Graphic designers such as you, are busy people. do you have any tips on stress? - julieebui
Work hard but not too hard. Take time off, go on holiday. Don't take your work home, try not to talk about it all the time, develop your hobbies and enjoy your free time.
What do you feel are the most important skills for a designer to have/develop? - julieebui
There are lots of important things you need to develop as a designer.
Know your software, and fill the gaps in your knowledge when you need to. As a designer you need to have a good grasp of the obvious softwares, and you should try and keep up to date. Lots of time spent working in Creative Suite on different projects should be good practice.
Print production and film are the two trickiest areas in my opinion. Preparing a document for print is meticulous and every printers specifications are different. Preparing a video can also have lots of problems with size, format compression etc... In order to help you it might be good to try to collate all the specifications for all the different outcomes and try saving your files and work to make sure you understand the various exports.
You should also focus on explaining and communicating your creative ideas. This will be really important when you start working with clients and you need to discuss projects. Having crits at school and with your peers will prepare you.
There are so many things that are important as a designer, professionally, understanding fees and finance, promoting yourself, I could go on for ages, but those would be my first three most important.
When your work first started to receive an influx of a lot more attention and requests for work, how did you cope with the change in pace and pressure? Did you feel much doubt or panic, or was it an easy progression you'd been waiting for? - Kairos27
Great question Kairos27. I really struggled at first, it was exciting and also quite scary. I was worried that people started to get annoyed hearing my name or seeing my work, and I know over-saturation is the negative side to lots of publicity. No one wants to be old news. After Topshop and Cadbury's I actually left London for a few months and went to NYC to escape the pressure, not from people around me, but that I was putting on myself. I knew that I couldn't keep out doing my self so it was worth taking a step back from it all and having a little break. It was perfect. When I came back to London I started my studio and haven't looked back.
Every so often when it gets too much I just take that much needed time out, and forget about what I think I should be doing, and just enjoy some freedom.
Now I just make sure that I am constantly turning out work in lots of different fields so I can keep the momentum going and keep everyone on their toes. Its great fun to make a music video one week, design a watch the next, then paint a mural, or design an album cover. That freedom and ability to switch between fields is my favorite thing about my job.
When you are drawing, for the fun of it, do you plan out what your going to draw or do you just make stuff up as you go along?
I never really plan it, just sit down in front of a blank page and go for it. I have never really been precious about my drawings, I just think of them as sketches and scraps of paper. That way they don't intimidate me, and I can't mess them up. I make mistakes all the time, but just try and work them back into the picture somehow. That's a great skill to learn as an illustrator, how to hide your mistakes, and make them into happy accidents. I sometimes work in pencil, but I use a light box to trace the pen version so I am starting on a clean sheet rather than drawing on the paper version. Just in case I need to start again, I still have my original sketch to trace from.
