The last day of this semester...

Well, here I am, 3:50am. I went to bed at 11pm last night and got up at 2:30. I am working on final projects for my portfolio class. Prior to beginning the graphic design program, I had never been this stressed out and this productive at the same time. I've never done good in school before I started graphic design. I've never learned more about any other subject.

I've learned so much over the past couple of years. Its always at the end of the semesters or near the end of a deadline that I have to start catching up at a rather quick pace as a result of my semester long procrastination. I always get trapped at home, working through the night, several nights in a row. The clock keeps running all through the night and the days just run together. Its not good to work like this. Sometimes it is just an inevitable part of deadlines but in my case, I think a lot of the time its mostly preventable if I choose and work hard to keep up through the semester. I feel unhealthy--body and mind, when I have weekends where I am forced to work continuously and work through nights and separate myself from my surroundings as well as the rest of the world. It cramps my whole routine and being so Type A as I am, it messes up my whole week. This was always the case with the Newspaper at school. I'd spend all weekend working continuously on a layout and it would screw up my schedule for the rest of the week then I'd have one week where it was normal and I had to focus intensely on my classes and get back on an okay sleep schedule but then the following week I would get messed up again. Another element to this dysfuntional schedule is that I tend to accept and take on more than I can handle...on a daily basis...in my education, and in my professional and personal life. This increases daily stress but in my defense, I like to be busy. I seek it out and crave the chaos. I actually enjoy working. I am a hard worker and when I am doing work that comes naturally for me...such as graphic design, its almost a recipe for a fine line between high quality efficient productivity and an overstressed disaster. I tend to teeter and walk this fine line regularly. I would say most of the time the teetering is beneficial for me because I learn a lot when I am more involved but there are times when I get too far behind and its no longer beneficial or healthy. I need to keep myself in check more. While continuing to challange myself, I need to work harder at finding a better balance between my school, professional, and personal lives.

Still, I feel resilient. I feel happy to know I can hold my own and pump out a design I know is quality work under a tight deadline. I take pride in all my work. I usually put my everything into every design or layout. I pay attention to every detail and am a perfectionist...these both are probably to additional major contributors to my seemingly endless weekends, probably more than I would normally admit.

Anyway, even today at 4am, in the middle of the stressfull end of another semester, I still feel healthier doing and learning about graphic design than I have in my whole life. Its my thing. It feels good...great, to be knowledgeable about a particular field. It feels good to be hopeful about a future with it. It feels good to be doing what makes me happy.

I was meant to do this.

Technology Poster

This project was done in my GR 160 class, Digital Imaging. The MCC Office of Information Technology's department head, Mike Alstrom was really impressed by one of our previous class projects and noticed that the IT office's walls were looking pretty bare. He admired our creativity and spoke with our instructor about the possibility of us designing some posters for his department. The major topic we were given was (obviously) technology, but from there, we were allowed to interpret it as we wanted and come up with any concept we felt related to the subject of technology. As a prize for the best poster, a winner was to be chosen and awarded with an Ipod Touch. Pretty sweet.

I went to the local computer repair shop, Crashmasters Computer Repair, on Apple Ave. in Muskegon. I spoke with one of the workers and he allowed me to photograph some computers and various computer parts. I took 150 shots total. Not all of them turned out but with the best and most usable ones, I edited them in Adobe Photoshop CS4. I worked with the levels, curves, contrast, hues, saturation, clarity, and used a few other tricks which I'll keep secret for now. The poster size was 11 X 17" and in addition to optimizing, I also completely created this poster in Photoshop (a first for me...usually for poster design, I use Adobe Illustrator or sometimes Adobe InDesign).

I love working with computers. But, when it comes to any knowledge beyond using them for my job, I know little to absolutely nothing. This includes basic anatomy of a computer; I couldn't tell you for the life of me what the disassembled parts of computers that I photographed are. Its actually kind of embarassing how little I know about computers. I should probably know at least what the major components are but even after 3-4 various Intro to Computer classes, I still cannot carry on for more than a minutes worth of an intelligent conversation about computers.

This lack of knowledge leads to the concept development of my poster. I wanted to somehow express the parallel of computer knowledge I have and deal with everyday with what I am assuming the IT department deals with everyday. Sort of an oxymoron of computer knowledge? Kind of like my knowledge of how to use a computer at an advanced level on an everyday basis clashes with the IT department's knowledge of how to make a computer function at an advanced level for me to use. I wanted to show the complexity of computers (even some of the simplest components) and pair that imagery  with a quote about the irony of man vs. computers

I read through several quotation sites on the internet to help portray this concept and found a sort of timeless quote by B.F. Skinner from 1969. Im not saying by any means that 1969 was too terribly long ago, but compared to how far our technology has come since then, I think this quote is perfect.

Needless to say, I didn't win the Ipod Touch :( but, my poster was one of two honorable mentions.

Man's Best Friend

These pieces were designed as part of a poster/ad package. The original sizes are 18 x 24 for the poster and 8.5 x 11 for the Ad. The objective was to design along the topic of Man's Best Friend using original photography I took. I shot a series of 150 images, differentiating between emotive and informative, and changing my aperture, shutter speed, and ISO accordingly. After choosing my best shots, I optimized each image in Photoshop, adding point curves, adjusting levels, color correcting/converting to grayscale.


The subject I chose was Petsmart's National Adoption Weekend because it is an upcoming promotion of 2011 and because I support the adoption of pets. I think its a great way for homeless animals to find good, loving homes who would otherwise be euthanized or left to fend for themselves.


The animals I chose to photograph are my own pets, who were placed in newspaper ads which caught my eye. I followed up on the ads and fell in love instantly, adopting them that day. They are very well behaved and loving dogs. They are dedicated and faithful and make me a happy owner everyday. I would recommend adopting a pet (or at least looking further into adoption) to anyone seriously considering it.

Master's Art Poster

This was a project I did in 2009 in Drawing for Graphic Design. This was my first project using Illustrator (or any program from Adobe Creative Suite, for that matter). The finished size was 11x17.

We had to research our favorite Art Master and recreate a design of our choice. I chose Erte. He was a famous designer of the 1920's era. Most of his work was centered around fashion design, during the Art Deco Era. 

No live tracing was allowed. Ha! I didn't even know what live tracing was when I first started out as a baby graphic designer :) Anyway, I also didn't know how to use most of the other tools in Illustrator either and for this reason, I had drawn each individual line using the pencil tool. I look back and think about the tools and techniques I used in creating this design and I realize I have come a LONG way since then. It really is amazing. These days I never use the pencil tool, I just don't have any use for it anymore. I have since found much more useful tools in illustrator and more efficient ways of reproducing a piece like this, from start to finish.

So, the first half of this project was to do research on our favorite Art Master and write up a one pg. paper about the artist. Then we recreated a design of our choice. The last part was to incorporate our finished design into a poster to be displayed in a museum where our Art Master's work is or would be typically displayed. I chose the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.






Top - My design
Bottom - Copy of Erte's original design

Exciting new blog for exciting new changes!

So, today was the first day back from spring break at MCC. I had mostly mixed feelings about it: a little depressed because Spring Break was my first real break since summer and it was over; excited because now that it is over, I am one more week closer to my Associates degree. Winter break was nice but I didn't get much of break, it was more stressful than relaxing. As for Spring Break, it started out with me having a gallbladder surgery so I was literally forced to relax and do nothing but lay in bed and recover for a few days. It was relaxing and amazing, to put it lightly.

I judge most of my days being good/bad days on how productive they are towards my current goals, long-term and short term. My most important short-term goals include finishing up my classes so I get my associates degree from MCC, looking for a summer job or second internship, and doing whatever else needs to be done in order to transfer to an art school with a bachelor's in graphic design program. On good days, I get a lot of emails, phone calls and internet research done. On a bad day, almost anything can and has gotten in the way of me being productive. As of the past two years, I can say there have been many good days, even great, fantastic days. As with life always, there were also a fair amount of bad days but not enough to stop me from making [huge] progress on this entire process of this step in my life.

In the past two weeks I have recieved letters of acceptance from Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI and from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA!


I cannot describe how excited I am to KNOW that I have a future waiting for me that will begin only a few short months from now. It is something I have not really had almost ever before. The closest time I've had exciting news like this was two years ago when I lost my job and got into the No Worker Left Behind program and they paid for me to get my associates in graphic design at MCC. But this is bigger than that because I will be more independent for this journey and it marks the passing of one milestone and the beginning of a new one (and probably many more that I don't even know about yet.)

Anyway, as I walked into GRD 200 today (my Portfolio Prep class at MCC), my instructor, Nancy said we would be creating professional blogs today. I was a little skeptical at first because I sometimes have trouble updating even my facebook account but now that I am started, I am really happy about it and have great expectations for this! The background I chose looks like a scan of a watercolor painting. For those of you who know the pre-graphic design version of Abby, that is why I chose this background...because I LOVE fine art. I love painting, I always will. I love watercolors and I love acrylics. Painting is one of the greatest escapes I know of. One thing about it though is that I rarely have time for it and when I do, even then does it rarely happen. I miss it. But, hopefully every time I make a new blog post I will think of it and it will motivate me to make time to paint.

I am planning on keeping up regularly with this blog because I think if nothing else, it will help me track my journey as a new and emerging graphic designer. Keep an eye out on here for newly finished projects of mine!

Thanks for reading!