Author Archives: ayanaairakanmance

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Noted: The Details That Matter

by Kevin Potts “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, the graphic arts industry was populated by full-time illustrators, production assistants and compositors. With only composing sticks for laying out type, straight edges for defining grids, a human proofer to catch spelling mistakes and an arsenal of X-acto blades for making edits, these…More

Will Design Students Find Work After Completion of Studies?

GD Studio 1 students are doing great work. They’re really a good bunch. I’m starting to wonder, given the current state of the economy, what future in graphic design do they have. Most certainly, students must be great designers, demonstrating fully, their understanding of the design fundamentals and their application. They also must be well…More

“Value” Is Once Again Driving Design

In recent blog posts and articles designers and business people have been writing about garnering, what I call, “value” in what we create. This word value has finally come to the forefront again of many discussions, both within design, business, and design education communities. All this buzz around once again putting value in what designers…More

What Do Designers Think About The Concept of Personal Branding?

While at WordPress’s WordCampSF, I heard a really great talk by Dave Gray of Xplane | The visual thinking company. In that talk, he mentioned David Armano of Logic + Emotion. Last year David Armano did a presentation on the concept of personal branding at the Chicago Convergence Conference where he stated “The hallmark of…More

How Valuable Are Old-School/Traditional Design Skills Today?

Inspired by LinkedIn’s Communication Arts Group’s discussion forum post:”When you learned to work on a computer, did you take classes or teach yourself?”, I want to pose the question: How valuable are traditonal design skills like thumbnailing (preliminary sketches and verbalization), and marker and paper comping? Are they still being used today? Are they being…More

WordPress WordCamp SF

“WordCamp San Francisco is a conference organized by the creators of WordPress for our users and developers. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. The event is open to WordPress.com & WordPress.org users alike.” http://2009.sf.wordcamp.org/More