On November 11th, I attended an in-person book talk. The event was to discuss Anthony Dunne’s new book titled “Not here, Not now”. The book was published on May 6, 2025, and it discusses speculative thought, impossibility, and imagination. My first impression was being intrigued and also curious. “Designing not for the sake of finding a possible solution, but for speculation” is a line that has stuck with me and made me think a lot in regard to my design process. Oftentimes, I do design to find the best layout/look, and I do see the limitation in that. It allows my perfectionism to take over, and as a result not a good design. Anthony suggests designers embrace inquiry, encouraging to design out of the box to create different perspectives.
For a future personal project, I am interested in creating a comic, which is why I decided to attend this exhibition. Emmanuel Knight is the creator and artist behind “Magna AX.” He drew inspiration from his childhood experiences, including PS2 video games, shows from Adult Swim, and SEGA. The manga series aims to explore the themes of self-discovery through combat and romance. The exhibition began with a tour led by Emmanuel himself.
I really like how Emmanuel laid out the compositions for each volume of the series. Each volume cover features characters in grayscale with a splash of color. However, I was most drawn to the cover that had a pink blue and yellow color palette. I really liked the front girl being portrayed in the center in almost full color, surrounded by characters that were in gray scale with slight color to them.
During the artist talk, Emmanuel talked more in depth about Magna AX, as well as gave the audience insight into his career journey. He is a self taught artist. Could you believe that he started Magna AX in his sophomore year of high school? I felt inspired by his passion and dedication to his craft. A piece of that he gave is this : “Look at things that inspire you and work from it. It is your story, you get to tell it the way you want to.” The quote stemmed from an experience where he got sent a contract from Tokyo Pop, which basically said that the work he would do, he wouldn’t receive the credit (he almost went through with the offer but declined after reading the fine print).
I attended Adobe Max conference virtually in the span of two days. The keynote outlines all new features that are coming out across all adobe programs. Although I don’t particularly like using ai, i did find Michael Fugoso’s Ai segment regarding Adobe illustrator (character design) in the day one keynote most intriguing:
I thought it was pretty cool to use Ai in a way that doesn’t generate art but instead in a way that takes your art and makes creating turnarounds much quicker, not to mention eliminating the time to redraw the character in a different direction. I think I do see myself using this new feature because I struggle drawing in 3/4 view.
After the keynote, I attended the information session “Brand Design with photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign” by the speaker Eloise Rouet whose a graphic designer. She talks about working flow and she explains three ways to improve workflow: clear communication, smart tools, organization. In my opinion, I think I need to improve my workflow. I feel each program has a lot of tools laid out, some unnecessary and others being more important. So, I definitely need to organize my workplace much better in terms of tools I frequently use.
The following quote best summarizes the session well “design once, apply everywhere” This is where brand guidelines come into play which includes: color palettes, font properties, brand elements, etc. In creative cloud, there’s a tab called project tab where you can keep track of files from each program. I never knew about this feature, and I can say I will be using this in aid for improving my organization of future projects.
