Savonne Andrews's ePortfolio

The readings intrigued me and what I took from them is that I need to be more careful about the work I produce. For about 2 years I have been taking freelance commissions and one service I’m constantly asked to complete by my clients requires photo manipulation. While I use stock photography while given free reign on a design, I have often used photography provided by my clients which they did not own the rights to. I would like to keep myself to a certain level of integrity when working for people to avoid issues in the future. As Amanda Ray states, there are no industry guidelines for designers, but I believe guidelines should be given. Designers should be educated on what they are doing and what they are providing to their clients to avoid hurting themself or their clients. Workers without any level of integrity, in my opinion, just lead to a more problematic business model. This is why the copyright article really spoke to me. The article made me understand that I need to become more familiar with copyright and free use laws in order to deliver the best work. While I was familiar with most of the laws within the article, I believe it’s possible I may have infringed upon rights before by illustrating photos. 

 

My dilemma is actually quite similar to the Fairey Hope poster. In the case of Fairey’s hope poster, I think his poster should fall under fair use laws. I could understand getting in trouble for using someone’s likeness, for example if Obama were to directly create a legal issue with Fairey, however I think simply using a pose from a picture should be protected. Fairey clearly did not trace the photo and changed essentially every aspect of the photo. The hope poster contains different coloring, typography and graphic elements. I think the settlement is ultimately fair as both parties have been credited and make profit, but I’d argue that if a designer manipulates a photo skillfully enough, they should receive the lion share of the split profits.

For my networking event I attended a meeting by creative mornings on October 1st with the theme “dare yourself.” The event kicked off in a very lively manner, first greeting all the guests and with a music performance. After the performance we we’re allowed to communicate with the musician, Ana Barajas. Moving forward the speakers teamed up with a coffee company to deliver breakfast to a viewer and recorded the live reaction. From here the event started with a speech on being daring with your work  and everyone was prompted to speak with another viewer in a breakout room about one of our weaknesses in design. It was nice to interact with others and give my opinion as well as hear similar struggles other designers keep to themselves. When we got back to the main room we discussed our various passions and if we still incorporate them into our work among other things. What I took from the event was that you should always try to remain passionate and pick yourself up when you become stuck rather than stay that way.

Over this week I completed the flyer with Dr. Ferdinand luckily only took a few email exchanges and one revision. For my original draft I included two different versions of a similar layout because I was confident the client would be satisfied and luckily I turned out to be correct.

The different layouts contained different color schemes and pictures. I unfortunately had to cut most of the images I picked out originally from being put into the design as they were not energetic enough. Ultimately, me, the client, and my supervisor agreed on the first layout being the strongest so I made a simple revision by adding a description of the class as it was not provided to me originally. After handing the flyer in I was asked for feedback in our weekly meeting and I was critiqued for the sizing of the images. I agreed with the critique and changed it for my portfolio. Another critique I was given is that I should use the white logo for city tech based on the background color so I will also be making that change.

 

 

 

 

This week I worked on developing another flyer for the African department of citytech working with Dr. Ferdinand. The flyer is for AFR 1462 Blacks in Science, Technology, and Business. The brief I was given was simply to make another promotional flyer akin to my prior work with the client except by collecting images of black scientists, technologists and professionals.

Since everything at Faculty Commons represents the college as a whole, it of course, as with any design job, is problematic to simply steal photos. To avoid this, I used Pexels.com which is my go to for free stock photography. Unfortunately it is hard to find any truly free stock photo sites so I always use this one when I can. With this being the only site I use for free stock photos I often hit walls searching for very specific photos This can sometimes lead to a long process of searching and then locking in on different search keywords to find exactly what I am looking for.

All in all I only  managed to find about 10 photos which matched my specifications on top of having a good angle to design for. I then imported the photos into Photoshop to make the backgrounds transparent for each image to start my design process in Indesign.

Below I attached some cutouts I created as well as a look at Pexels.

Following up from last week I revised the black women in literature flyer. For the revision I had to readmit text from the client into the design as I changed the initial text heavy class description. To fix this issue I worked on the leading and font extensively as well as the hierarchy. Additionally I had to search for more stock photos as the clients did not like the original one I had for the design. After two revisions the clients were very pleased with the result. I ended up giving them two versions of the final design as they never specified which stock photo they preferred when I revised the original.