This program elucidated the importance of mentors to gain inspiration for projects. When I learned our choices for the thesis included a music tour, I immediately envisioned Grace Jones and Akhenaton as the underlying inspirations for the persona. I have already applied many of these goal-setting, and ideation strategies to work on my projects successfully. 

There are several ways to animate text. In other platforms such as Sony, Magix, and Cinema 4D, it’s hit or miss whether or not the client uses those design suites or file types. Learning text animation with Adobe is of great value since Adobe has a monopoly on industry and freelance mid to mainstream cross-platform media propagation. 

Critical design research revealed that logic matrixes have inherited racial, religious, and gender bias and that research for non-euro normative, non-white male, non-Christian brands required extra steps and alternate means of acquiring data. This is very important because the thesis and my personal projects center on diversity and tenets of shared globalized culture.

Brand strategies were fascinating. This Ikea commercial for furniture puts a couple up front and center, with an equality banner, with just the hint of the price for a cabinet that is obscured and running off the picture because selling an inanimate feeling of diversity and equality for Ikea is more critical for sales obviously than just showing, basic furniture pieces. This was a strategy I explored voraciously with the Mandy Madison thesis, designing a feeling albeit an immersive culture as if in fact, that was the product. 

.

I was familiar with the advent of digital publishing but wasn’t sure what it was. Halfway through the Harvest design project, I realized I was creating something for publishing. It was quite satisfying to produce and then actually publish my Harvest Guide on YUMPU.

The copywriting and technical critiques for all the writing at Full Sail have evolved my understanding of professional writing. Which I was never tasked with in other art programs or colleges. I savored the challenge of revisiting writing mechanics and gaining familiarity with the new tools available to writers, especially Grammarly. This improved my overall writing skills, especially grammar, syntax, and neology. Constantly writing against real-time spellcheck and grammar robots was also an excellent exercise to strengthen my writing.

Font Pairing was important because I have always been drawn to unconventional fonts. Learning there was a method for how to feature several different fonts in a design piece was illuminating and now feels intuitive.

Relearning how to plan compositions was challenging and fun. The idea of planning creative compositions has been firmly reintroduced and codified in my workflow process, due to the satisfaction of how much more effective and focused planned compositions are.  

Editing with auxiliary Adobe software platforms is something that has been on my to-do list, especially Adobe Illustrator but it was unclear to me what advantages they offered over Photoshop, which felt like an all-inclusive image editing program. Producing in these programs demonstrated clearly why they were separate programs and the power of knowing multiple programs in the Adobe suite that allowed the designer to have more control over specific aspects of design creation.

This was by far the most exciting and challenging thing I have done in years. I thought I had a good grasp on how this was done but I had no idea there were so many different aspects. Now when I walk through merchandise outlets, I notice how so many of the strategies, and competencies I learned in this program look in the real world. Which reinforced what the program teaches.