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Spring Break has been refreshing honestly. I think we all needed this break from the massive project we all embarked on. ( The Portfolio Show Campaign. )

Rest is very important to the human body, people shouldn’t be doing the same thing every single day without a break. It would drive a person mad. But also this break is important as we approach the White Whale of this degree. The Portfolio Show, when we come back we are going wild with production. I personally am the Art Director of this show. I have to do a lot of things in order to get this show on the road.

Such as doing prints of the book, working with the photographers, etc. There’s a lot to do, and I know me and my classmates are up to this. We have an industry to impress, and I do not intend to disappoint them.

I’m so excited to be basically like an art director for the portfolio show. It’s kinda a dream for me. Or am I more like a creative director?

I don’t know but it’s exciting to have your ideas be expressed out by a group of people. You get to lead people with your creative direction. It’s all I have ever wanted honestly. I have never gotten this much attention before but it’s now my chance. It comes with a lot of work and responsibilities but I’m ready for it.

I have learned a lot over my two years here and I cannot wait to show off. Plus today I gotten to learn more about the laser and it made such clean cuts for my package design.

Also Spring Break is here and it’s a blessing because I haven’t gotten the chance to relax in a while, and I need it after dealing with an exam, the portfolio campaign, an essay, and multiple presentations.

Yesterday, I learned that I have officially won the Portfolio Campaign contest. My instructors had to check over my files to make sure they were good before I was officially made the winner. Honestly, it feels good to have your work vindicated for once. I haven’t had many chances to show off my work, and now’s my chance.

This also means I got to make a show-stopping table trifold for the campaign, as I am the first person people will see when they walk through those doors. I want to set a good example.

I did not realize how much stuff I had to do because I won. I have to work on the book printing portion now. Which I made harder on myself because I did not do the standard book fold; instead, it’s on the top, which is much harder than you think. Me and my instructor Tony worked on the book production side as we had to lay out pages. Dummy it up, remove/add pages, turn pages upside. It was a big brain fart as it was so much going on all at once. Although I learned many things from that day, specifically when making books. Make sure the amount of pages you have is a multiple of 4.

I’m going to be modest. But I won 1st Place for the Portfolio Campaign show. I was shocked, to be honest, there was some tough competition. Especially when the competition were my friends! But in the end I won. I am hoping that my files are correct, because I was so giddy and happy after winning that. Plus I’m excited to bring my parents to the show to show that I won the portfolio show, and that my design gets to represent the class of 2025. They can’t really brag much about me, compared to my sister who is going into the medical field. I finally have my time to get bragged about by my parents, plus I have the magazine as well! Which is a physical thing they can show off.

Moving from that, I am glad I won. Because it means people really liked my designs. Which boosts my confidence to continue designing. It’s the recognition that’s so good. I saw some good designs among us, and I bet competition was fierce as there was a tie for 3rd place between two people. I like my design, it’s different from others. I thought outside the box with my design, I picked the envelope design for the poster because I wanted my poster to stand out on walls. Think about it. When you see my poster on the wall, you notice huh. Why is there an envelope on the wall? It stops people from looking, cause that’s what your poster has to do. It needs to make people stop for a moment and look. You cannot blend in with the other posters, you have to stand out.

Today we went on a field trip, but before that happened. We had our lab production class, where I learned to use the cutter to trim off the excess off of my magazine! It looks so clean and professional now! All of my hard work was worth it.

I also was helping my friends, by teaching them how to bind their magazines. Firstly by scoring the middle of their magazines, then taught them how to staple and eventually how to cut as well. Honestly that was fun, did not get time to cut my portfolio stuff. Because somebody was hogging all three of the paper cutters.

After that we left for JDS, and the tour began. What stuck out to me the most was the process of sublimation. This process was super interesting to me because I have never heard of it before. Basically it is “transfer artwork to an object in a gas state, using a high-temperature heat press.” Which sounds super neat. I kinda wish our school had a bigger expansion into printing production. Cause a lot of the stuff there was so cool.

Today was a rather fun day not going to lie, we have always worked on my macbooks and never actually get to see our designs physically. Like physically make them. Today we printed out our magazines, scored them, stapled them and I almost got the chance to use the cutter to trim off the extra bits. 

But it was rather satisfying to see what I made over these past few months come to life, I have put so much effort into this thing. It’s like my baby. Everything has been building up to this. I’m glad I learned a lot in Tony’s class as it allowed me to create many amazing things this semester. Many lessons from the past have been useful, such as bleeds, crop marks, and margins. Seeing it printed out really shows the importances of these things

Also the printer was less scary than what it was made out to be. 

We are approaching the deadline of the Portfolio Show’s Materials. It was supposed to be on March 5th, but our instructor moved it a week before due to him needing to take his wife to surgery. Now it’s February 26th.

This has kinda made me panic and stress out a bit, because I was worried I wasn’t going to get everything finished. But I realized after designing the poster, a lot of it is just the poster but resized and reworked which made making the other items much easier. The only two things I’m worried about is the website layout but also the portfolio book design. I’m trying my best to get everything but the book done first. So I can have enough time to design the book, which I have an amazing idea for already.

Overall it’s kinda a taste of the graphic design industry, a lot of deadlines, but also it’s a good overview of life. You may try to plan everything out, but sometimes plans don’t work and you have to adapt.

So, we finally completed the trapping exercise and I kinda understand it now, like 90% of the way. It’s like adding a bit of overlap to ensure there’s no white space when registration is uneven. The exercise was helpful, though the last 4 were much easier than the beginning few.

Another thing we did this week was installing an application that basically gave us a private server to work on our websites. Which I am excited for, cause I get to design a functional website for myself and my brand. Designing for myself is something I’m looking forward for.

So, today we started attempting to print out our magazine test pages to see how they would look. Obviously just a few spreads and in black & white to save money.

But technical difficulties happened today as the printer could not print out everyone’s stuff. Also Tony was not here to help, and Rick does not know much about the printers. So we’ll have to wait till then.

This did get me into working with Master Pages and Folio. I’m gonna be honest, I was rushing to add those in when we were submitting our magazines last semester. Which did not allow me to fully understand them. But finally getting time to process allowed me to properly add the folio and edit them. Command + Shift + Click allows you to edit them on the non-master pages. Something Tony taught us, that I couldn’t use the first time, but now I can.

So this week Tony introduced the concept of Trapping. When he said that I was confused as did a bunch of my friends did as well. I didn’t understand it as it was a bit of a struggle through the first few exercises. But according to google it means “the process of slightly overlapping colors to prevent gaps between them.” Which explained it to me, because we kinda just dove right into it without an explantation about what it exactly is.

Googling it helped, cause it showed many examples of the process of trapping and such. But it was an interesting process to learn honestly, difficult but interesting.