Update on the commemorative masks, my supervisor informed me that the designs that I submitted were good but the college aren’t going to be able to actually produce the masks due to costs. The masks that the college will give out will be the standard black design with just the associated official school logos. I’m a bit sad, especially given the effort I made into the designs, but I understand that sometimes a budget is what determines what can be produced for a given project. It’s also the norm for most designers, sometimes work gets scrapped in favor of costs or sometimes in favor of a different art direction. This event reminded me of an article about Yuko Shimizu, an Illustrator who was hired to produce a TIME magazine cover for their cover story about Tiger moms but her work was scrapped in favor of having a photo-based cover instead. Shimizu ended up using the scrapped work and concepts to create a new illustrative piece which she then posted on her website. My work was scrapped but I could use the knowledge I gained from the project, the specs, and the overall design layout for a cloth mask and apply it for another mask design project in the future. Sometimes what you gain from a project is experience and knowledge which you can later use to become a better designer.
Link to Yuko Shimizu’s story
