Crunch Time (almost)

The semester is coming to a close, and while I wouldn’t use the word panic, I am beginning to feel the pressures of approaching deadlines for multiple courses. Unfortunately I have a feeling that certain amount of damage control will be the order of the day when crunch time truly sets in. I discussed this at length with my parents over Easter and they agreed that prioritizing my classes is much more important than giving equal attention to them all. Sorry History of Baseball, I will always think fondly of you in the years to come. I have to say though, that I don’t enjoy doing this. My grades are a source of personal pride for me. While A’s and B’s may not be the most accurate way of gauging someone’s understanding of the material, for me they represent my ability to adapt and perform under less than desirable conditions (sick, time management between school work and girl friends, money problems, diet, lack of sleep…life as I like to call it). While grades may not be an important factor in this field of work, I still want to make the dean’s list one last time. 6 for 8 would be good record, especially in baseball terms.
On to this weeks readings. What concerned me the most from Sara Eisenman’s Building Design Portfolios, were the resume examples she provided. They seemed scarce in terms of content, but were referred to as strong pieces. I can only assume that the information given must have been the Holy Grail and lost temple of design assignments. Thus giving the designers lots of room with which to be creative in their page-layout. In comparison my resume has a lot of content, but nothing remarkably impressive. I suppose that this is a disadvantage most graduate designers face seeing as how they have do not have much out of school experience to present. Still, I’m leaning towards putting my resume on a diet of sorts and removing a lot of the content and compressing the information. For example I could probably just put Adobe Creative Suite in place of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc., leaving more space for creative layout. Even though I do not have much to present in my resume, I could still make my resume something of a presentation (hi there! I barely know how to file my own taxes and still live off of a steady diet PB&J’s but doesn’t this look nice?).
The self-promotion section was another interesting method of getting your name out there. I’m not quite sure how I would go about doing this just yet, but the number of cost-effective examples presented by Sara is encouraging. I like the idea of a mini-pamphlet, perhaps something akin to the workflow guide in Adobe’s CS3 program box. Obviously not as in-depth as Adobe’s, but following the same idea of a 5.25”x7.5” layout. Making everything fit, while retaining legibility will be an issue. Strangely enough being gifted with very good eyesight is something of a curse for me when it comes to design as I can read small text clearly when other’s cannot. As a result I often have to go back and redesign everything, and unfortunately it’s never as easy as scaling down the images and magnifying the type. Perhaps one day laser eye surgery will become more common place and I won’t have to re-do my works as often.