Ron Ramlall

COMD 3503 – Topics in Graphic Design

Professor Marianna Trofimova

In today’s class we watch two video’s titled by Stefan Sagmeister. The videos did not catch my attention or appeal to me but I understand what he was saying from a designer perspective. He was speaking about his work in a visual way and about the things he learnt in life.

In the video, I felt Stefan Sagmeister was explaining his design and how he came about doing it and where he started. I guess this was the idea in presenting our portfolio in class explaining our work. I finished my presentation and I think I did fairly well. The difference between my presentation and Stefan’s is that mine didn’t go into that very detailed explanation. I guess as a graphic designer you have to explain or try to sell your design from every aspect so the audience can have a sense of where you’re coming from.

Also, Stefan said that being married and having allot of friends will make you happy. I’m not married so I can’t relate to that. I have friends and I’m happy, so I can relate. In the graphic design field, you should have friends because when you do a design you should be able to get some kind of feed back from your friend before you send it off to the client. Having friends help you develop your creative, like Stefan said a happy designer is a good designer. Stefan also said do more thing that you like to do and fewer things that you don’t. Doing things that you like will make you happy and it brings out the best of you in that skill rather than doing things that you don’t will anger you and your design will be crappy and also you will hate yourself.

In the video, he mentioned keeping a diary to support personal development. As a graphic designer we keep a sketch book, in my opinion, to see how we’ve develop from the day we start to present. In my work, I can see the development in my skills from the day I started to present and I can say I’m impress from what I saw. I keep all my work in a folder so I can look back at it to see where I was to now.

In this video, the speaker was a female writer, I can’t remember her name but she was speaking about being afraid and keeping on showing up. This video relates to me because sometimes when I do a design I’m afraid I didn’t deliver what I’m suppose to do or someone judging my design and that makes me second guess my self sometimes. If you know to to yourself, you’re producing good design and aren’t afraid of what others say, you keep on show your work, get positive feedback and you’ll develop into a strong designer in the future.