improve

I’ve been picked for a few really cool projects at work lately, so I think I’ve accomplished this one for now. I keep getting the sorts of things that we used to send out to real companies (at least in part because we used to have real budgets), but I also keep getting good feedback. People think I’m fast and good, which is a pretty awesome combination. I definitely don’t have the jitters and worries I used to under my old boss, but I’ve also realized that she was an awful person who liked causing jitters and tearing people down.

A few weeks ago, I was picked to work on this tiny little thing that kept annoying people over here. I don’t know how many people had worked on it, but at least four or five in different departments had taken a stab at it in two weeks and it all needed to go to air. When they dropped by in the morning to ask me about it, the client was definitely relieved, like they’d brought in the big guns when it was just me showing up as usual. So, yeah, I’ve accomplished this one. Not that I can’t get better, but I’m at least over the hump, you know?

even though I haven’t spent a lot of time actively working towards “improvement” per se. In my new job, I get much more interesting things to work on, and my design class turned out really well—I especially liked my final project, but there were a few projects that I thought turned out nicely. Taking a class was much better than telling myself that I should do things and then never quite following through.

I don’t know if I’ll keep this long-term, or if I should close it out now. It’s nice to have as a reminder, like “Simplify”, my top goal.

I feel like this is one of my goals that just never gets any love…

My class started last night! It looks like it’ll be fun. Our first assignment was to make a “poster” with those old letterpress scratch off letters. I didn’t quite know what to make, but one of my neighbors had a font of icons for sports and leisure activities, so I made a bad night on dancing with the stars…

I haven’t done anything serious towards this project, so I signed up for a design class that starts in September. Should be fun!

I took on a freelance project that involves designing actual things, so I’m going to let myself off the hook on this goal for the next few weeks. I have pushed myself to come up with more variations than the traditional three and I’ve spent much more time and been more careful about the design process than usual. It’s also nice to have more time. At work, I often get a day or two to create something, so to have a project that I work on a few hours a day over a longer period is a nice change of pace. Of course, I want my free time back…

how to formulate this goal and I made up all sorts of long, complicated names, but I think this is a good one. Short, simple, open…

My goal here, at the moment, is to improve my self-confidence as a designer. I have one of those hyphen work titles: “animator designer”, and while I feel like I can animate anything, like that’s a known quantity, I don’t always feel like I can design anything and everything. Designing is just more subtle and frustrating an art, and the setbacks and lousy projects get to me more than my victories.

What I need to do is practice more. At work, I’m the low girl on the totem pole and I rarely get fancy or interesting projects. I rarely have to do much explaining or many styleframes, so when I do, it’s a bit foreign. There are two things I want to do: I want to make sets of styleframes [but only styleframes! I should be able to get my point across without animating everything] and I want to play more with text and type. I think a good exercise for both is to take existing movies and books and pretend like someone is making them into TV shows. I also like the idea of illustrating quotes or poem fragments through storyboards.

That’s the idea for now.