When thinking on the path that led me to where I am now, I realized I’ve jumped around so often in terms of different forms of designs. Yet, where I’m at now, and the industry I’m going into post-graduation has combined all of them into one job, which is really awesome.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, a Creative Director and partner at an advertising agency. He sparked my creative side at a young age, although I had no interest in fine arts or even art history. Even at a young age, I always leaned more to how things looked on a page rather than drawing people or animals. He taught me how to begin using Photoshop and Illustrator when I was in eighth grade and I spent most of my time teaching myself on how to make certain things within those programs. I would always show him my work and he was impressed enough that I took an internship during my sophomore summer of high school coming to his office and touching up design work. I couldn’t believe it. A 15-year-old kid coming in and touching up work that professionals had worked on. I was constantly catching mistakes, misaligned text. I remember not even knowing what kerning or leading was, but I always had an eye for it.

When I began my college career, funny enough, I was a nursing major. It took me two years to figure out what the hell I truly wanted to do with my life, but I’m extremely grateful that I had figured it out. I took a year off of school and came back wanting to pursue art in hopes to push me closer to the path that my grandfather had taken and ultimately my goal was to end up as a Creative Director at some point and maybe even achieve more than that. I was halfway through my first semester back at Penn State and he passed away. This had fueled the fire under me to complete my goal and sort of honor him in that way. A way that he would have been very proud to see. Continuing on, I began to become very interested in user interface and user experience design. I felt as if this was the wave of the future, considering we spend about 3 hours a day taking a “class” on both just by looking at our phones every day. Apple should start marketing that — Sure, our phones are $1100 for the base model, but you’re also getting free UI/UX classes.

After dabbling with that for some time, I felt that I was good enough at it to the point where if I was ever tasked with doing wireframing or UI design work, I could handle the task effectively. Then I began to move on to more of the conceptual process which is by far the hardest. It’s just not tangible. I could test UI functions all day long, but I can’t feel a good idea with my hands. This was tough for me because unfortunately there are no classes in Penn State’s art department that teach you how to think in a design regard. You sort of know it or you don’t. I’ve had other creative directors explain to me that it’s sort of an innate knowledge that you’re born with. Well, I hope I have it.

Moving on to this past semester, I really honed in on Art Direction. This piqued my interest primarily because it offers so much more than just design work. I’ve spent countless hours looking through portfolios, awards results and publications to absorb as much information as I can to truly be ahead of the game when I graduate. I became absolutely inspired by some of the works of great creative directors such as George & Tom McQueen who work at a New York ad agency called Droga5, and Travis Waid, a creative director who notably oversees all creative work for the United States Airforce at an agency called GSD&M in Austin, TX. In fact, I was so inspired by Waid’s work, I reached out to him personally and told him so. It led to him inviting me to Austin, TX to tour the office and talk more about my work and how to become a better art director. I will be paying Travis a visit this coming August.

The conceptual process behind design is what intrigues me far more than the actual process of doing it. I want to know, does it work? Will it reach the intended demographic? Is it too basic? Too convoluted? I really enjoy digging deep into the conceptual process and procrastinating the actual design work. Stories and words are the most important things we have as a society. The ability to tell a story through design or a perfectly executed social video goes to show how far we’ve come in a digital age. Even if that story is somehow squished into an 8 second video on Instagram or placed before a Youtube video.

As I mentioned in Module II, I’m not an artist. My grandfather was an artist on the side, known for painting and drawing in his free time. However, I solve clients problems with design. I typically remain silent on this topic within the halls of the Penn State art department, in fear of being judged or accused of some sort of blasphemy, however if I had the opportunity to offer this approach to other students like me, I would take that offer. It could be extremely beneficial for their future.

I think once New Media students realize that they can be artists and express themselves however they want — but at the bottom line when it comes to working in a job as a designer, animator or web developer, your job is to solve problems. I’m often curious if students who take Art classes such as 201/314/315/415 also think this way. Maybe this way of looking at it has never occurred to them. However, from my experience, once I realized I was in fact solving problems, not creating art, my work got 10x better than it was.