vizcom2. v2. kidwell class. reflect.

I honestly had no idea what exactly was going to be covered in this class, as based off of the name it was a continuation in my mind off Visual Communication1(VisCom1), except there was a different professor. I was honestly waiting the first day to receive a subject that I would have the whole term, same as VisCom1; we never did. We dived into terms day one and I believe that is the day that we took a class photo.

the day that we all decided to wear dark colors. ;)

It's been an interesting semester, full of many frustrations and break downs on my side due to this class. Our first poster had become my favorite project...the first project at KCAI that I didn't hate; I was progressing. I didn't fully know how, but assumed either I was growing, it was Kidwell's doing, or something else. I went back at the end of the semester with a better head on my shoulders and reworked on the train poster. I am still proud of the poster; I know work still can be done, but I am on the road to effective communication. I really strove to make myself work and grow, so I had pushed myself to use no images or heavy colors, only text. It was an extremely difficult task, but I needed to know how far I could push myself and still succeed. I ended up successfully portraying both emotional and informational perspectives in my California Zephyr AMTRAK train poster.

The second project forced me to work with a partner; I chose someone who I was attempting to design like, Wendy is awesome. I thought with her design abilities and my words/concepts we could take over the design world! We didn't do that yet, but one day we will. It was a bit of a difficult partnership as we both had our own ways of completing projects, but we ended up with a fairly successful How-To that I think incorporated both of our styles. 

The last project as basically rebranding, even though it wasn't really rebranding. This project was one of the most difficult for me during the semester because we needed to narrow on one pop culture reference and change how it is seen, make it a better icon of culture. I put a lot of research into this project, as well as past knowledge as a fan of David Bowie. The most exciting and interesting part of the project for me was using our 8 visual elements to create a t-shirt design, calling card, CD + case and a website. 

Throughout this course I learned more about the ways to work in a partnership, combining not only both schedules, personalities, and automatic design responses. What I mean is how we, as designers naturally respond to a given design problem/prompt. I also learned more about making smaller, subtle changes in typography, color, and lines to add emphasis, following along the lines of "less is more." I have definitely changed as a designer, and become more calmed with my design skills. I still need to figure out how to push myself further than I am comfortable going; that is one of my major setbacks as a designer.