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!
