Blog 24: Last Presentation Reflection

Woot woot!

(1) Positive Statement

What are you most proud of in your block presentation and/or your senior project? Why?
-I was most proud of my activity, because it directly tied into my EQ and final answer about communicating with your client or graphic designer.

(2) Questions to Consider

a.     What assessment would you give yourself on your block presentation?  Use the component contract to defend that assessment.

AE       P          AP       CR       NC

b.     What assessment would you give yourself on your overall senior project? Use the component contract to defend that assessment.

AE       P          AP       CR       NC

(3) What worked for you in your senior project?
-My presentation overall was very organized and many people enjoyed the activity because they used their own creativity incorporating what they learned into their designs.
(4) (What didn't work) If you had a time machine, what would you have done differently to improve your senior project?
-I didn't fully get my point across because I had a bit of a hard time expressing myself and explaining my content/how my answers related to my EQ.
(5) Finding Value

How has the senior project been helpful to you in your future endeavors?   Be specific and use examples.
-It really helped me understand how to carry myself and know how to talk to others (exit interviews, interviews with mentors/interviewees). I also got a lot better at making presentations, and found confidence in my own style because many people told me my theme looked professional and aesthetically pleasing.

Blog 23: Exit Interview Prep

(1) What is your essential question, and what are your answers?  What is your best answer and why?

-My essential question is: How can a graphic designer communicate their client's vision while maintaining their own creativity? My three answers are: 1. Establishing a clear understanding and communication of what the client wants. 2. A thorough research on the client's background. 3. Have both the graphic designer and client to have a clear understanding of graphic design and printing. My best answer is: Establishing a clear understanding and communication of what the client wants.  I chose this answer because communication is imperative when it comes to graphic design, hence its alternative name "visual communication".
(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

-During my interviews, I ways always told that communication is key to graphic design; that's why it's also called visual communications. I also came across several articles stating that keeping a constant communication with your client will help establish a clear and successful business with one another.
(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

-I was nervous as to how I could answer the EQ with just one sentence. But then I realized that the simpler it is, the easier I can explain in full detail as to why I reached that answer.
(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

-One was my interview three with my interviewee Jarek Ceballos. He was extremely thorough with his answers, and really was eager to assist me in answering my questions about graphic design and how I could improve my skills. Another source was the website Creative Bloq, a website for designers to go on and research or find inspiration. This website was very organized and in almost every article, there would be steps or a process to follow that could possibly help me with designing. And they didn't come off as forcing me to use their ideas, the website's creators and authors always encouraged their audience to create their own ideas while using their ideas as inspiration.

Blog 22: Independent Component 2

Easter 2016

LITERAL
(a) Include this statement: “I, student name, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents ___ hours of work.”
-I, Scully Kuo, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 37 hours of work.
(b) Cite your source regarding who or what article or book helped you complete the independent component.
-Ceballos, Jarek. Personal Interview. 2016 Feb. 18.
-Hardy, Gareth. "Logo Design: Conducting Preliminary Research." Logo Design: Conducting Preliminary Research. Graphics, n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2015.(c) Update your Independent Component 2 Log (which should be under your Senior Project Hours link)
(d) Explain what you completed.
-For my Independent Component 2, I was assigned to coordinate, create, and design a two-day event. One was on Saturday, March 26, 2016. It was a performance event called "Life Show (life, because Jesus Christ rose to 'life' on Easter day; it's a pun for live show)." For about three weeks, I planned, discussed, designed, and coordinated the event's venue and created flyers and posters with it. For day two of the event on March 27, 2016, I was required to make signs for the many people who were going to hold up the said signs. I was also assigned to cut out big pieces of cardboard and spray paint them. Words like "honk for Jesus", "hope is everything", or "know Him, know life, no Him, no life" were painted upon them in a typographical way.
(e) Defend your work and explain the component's significance and how it demonstrates 30 hours of work.   Provide evidence (photos, transcript, art work, videos, etc) of the 30 hours of work.

Flyer for day 1

Flyer for day 2

Photo booth area

Cardboard sign to welcome attendees into the event.

Cardboard signs used to let people know today is Easter.

(f) How did the component help you answer your EQ? Please include specific examples to illustrate how it helped.

-IC 2 helped me find my answer, because I was constantly communicating with others and asking the host of the event (aka my client) what their thoughts were and how I could improve it. The answer I chose to answer my EQ was that in order to communicate the client's design while maintaining our own creativity was by establishing a clear understanding of what the client wants. This IC really helped me confirm that communication and understanding was the most important part of graphic designing. If we don't communicate our thoughts and potentials, we wouldn't create something meaningful to the client themselves.

Blog 21 - Interview 4 Reflection

1. What is the most important thing I learned from the interview?
-The most important thing I learned in this interview was that communication is everything when it comes to graphic design to be able to be in the same page as your client and understand their needs, while they can understand the graphic designer's work habits, creativity, and style. 
2.  How will what I learned affect my final lesson?
-I will definitely be focusing more on communication and business with the client more than my past two presentations, because it's a very important component that needs to be focused on more when it comes to graphic design.

Blog 20: Fourth Interview Questions

1.  Who do you plan to interview?  What is this person's area of expertise?
-I plan to interview my last interviewee's colleagues. They are also a freelance graphic designer.
2.  Post 20 open-ended questions you want to ask an expert in the field concerning your senior project. Your focus should be finding answers to your EQ.

1. How can a graphic designer communicate the client's vision while maintaining their own creativity?
2. How do you make sure both you and your client has a basic understanding of graphic design?
3. Is there anyone or anything that inspires you to create the designs you make?
4. When you started out, what were some of the most difficult things you had to go through as someone who just started in the business?
5. What is your favorite design program to use?
6. Have you stuck with it since you started or have you tried different programs to stick with what you've had now?
7. Why is communication such an important factor for graphic design?
8. What is the key to making your client satisfied?
9. How can a graphic designer improve themselves as a person to appeal to their customers?
10. What is a good way to show your client your designs with their preferences in mind?
11. How do you convince your client that your designs are good enough for them to use?
12. What is the most important part of being a graphic designer?
13. What are some components that makes someone want to hire a graphic designer?
14. What is the first thing you do when you get a job?
15. How do you understand the art of design?
16. Where do you get your inspiration for your designs?
17. What is your favorite brand in retrospect, and why do you like it?
18. Design isn't just making it appealing to the eye. It also requires perfect measurement. What do you do to make sure your designs are perfectly symmetrical?
19. What qualities do you consider necessary for a good designer?
20. Do you have any advice to give people who want to start out in this business?

Blog 19: Third Answer

• EQ
• How can a graphic designer communicate their client's vision while maintaining their own creativity?
• Answer #3 (Write in a complete sentence like a thesis statement)
• A graphic designer can communicate their client's vision while maintaining their own creativity by making sure both they and their client has a basic understanding of graphic design and how it works.
• 3 details to support the answer
• Mentor's interview talked about it in the past, and had personal experiences with miscommunication because the client didn't understand graphic design
• Some clients don't get graphic design and its dynamics, and ask GDs to do the impossible.
• This leads to miscommunication and confusion, and therefore takes a lot of time/gets very messy in the process of designing.
• The research source(s) to support your details and answer
• Interview #1
• #7
• #15
• Concluding Sentence
• Having both parties have a good understanding of what graphic design is is important. If there is no clear understanding between what is possible and what is impossible, there would be chaos and both the client and graphic designer will blame each other for not doing their job right and not understanding the limitations of graphic design, respectively. Therefore, to have both the GD and client understand at least a basic amount of GD terminology and concept is one of the keys to having a successful and smooth relationship while the GD does work for their client.

Blog 18: Answer 2

1.  What is your EQ?
-My EQ is, "How can a graphic designer communicate their client's vision while maintaining their own creativity?"
2.  What is your first answer? (In complete thesis statement format)
-Establish a clear understanding of exactly what they want through communication.
3.  What is your second answer? (In complete thesis statement format)
-Have an understanding of the background of your clients' company/organization.
4.  List three reasons your answer is true with a real-world application for each.
-Communication is important for every job. I noticed in almost every presentation I saw, there was a presenter who mentioned communication at least once.
-If you make sure that you and the other party understand each other and know what each other would like, it creates a harmonious relationship to get work done.
-Many articles that I have accessed have stated that you must do thorough research before creating something for a company, as it must hold an important meaning while integrating what the company does/is.
5.  What printed source best supports your answer?

-Hardy, Gareth. "Logo Design: Conducting Preliminary Research." Logo Design: Conducting Preliminary Research. Graphics, n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2015. <http://www.graphics.com/article-old/logo-design-conducting-preliminary-research>.
6.  What other source supports your answer?
-Shorr, Graham. "5 Tips to Create a Design Portfolio." Expertise. Expertise, 1 May 2015. Web. 18 Feb. 2016. <http://www.expertise.com/design-and-photography/easy-steps-to-create-a-beautiful-design-portfolio>.
7.  Tie this together with a concluding thought.
-I believe that these two answers help me with my EQ, because communication is key when you talk to people. It's especially important in graphic design. I recently interviewed someone who also told me that communication is literally everything when it comes to GD, hence its other name, visual communications. Other articles and sources I have come across have also stated this, therefore I am positive and confident that these answers will lead me to a good and solid answer.

Blog 17 - Interview 3 Reflection

1. What is the most important thing I learned from the interview?
-The most important thing I learned from the interview with Mr. Ceballos was the fact that referencing work is the best way to improve yourself as a graphic designer. Quoting him, he said that "Just, I mean, just collecting bits and pieces that you see. So if you’ve ever looked up a catalog or something…" Something he said that also caught my attention was what he said about enjoying your design. "...just appreciate it for what it is. And I think that’s a good way to start out with design, just have fun with it. Don’t be so serious about it, and just see everything that’s possible to you."
2. How has your approach to interviewing changed over the course of your senior project?
-It helped me realize that I need to create interesting questions that will really make the interviewee talk a lot and elaborate more instead of a single sentence or short answer. I need to pinpoint exactly what they want. Just like in graphic design, I need to know the background of the person and their personality in order to think of questions that will really make them come out of their shell. Another important thing is to always use follow up questions. Those are key.

Blog 16: Independent Component 2 Approval

1.  Describe in detail what you plan to do for your 30 hours.
-I will create a logo for a coffee shop and design the theme of it using photoshop, then post it on social media (like Instagram) to communicate with others and track my progress. This is what a website about graphic design I used for my research; it said that using social media to push you into working will help you improve and check how much you've done.
2.  Discuss how or what you will do to meet the expectation of showing 30 hours of evidence.
-I will constantly create different logos first and see which one is the cleanest and best logo. I will ask people for advice on how to do it so communication is a vital component in my independent component 2, which is part of my EQ. I will also show the Instagram account.
3.  Explain how this component will help you explore your topic in more depth.
-This IC 2 will help me because social media and communication are being implemented into my project, which is what my EQ is: how can a graphic designer communicate their client's vision while maintaining their own creativity? Because I don't have a client, I can say that my audience is.
4.  Post a log in your Senior Project Hours link and label it "Independent Component 2" log.
-HERE

Blog 15: Independent Component 1

• LITERAL

• (a) Write: “I, __________________________, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents ____ hours of work.”
• I, Scully Kuo, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 56.5 hours of work.
• (b) Cite your source regarding who or what article or book helped you complete the independent component.
• Yearbook

• (c) Update your hours in your Senior Project Hours link. Make sure it is clearly labeled with hours for individual sessions as well as total hours.

• It has been fully updated!

• (d) Explain what you completed.

• I completed spreads to design that were assigned to me for yearbook. 

• INTERPRETIVE 

• Defend your work and explain its significance to your project and how it demonstrates 30 hours of work.   Provide evidence (photos, transcript, art work, videos, etc) of the 30 hours of work.  

• Since my senior topic is about graphic design, and one of the topics in my topic is editorial design, it is something that I wanted to implement into my independent component. Editorial design is the structural arrangement of text and photo, such as magazines and newspapers. Yearbook does the exact same thing; in fact, we often reference magazines to create wonderfully designed spreads for our yearbook.

• Here are the cover designs for our yearbook. This is the old version of our yearbook's cover; the completed version is a classified and therefore cannot be shown, but it shows my progress and how I took time to fix it and create a good cover before its final look.

• APPLIED

• How did the component help you understand the foundation of your topic better?  Please include specific examples to illustrate this.

• As mentioned, editorial designing (the designing with the use of text and photos, i.e. magazines) is one of my main topics. I decided to use yearbook my independent component because it was exactly what I needed to improve on my editorial designing, and since there are yearbook advisers, Mr. Strand and Mimi, who works at Herff Jones a.k.a. the site we use to design and create our yearbook, I could be given advice on how to improve my work. Overall it was a very hands-on experience and I was barely given any assistance on creating my spreads, only small measurement recommendations and how to use the site's controls. For example, if I needed two text boxes side by side to fill up space and the text was too long to fit the first box, I would press a small button next to the first box and the rest of the text would automatically jump to the second box. Mimi showed me many things that made my designing a lot more easier and less of a hassle. We would also go over spreads as a whole elective class, talking about what we needed to improve and what we could have done in terms of designing.

Lesson 2 Reflection

1.What are you most proud of in your Lesson 2 Presentation and why?
-I am most proud of my activity, it got a lot of good feedback and many people enjoyed the activity.
2. a.     What assessment would you give yourself on your Lesson 2 Presentation (self-assessment)?

       AE       P          AP       CR       NC

     b.     Explain why you deserve that grade using evidence from the Lesson 2 component contract.
-I did everything that was a P consideration, from remembering my EQ without looking at it to cleaning everything up.
3. What worked for you in your Lesson 2?
-My activity really worked.
4. What didn't work? If you had a time machine, what would you have done differently to improve your Lesson 2?
-What didn't work was that I didn't have enough research/intellectual content for me to make 10 minutes or more, so I had to pull out more than I thought I would need from my mind to make the 10.
5. What do you think your answer #2 is going to be?
-My next answer would probably be "To have in-depth knowledge of what your client and their company does."

Blog 14: Third Interview Preparation

1.  Who do you plan to interview?  What is this person's area of expertise?

• I plan on interviewing one of my classmates' mentors or relatives. Either that, or I will interview my mentor's wife, Mrs. Sarah Chen, who is also part of the design industry.

2.  Verify that you have called your interviewee to schedule an interview.  What is the date and time of the interview?

• I will be interviewing them in 2 weeks, on January 24, 2016 at 1:00 PM.

3.  Phrase an open-ended question that will help you find research resources that would help to answer the EQ.

• "What is the best way to communicate your design to others?"

4.  Phrase an open-ended question that will help you think about other useful activities you might do to help you answer the EQ (IC2, possible experts to talk to, etc).

• "How can someone design something according to their client's and their ideas?"

5.  Phrase two open-ended questions that help you to understand your interviewee's perspective on an aspect of your EQ.

1. What is a good way to show your client your designs with their preferences in mind?
2. How do you convince your client that your designs are good enough for them to use?

Blog 13: 10 Hour Mentorship Check-In

1.   Where are you doing your mentorship?
-I am mentoring at Ultimate Printing in Rowland Heights, CA
2.   Who is your contact?  What makes this person an expert?
-My contact is Ken Chen. He works with the printing and designing business and manages it. He has been involved with the design business ever since he was young because he always had an interest in it, therefore making him an expert.
3.   How many hours have you done during the school year? (Summer Mentorship Hours and Mentorship Hours should be reflected separately in your Senior Project Hours log located on the right hand side of your blog).
-During the school year, I have done 18 total hours.
4.   Succinctly summarize what you did, how well you and your mentor worked together, and how you plan to complete the remaining hours.
-My mentor and I worked on a few projects he had gotten from his clients, and often made me a sort of "assistant" that helped him organize things. At home, he would email me things to do and I would create them on Adobe Photoshop. Right now I am still slowly learning how to master Illustrator with his assistance and guidance. I work very well with Mr. Chen; he always tells me to ask if there are any questions I need to ask and always tries to find time to help me grow as an artist. I plan to complete the remaining hours by continuing to work as his assistant and learn new techniques, therefore broadening my knowledge of graphic designing.

Blog 12: Holiday Project Update

1.  It is important to consistently work on your senior project, whether it is break or we are in school.  What did you do over the break with your senior project?
-I worked with my mentor throughout the break, creating more designs and learning graphic design terms.

2.  What was the most important thing you learned from what you did, and why?  What was the source of what you learned?
-That communication is the best thing to create a successful business with your customer. I watched my mentor speak with a customer and they were very detailed about what they wanted and were very meticulous when it came to exactly what kind of design they wanted.

3.  Your third interview will be a 10 question interview related to possible answers for your EQ. Who do you plan to talk to and why?
-I plan to talk to either my mentor's coworker, or his wife, who is also in the graphic designing business.