Bridgette Goes to College

                 You know how I said the last project almost kicked my butt?               Consider it kicked.               I have been defeated by a foe greater than any the world has ever seen.               Who or what is that foe?               It’s me.               My own ambition and ideas are stronger than my fragile human body and the short time I have to spend on this Earth. I have seen the dark end that lies in wait for all of us and felt the crushing burden of a great potential that will never be fulfilled. I have been slain by a despair so great humanity will sing of it for an age.  ...

              Animating kinetic typography is a beast.               I say this to be punny, and also because it almost kicked my butt.               I was having fun, and I got over ambitious as I tend to do, and I ran out of time and had shorten the project I was working on. It still works. I still met the requirements, but I ended up with 42 seconds instead of the near minute and a half I had anticipated. I could have gone a bit longer, but I think I’d be working on the next 40 seconds for another week and that is Against The Rules. The question that might be asked is why specifically 42 seconds, and why was the only other alternative to go overboard and have double the required time?               The answer is I chose a very specific song with very s...

               This month I’m learning about post production with the use of After Effects! I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it, but I have so far, and I wanted to share a couple of projects I’ve worked on this week. One of them is purely for amusement, and the other I think I might actually be a little proud of. This is the first project, which I’ve simply been calling Sad Window Rain. One of the options for a beginner project was to add rain to a video, and my genius decided that meant filming the dolls that live in my dollhouse looking sadly out the window. It’s Poetic And Sad because the dolls living in the dollhouse represent me and my best friend, who moved across the country this summer. It’s Also A Joke because the music I chose to put in the video is from that iconic Australian mermaid show H2O: Just Add Water, that plays whenever any of the characters has a break up and they look sadly out the window while it rains for a full th...

  Stormchaser is the second book in a series called The Edge Chronicles. I may or may not have been obsessed with this series as a kid. Ok, I absolutely was obsessed. It was weird, imaginative, fun, and no one else I knew was reading them so my Inner Hipster Demon felt really Cool and Special. I did a book cover analysis of The Two Towers a while back and I wanted to try another one. I only have a copy of the first cover I’m going to show you (It’s a first American edition, printed in 2004, so it’s not the first cover ever), but I remembered having Thoughts about this second cover when it was released. I’m going to take another look and give a Designer’s Opinion on it and on another, newer version of the cover. Here is the first cover of Stormchaser: Iconic. Maybe that’s the nostalgia talking, but I really do love this cover. The fake distressing on the edges, the swirly cloud background that looks like old, stained paper, the fluttery scroll of the title. The hard cover is tex...

I’m doing something different this week. This isn’t your regular “what I’ve learned this week about Graphic Design” post. It’s more like… “ what I’ve been learning about myself over the last two years.” I’ve been meaning to talk about Imposter Syndrome.  It was brought up in our very first week of class this month and I’ve been sitting on this blog post ever since. Hoo, boy. I’m familiar with it, but probably not in the way that you think. Imposter Syndrome, to put it simply is when you feel you aren’t as good at something as people say or seem to think you are and one day they’re going to find out you’re a big liar who’s been tricking them all this time and you’re actually a bog mummy in disguise. Lots of people feel this way. I feel this way. But not about my design skills, or my intelligence, or my ability to perform a task. I keep proving to myself that I’m capable enough. I’ve had straight A’s the entire time I’ve been in college. I got an A in algebra for math’s sake, and I...

              I’m supposed to write a cover letter for a job listing of my choice as a homework exercise. I haven’t quite worked up to it yet, because first I have to pick the job I’m fake applying to, and then I have to…you know…write it. It shouldn’t be an impossible task because I believe I have a certain amount of skill when it comes to writing, but it will take twice as much energy and brain power as this blog post here because it’s supposed to be purposeful and good and professional , or whatever.               Not that this blog isn’t supposed to be those things, but this is supposed to be “heyo here’s my personality. Let me tell you a fun thing” and not “Hello, yes, I am uniquely qualified for this position because of xyz reasons – but interesting.”               I can make excuses left and right about how I i...

One of the things that is so interesting about Graphic Design is that it is everywhere, and it is so everywhere that most people don’t even think about how everywhere it is. Not only that, but there are so many different specific kinds of Graphic Designers that most people who are hiring Graphic Designers (which is more people than you think) don’t even call them Graphic Designers. A designer who is animating graphics for a video game does not do the same kind of work as a designer who formats books for print. So, that makes sense. Why call both jobs Graphic Design jobs when the work is completely different? They might be called a Graphic Blandisher and a Layout Artist. Ok, Graphic Blandisher is a joke from Peanuts cartoons, because apparently Charles M. Schulz hated animation or something and all the animation on stuff like A Charlie Brown Christmas is called Graphic Blandishment in the credits.  Photo credit https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/Peanuts_Wiki  So, the j...