Graphic Design- Semester Reflection

This Semester in graphic design offered me personally a lot of new knowledge. I feel like I have learned a lot. We did many different projects like the Homecoming posters, Typography, and branding. I also did a lot of side work too.

Coming into this year I wasn't very confident with my Illustrator skills. Honestly I barely knew how to use the pen tool. We started off this year going over the basics and I think that helped me out a lot. Now I use illustrator constantly and it’s my best friend. Another trick I really appreciated learning was how to vector and image almost instantly. Image trace has saved me countless hours. I think I really improved my typography choices too. I can now match fonts and I know the rules to it. Learning about kerning and other elements helped me personalize it.

Some things I could work on next semester would probably be making my own fonts. I see a lot of kids in this class who are extremely talented with hand drawn fonts, I feel like this would make my works a lot more professional and stand out more if I used them. Another thing I could definitely improve for next semester would be communication with the class. I do talk and ask questions with the people next to me but I think it would be smart to maybe talk to Brett more often because I really admire his work and he comes up with a lot of cool and original ideas.

One of the highlights from this year was probably making the Homecoming poster and having it selected for the actual event. I was super psyched when that happened. I honestly didn’t think it would happen with all the other amazing posters that were made earlier in the year. I do wish I had more out of school projects to work on. I feel like making more challenging graphic would be a lot of fun and a good way to spend my time.  Finding out how to get some jobs like that would be something I need to figure out. This would also help my résumé for whatever Graphic design Programs I apply to for College.

Another big thing I decided on this year was that I wanted to do Graphic Design as a career. I’ve been researching it ever since the KU visit.  More visits like that would be extremely helpful. Currently I'm thinking about going out of state but Im not sure which college would be right for me. Although RISD did peak my interest. 

Hopefully next semester I can improve a lot and I can get an even more solid foundation in graphic design. I think it would be cool if we did more with Photoshop in this class, maybe do some sort of model photoshop tutorial. That really interested me last year.

Overall so far this year I feel like I have learned more than the past 2 years combined. This is a wonderful environment and I love having the class as my first two hours of every day. Can't wait to learn more!