December 2, Today I will be working on making a logo spread the for the logos I did for Lisa a few weeks back. It is a mind numbing task that is not easy to do when you are lacking sleep. At first I bunch up the logos too much. About twenty per page, to many to be viewed by themselves so I decreased the number of logos per page by ten. I had some difficulty putting the longer worded logos on the same page so I had to decreased the size of most of the logos by ten or twenty percent. Within a few hours I was done and there wasn’t much left to do. While grouping the college’s logos it made me realize how subconsciously I really do dislike working with logos. Whether it comes to designing them or dealing with them as a whole. I just can not wrap my head around it. It is a weakness that I must get over even if I am only interested in web design and web development. I have three more days left until my internship is done and I can honestly say that I am still not to keen on the design field and if you are not happy doing a job then most likely it is going to suck. But, hey, I am simply going by what a co-worker continually mentions when he comes into a work. Then again it might just be the fact that he’s working with C.U.N.Y., who knows.

November 30, today I showed up to for my internship to find that my supervisor, the art director, was not in for the day. So for today I get a free day. I have to see if it was just a family emergency or if I don’t have to come in for the week. Hopefully, she is not sick.

December 1, so I came in today and was told I would be designing a holiday postcard for the college. I was not sure how many designs I would need to have done by the end of the day but I decided to have at least three done. Before I did anything I started thinking up words one would associate with the winter and holiday season. If something was too cliche, I would cross it out until I could come up with a suitable idea for it. This continued for about an hour before I began sketching, horrible little sketches, but sketches nonetheless. I knew I had to incorporate the either the word “joy” or “peace.” For both of the designs I chose the word “joy” since it was the shortest and I had at least two ideas for them. In one idea I decided the make the word “joy” into gingerbread cookies. I was very hungry so I have no idea why I tortured myself like that. The second one, the word “joy” would be made out of snow, I chose a holiday looking font by the name of Wallington. It is a pretty nice font.

November 24, and I am still battling my cold along with dealing with a lost voice. As bad as that sounds, it was not, besides the occasional bouts of almost sneezing everything else was fine. While working on a few projects the art director approached me stating that there was a few things I needed to do. Following, I learned that I will be doing some logos, not necessarily designing them, just typing out the department names and offices. If you are thinking that that sounds boring, once again you would be right. It was extremely repetitive, type the name of the department, then create an outline from the text, then white out everything. It was so mind-numbingly boring that I made a few mistakes here and there. However, nothing that could not be fixed with a simple retype and overwriting the file before anyone sees. I may have started off a bit slow but I managed to finish everything before the end of the day. Currently I am waiting for my next project, which Lisa tells me will be a little bit more creative. I am happy but not too happy, still not into the whole graphic design aspect. And when your next door office worker having a small breakdown about a project that was due yesterday it all does not seem to appetizing. However, I’m starting to like web design again so there is that. Oh, and I finally sneezed, NOW that was the biggest highlight of the day. With that done I could actually concentrate on what needs to be done.

November 23, two more days before Thanksgiving and I’m at my internship, I have lost my voice and currently working on a few projects. At the moment they do not have anything for so I spent the day reworking some of my old websites. Especially since the release of the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge, I needed to figure out how my website would look on its screen. While coding for my website I realized that the background image I had for it was too small. So I re-sized at 960 pixels. Of course doing that I ran into something else. Since it is a one page design, I had to figure out how to keep the graphics on their respective sections which is turning out to be a chore. And then I ran into an additional problem that I did not have yesterday. The paragraph on the site is not doing what I told it too on the style sheet. Problems like these are annoying, but unlike graphic design. I like problems like these, it lets me flex my brain and figure out where the bug is or what code did I leave out that causing the page to act so wonky. I am not at the point where I could say that I love web design but I definitely like it. A whole lot more than I do graphic design. Maybe I should have went into computer science since I like coding so much. I should probably look into that later.

November 18, I heard back from Lisa about my designs, the boring one was obviously gotten rid of but the constellation and the slightly better one I was asked to work on some more. I was given a paper filled with copy for what would be the information appearing on the postcard and I was asked to play with the type a bit more to make them seem less boring. Most of the design work was done, I just needed to add the CUNY Logo as well as the Brooklyn College logo to the back of the post card. Next it was type, I played with type hierarchy a bit a long with the typefaces that the art director had given me. I was given some direction with what information was the most important. Obviously it was the name of the students whose pictures were featured on the postcard who also happen to be the names of the students are a part of the fellowship. I spent so much time playing with the type that I had nearly forgotten the CUNY logo and Brooklyn College’s logo. The CUNY college’s logo was supposed to be small while the Brooklyn College logo is supposed to be big. Makes sense right, well what is seen as big and small is entirely subject to the art director’s perspective. I made the CUNY logo to small and the Brooklyn College too big, so I had to go back and forth re-sizing. I remember something like this from Communications and Design class, logos are a funny thing. If it is to big, it is too loud; however, if it is too small your viewers can’t see it. Somewhere in the middle there is perfection…or as close as you can get to it.

November 17, my second day of my internship at Brooklyn College. Currently I am working on two postcard designs the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship currently happening at Brooklyn College. The main goal of MMUF is to send well prepared minority students to distinguished colleges and universities for graduate studies. The art director, Lisa, stated that the higher ups would like to see a collage of the pictures that I converted and that they would need at least two designs by the end of the day. So I spent the better part of the day researching postcard designs since it has been a while since I have ever seen one physically (thank you email). After a while I just did some sketches for postcard ideas, let me add that I am not particularly fond of graphic design either. Web Design or more specifically the coding I liked the designing part not fond of it at all. I came up with a few designs but nothing I really loved or remotely liked. Eventually I just started to play around with illustrator and Photoshop just to see if anything creative came to mind. I came up with two designs, one that seemed boring and the other was kind of fun but the problem was how I would incorporate it into the design scheme. The boring one had the picture collage front and center with the college’s colors in the back. If you are thinking that is boring, then you would be right. The second one, the slightly fun one, had an polygonal outline in the back with constellations. Fun to do but hard to incorporate it. By the end of the day I had three designs instead of just the two, all of them collages but with different flavors. Lets see how this goes.

November 16, today was the first day of my internship and things were not running as smoothly as I had hoped. The mac-book I was supposed to use for the internship was being used by someone else, but thankfully I had the foresight to bring my own laptop just in case (unfortunately, I could not get online, that will be relevant). There wasn’t really much to be done for the first day, I simply had to convert RGB photos to CMYK and raise the dpi to 300 without re-sampling them. A few of them really needed some retouches due to the artifacts left behind and some had lost a lot of their vibrancy. Later on in the day I learned that I would be designing a few postcards with the pictures I had worked on. Even though I did not have the exact dimensions for them, I did some very rough sketches just to pass the time away. I would have done some research beforehand, but since I had no internet that was all I could do. After two hours of sketching, I had the bright idea to use my phone’s 4G network to research, the bad part? I had forgot to bring my charger. So I spent the rest of the day either sketching or trying not to fall asleep onsite (did I forget to mention I have had insomnia for the past three days?). When I got home I decided to do some research on them with the hope that maybe tomorrow or the next day, I would finally be able to get online.

October 28, I read an interesting article about a CEO who set minimum salary for his workers to at least $70,000 dollars and now he’s receiving backlash for it. The name said CEO is Dan Price and in order to make up the difference, Price cut his one million dollar salary to $70,000. Not only that but he mortgaged his house, sold all of his investments to create a nest egg of three million dollars for his company, Gravity Payments. Usually when one hears that a CEO has been this generous with their employees, one would expect that nothing but praises would be heaped in his general direction but that was not the case. In fact he is being sued by his own brother, Lucas, a minority shareholder in Gravity Payments. The damages from the suit might cost the company one million dollars worth of legal bills. The story goes on citing criticism from others stating that it was a publicity stunt, to his own veteran workers, who apparently quit over the new policy. For a few moments I just sat back and let the story digest. And the only question I can ask myself is “what the heck is wrong with people?” I mean seriously, in a generation where the wealth gap is getting larger and larger, something like this happens and people complain about it? Yeah, it is officially I do not understand people…At all. If you would like to read the story for yourself here is the link:  http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/09/news/gravity-payments-dan-price-70k-salary/

October 13, 2015
I am reading an article written by Jonah Lehrer titled “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth.” By the way, the pain behind my left eye still hadn’t gone away, so with that fact I had an enjoyable time reading that particular article (sarcasm). When this article began somehow I knew I wasn’t going to like the outcome. However, I continued reading hoping for a surprise and the only surprise that came up was that brainstorming usually didn’t work. And I understood why people thought it was a good idea and I understood why it failed. All brainstorming ever did was have people throw ideas at the wall with the underlying thinking of if you threw enough ideas, no matter the quality, you were bound to find one good idea out of the bunch.
Remember when I begun writing this blog how there was one aspect of this article I wasn’t going to like? It had to do with group work, I honestly do not like working in groups. I won’t deny that it can lead to creative ideas and works, but it’s not for me. I personally find that I do fine working by myself, I don’t like having to rely on someone else to pull their weight within a group. I have had some pretty bad group experiences in the past and it might have and I would like not to relive them again. However, as the article went on, I knew that that sort of thinking would have to change.

October 9, 2015,
Decided to write another journal entry because, why not? I’m still working on my print portfolio, I’m still compiling a list of internships I might qaulify for and I’m still freaking out about not finding one yet. I’ve been thinking of whether I should just forgo the portfolio and just call every internship I have found and then work on it in between. However, the perfectionist (is that what I should call it?) in me won’t allow me to do it until I finish my appointed task. This might end up being a problem.
Between having bouts of, “I hate this, I hate this, how can I expect to do good work if I hate this” feelings, (yeah, it is going to be one of those journal entries analyzing my mind) and getting a pain behind my left eyeball that just won’t go away. I’m still wondering if this type of work is suited for me. In either case, I trudged along like a good little soldier until I realized the date. It was around the time I begun writing this, it’s October 9th and I still don’t have an internship. Part of me is terrified and the other part is just going “meh”.
It was in September that I started reworking my portfolio, initially I already had it completed by with the march of time, there are things that must be updated. A portfolio is as much alive as your resume when you are a job seeker. Now it’s October and I’m almost halfway done and my general feeling to that is…Meh.