Past Work

I actually haven't been doing a great job of updating this with everything I've been working on. Here are some projects that I completed at work:

Carson Grey Photography

High Performance Graphics

 

Redline Mailer

The last one is just a beta in testing, which is why.. its not finished. lol. These aren't quite the best representation of my design style. There are two tiers that prevented my designs from being completely 'mine'. Of course, there's the client, and then there's my boss. But that's not really the point of what design is for (and that's just the way it works), so I'm not really complaining. Plus I get a lot of good feedback from them and I see things I didn't see before. yay learning. But I'm still not a big fan of bevels.

I find it kind of humorous that one of the freelance clients that rejected me hasn't gotten their site online yet. It seems they may have resorted to wix and wordpress. ew.

New look?

So I was just testing out how to restyle this blog. I've never actually tried to, because it's kind of intimidating. Now that I have a better understanding of css from work, I thought I'd give it a shot. As you can see, there are a lot of kinks and weird things going on... but I am le tired for now.

Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere to host the images, so I tried a few quick fixes. I thought that if I uploaded them to blogger, I would be able to call them in my xml and css. I can't do that for some reason, and that really made everything take a lot longer. I also tried uploading my images to flickr, but it converts awesome .png's with transparency to .jpg's, which is not as pretty. Now I have everything hosted on imageshack, which is just a (very) temporary solution.

Not really satisfied with it, so I might try again some other day. But now I know I can do it!

Things are looking up? Maybe.

So, after I told myself that I wouldn't get into freelancing again, five(ish) different freelance opportunities came to me. All of them are through my immediate network, as opposed to friends-of-friends-of-acquaintances. That's pretty exciting and definitely reassuring, although most of them are still very early on in the negotiation process. Projects at work have also started to pick up, which has been putting me in a pretty good mood lately.

Today was the CED career fair on campus. It was a pretty hectic day, and I probably didn't prepare as much as I should have. I rushed to print and assemble my portfolio, and asked a lot of favors of people. I was able to talk to the majority of the different firms there, but that isn't really saying much. This year there were about 12 different firms, which is about half the amount of firms there were last year... and last year's turnout was half the amount of the year before. And to top that off, a majority of the firms I talked to said they weren't hiring (surprise! ...). I found it amusing that when I mentioned graphic and web design to some of the recruiters, their tone sort of suggested I should pursue that instead of architecture.

Overall though, I'd say that reception to my portfolio has been mostly positive, which is a relief considering it took me so long to "finish". I've accepted the fact that my portfolio is something that constantly needs to change and evolve. It may feel complete for about 5 seconds after it's printed, but it will never be "finished"... until I retire. It's just a shame that it costs $40 to print every time. And I'm not making much money. At all.

So now what? I need to stay optimistic and be prepared to wait it out some more. Sounds like a plan..

Day of Remembrance