Off to a great adventure!

Well folks, its been swell. I picked up my cap and gown yesterday tassel and all. I'm actually graduating.

I know if you're a prospective you can relate. We're both leaving our familiar lives for something new and exciting. It's a bit different this time for me. I have no idea what to expect, no classes or teachers and no gigantic institution of a university to keep me on track. Then again, I'm also college educated with a great portfolio and a lot of confidence. I really poured everything I had into this major and I'm very satisfied with what has come out the other end.

I daydream of my near future constantly. I'm finally going to be in the same place as my fiancé and starting off our lives as a unit. We've got all these adventures to pursue that have been building up for the past few of years of a long distance relationship. We can't wait to cook together, ride bikes, visit museums, decorate our apartment... ok, maybe that last one is more me than him. I'll have weekends finally and even the luxury of regular grocery shopping and laundry will be mine. Life is good.

So I'm off! Off on another mad-cap adventure. Thanks Syracuse, for giving me the tools to do what I've always been meant for. Thanks to my parents for being a constant support in every way. Thanks to my friends who have helped me along the way and thanks to myself (as weird as that might seem) for sticking with it and getting through. I'm ready to be done, but I'm thankful for all four years here for helping me be who I am today.

Keep up with me as Allie Jennings now and Allie Kilmer in a little more than a year.

Wish me luck!

- Allie

Winding everything up

Hello again everybody and happy almost summer! I know there are some major gaps in this blog, but time ceased to make sense in my life a couple weeks ago and is only starting to reinstate itself these last couple of days. I, my friend, have a portfolio. I still have a couple tweaks before it goes down to NYC later this week, but it's pretty much what's it's going to be, and I couldn't be happier.

Last Wednesday at our show for family and friends I was just so proud at what our entire grade has done. We really stuck it out through good, bad and worse to get through this major and it paid off as we always trusted it would. Every book on the tables was ready to show at an interview. We're all feeling good about graduating... it's just good all around.

Anyways, this week is all about making those last tweaks and getting everything triple checked and buttoned up for the real world. I've slept a bit more and ate a bit more and I feel like a person. So good!

One of the things I'm buttoning up is my website. It's not completely done yet, but you can still check it out. It'll be done by the end of the week. 

www.AllieDesign.tumblr.com

Maybe you'll recognize some of the projects from earlier posts!

Photography Prep

The weeks are winding down to graduation. I don't really like to think too exactly about the decreasing amount of time I have left complete my portfolio. Trust the process. That's what I'm doing, and, magically, things are coming together! I've got my self branding, my resume, business cards and take aways/leave behinds in the works. My portfolio book itself is in my closet with the transparency sheets. My portfolio case is being made and should be on its way soon. Now I just need to, you know, design the portfolio :)

I have a bunch of projects, I think 10 clients in total, to shine up and present in my portfolio. In a little more than a week, everything 3D will be ready to photograph by a professional photographer. The photographer I'm working with has been photographing CMD student work for over a decade, so he really knows what he's doing. I'm just so excited to see my work look like the work I've been marveling at for years in past seniors' portfolios. Now it's my turn.

Midterms

Midterms have hit this week. For seniors in Communications Design that usually means that we have three completed projects. For my class, though the professor has only had us do two whole projects, which makes my life easier for now, but harder in the end when I have to fit in an extra project when the other students are all set.

Since both my projects are mostly completed this week I'm just polishing them up, strengthening the weak spots and filling in any missing spots. My packaging for the Bigelow Tea redesign was well received last week so all I have to do is make a handful of changes for that and add a print ad and an environmental ad to the TV spot I devised last time around.

OMA Tibetan Dairy needed a bit more tweaking with the graphics and an entire point of purchase display that I hadn't had anything for before. No biggie.

Next week is spring break, and I'm really going to have to get down to business. My consultation with my photographer is coming up so I'm going to need some kind of feel for how many pictures I want, of what and what I want them to look like. To do this I have to have a very good idea of how my next few projects are going to pan out. Lots more polishing, tweaking, redesigning and constructing in store.

As always, wish me luck!

Pofoli-oli-oli-o!

So I've decided that shopping for the actual book part of the portfolio (like, the cover and binding and pages and such) is like shopping for a wedding dress. It's the pretty stuff that you want to worry about with none of the stress of the actual work involved.

My favorite these days? Check out this beauty.
It's durable, sleek, kinda classy, kinda quirky. Very me.

PLUS I talked to the lady at our local Commercial Art store and we've devised a way to bring the price way down. I'm talking, no shipping and handling, no unnecessary fancy add-ons plus a 20% student discount. I think that through buying through Commercial Art I may save close to a hundred dollars. I can get behind that.

The Portfolio Photographers

This week in portfolio our professors had two professional photographers come in and give presentations about their photographs and processes. Each one showed us pictures of past communications design projects that they've taken, explained different set-up, lighting and prop options, and counseled us on how to prepare for our own shoot. Kinda scary. It's coming up fast and I have a lot to do. Everything I need photographed must be perfected in only a little over a month. Hoo boy.

The thing is, those pictures look AMAZING. When you see how beautiful the projects look when professionally shot you realize, it HAS to be a professional. I could never take such gorgeous pictures on my own. I don't have the camera, the lights, the props and most importantly, the know-how. These guys have done this before, and they'll do it again for me.

Other than photography, tea is still on my mind. My Bigelow redesign project is proving to be a lot of fun. In my critique last week my professor told me to ditch most everything about the old packaging. He said that it was ugly (true) and that the awful design of it trumped any kind of brand equity that the product currently has. I'm taking him at his word on that one. I think there's something to the big titles and the bold solid colors. As a compromise I'm keeping the shape of the logo and the use of colors to classify the teas, or at least keeping the colors that are already delineated to the flavors.

The interesting thing about the Bigelow brand is that it is very American, which is kind of rare with tea. Even if the company is American, a lot of time tea tries to look either British or Asian. Bigelow is a family owned company, and they own the only American tea plantation. Therefore, I'm trying to incorporate a bit of "American" into the packaging. Nothing over the top. No stars and stripes (yet). But I am now researching what style or imagery subtly but solidly communicates the American-ness of a product. Old painted barns, quilts, denim, flannel plaid... we'll see what fits and what sticks.

Packaging! Oh my!

My Tibetan Yak Dairy project is wrapping up. I struggled for most of the project to get it to a point that I liked, and I think after this last week's critique I got it! Now I just have to wrap up the details for the packages and ads and work on a point of purchase display for this project.

For my next project my professor recommended that I attempt a redesign of an already existing project. He says that even though possible employers like seeing our crazy ideas in projects, they can relate much better and judge our skills more accurately when applied to an actual client. That makes a lot of sense to me. Therefore my next project will be spiffing up Bigelow teas. I'm very excited. I love tea, and I LOVE constant comment. I had no idea that that's the flavor that started the whole company. That's a great thing about this major. You never stop learning about such a  variety subjects.

Personal Branding

This week we've got a really exciting assignment for our portfolio prep class. We get to start creating our own personal identities! It's something we're all both excited and a little intimidated to do. It's like creating one's own horoscope. If done right, it accurately portrays to the world Me. Who am I? What does it mean to people when someone says my name? How can I put Me into a tiny little symbol on a page. What part of Me is most important to focus upon?

I'm currently just pumping out all the ideas I can think of. Just for fun this week I think I'll send the first drafts to my family and my fiance and see which ones they think are closest.

And the job search begins...

This week we started job searching in earnest. We've had only two portfolio prep classes, but we're already organizing and augmenting our portfolios, researching design firms and calling them up to scope out prospects. I've never job hunted like this before. I've done summer jobs, and I've done internships, but this is definitely more stressful. I get to find companies I want to work for in cities I want to live in, but then I have to put myself out there, call them up and maybe not get such a nice answer.

The nice thing about this is that we're doing this so early. This is the first week I've done this, and I'm a bit choppy, but I'm already learning some tricks, and I feel more confident every time I call someone up. Looks like there's a method to our professors' madness.

This week for my packaging design project I'm making preliminary designs in different graphic directions. This time around I'm packaging a line of Tibetan Yak Dairy products. If I do one design that is whimsical, I might want to focus on a more ethnic approach to another, and maybe another that is more upscale-foodie.

I'm slow-going this week, but I hope it packs up in time. I think it takes me a bit to get in the zone after I've been on vacation. Though I'll miss vacations when I get a real person job, I think it'll be nice in one way to be able to get into a steady groove in an office.

Last but not least, my only elective this semester is really starting to get fun. I'm taking an independent study with a professor I had last semester. He's letting me sit in on a web design class he teaches at Newhouse. It's exciting and interesting to see how web design is taught to this bunch of journalists and media-people. I'm used to being in creative classes with kids from the Art and Design program here. The Newhouse kids bring in whole different perspectives as to what to focus on in a design. This week we discussed successful navigation in a web site and are beginning our first forays into the world of HTML coding. We learned how to code different heading sizes, paragraph breaks and text alignment. Basic stuff, but we're taking baby steps. It's like learning a language. I can't wait to see where this goes!

The Beginning of the End

Hello everybody!

So I've been  a little lax on the whole blogging thing, but I'm back today to say I am alive, well, and super pumped for  my last semester here.

This semester is amazingly exciting (and labor intensive) for the seniors in Communications Design. We continue to produce six credits worth of new work while simultaneously collecting together and tweaking all of our old stuff. Hopefully a lot of the old stuff will be able to go into our final portfolio. Technically we should all have 18 credits (roughly 18 projects) worth of work to chose from by the end of this semester. Of course some of the projects from our past will not shine as bright as others so we do a little bit of augmenting and editing to get everything all set.

And then I'll have a portfolio! A real, live, communications design portfolio. I remember when I first entered this major (was it only?) three years ago and I could not fathom how I could ever produce such a lovely object as a CMD portfolio. Now that I'm here and I have revisited those past portfolios for my own reference, I know my work is up to it. Design I thought impossible not so long ago I can do, and do just as well (or in some cases even better)! It feels good, really good.

That's not to say I won't struggle at all this semester. Design will always have the ability to stump and befuddle. I've learned that from all the lectures and articles I've been ready. It's part of the fun and the challenge. Still, I have the basic tools now.

Just the other day I sat down with my new project (a line of Tibetan yak dairy products) and I knew exactly what needed to be done. My visual research is thorough, organized and very inspiring. Before last Thursday I knew nothing about Tibet and it's culture. Now I'm beginning to be familiar with customs, colors, patterns, words and foods. It's one of the many benefits of this profession. I get to learn quickly and in depth about any problem presented to me. I will always be able to be curious and inquisitive.

I guess designers are forever students in this way. I am VERY aware that my education has just begun even though I'm on the edge of graduating from Syracuse. That, to me, is a comforting thought.

More to come about my job search and self branding!

Wish me luck!