Saturday, May 21, 2016

Graphic Design is Tough Work!

Whew! I can't believe my last blog post was all the way back in March! I've been crazy busy over the past couple of months. For those of you who may not know, I joined a nonprofit organization called Grow Appalachia as an Americorps member. We're working on this terrific project called Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). Our goal is to provide free meals and fun educational activities to kids in Berea all summer long.

One thing that I really appreciate about Grow Appalachia is that they value my skills as an artist. My first week on board they put me to work designing a new logo for SFSP. After several sketches I finally came up with the idea to do a silhouette of children marching in a parade since our motto for this program is "Your Summer Vacation Destination!" 


After designing the logo I jumped right in to designing flyers and banners and signs to help spread the word about SFSP. For the first time ever I feel like a legit graphic designer, and let me tell you what! It is tough work! I had to make draft after draft after draft for every task at hand. The flyer was especially difficult because it required me to condense a ton of information on a single 8x11 page format.


I've also made plenty of mistakes. For example, I accidentally sent the wrong draft of the SFSP flyer to Berea Printing Services and spent over $90 of Grow Appalachia's money to print hundreds of copies of the wrong flyer! That was a rough day.


I may have learned some hard lessons on this job, but every bit was worth it. My knowledge about graphic design and Photoshop has tripled since I started working here. I made myself learn tons of little technical quirks that I've avoided for a long time, like making transparent backgrounds and enlarging images for printing huge banners and posters. All things that will help me in the future as a free lance illustrator. 

Anyways I just wanted to give a big shout out to my fellow co-workers at Grow Appalachia. Their encouragement and constructive criticism helped make my work the best it could possibly be. I've learned so much and I am incredibly grateful for this experience. 

I'm so excited for next week when we actually start providing meals and activities to kids all throughout Berea!