may enjoy print design.

Ram Castillo

The speech that Ram gave us at the AIGA presentation was really helpful. It was helpful to see how to organize an online portfolio and how to create questions to bring to an interview to seem properly engaged in the position you are applying for. It is also always nice to see how someone came to be at their current position, because being fresh out of college sometimes it seems impossible to imagine myself getting to a position that I want within the next ten years of my life. It helped to put things in perspective and helped to instill some more confidence in me about my abilities. He was really interesting to listen to and he definitely gave me a new perspective on trying to find a job in the world of graphic design.

Studio Conover

It was really nice being able to go to Dave Conover's studio and see his and his wife's workspace. I really enjoyed seeing all the physical samples that Dave's wife Cecelia works with. It is definitely enjoyable to be able to see and experiment with physical samples in order to design a whole picture of what the building would look like. I found it interesting that Dave also made a point to tell us all to follow our passions, I feel like in every other field of work the words "follow your passion" are rarely said and definitely not said with honestly behind it. It was refreshing to hear yet again. His studio seemed like an amazing workspace to me, it was interesting how it was cut in half between the two types of design. I really enjoyed the rustic feel of it all. It was really cool to see how different the paths you could follow in design are, Dave took something that could be so boring and he made it beautiful, all of his samples he showed us seemed directly connected to the office space they were produced in, which I thought was really enjoyable and interesting.