Less than a year ago I was a student, disappointed of the University I chose. I was still hoping to learn as much as possible in the web design field. I found them by chance, sent them my resume, and they contacted me the very same evening - I was surprised by the promptitude in the quick response. The first person that I met was Andreea, who made a good first impression. The next day I visited them on a very quiet and peaceful street.
We all know that people are born with imagination. A very important thing to keep in mind when talking about design. Just like a painter who needs to be trained both artistically and technically, to be able to represent on canvas the image created in his mind, a designer has to follow up on an idea. As far as printing is concerned, the idea can outrun the limits of the digital display, having at hand a series of additional techniques. Each printing material has some characteristics which, if taken into consideration from the very beginning, can help a designer accomplish higher quality work. For example, if I am to deliver a message on a piece of wood, it would be absurd to print on it a text with a Photoshop emboss effect, when this technique is available by the means of a “printer” that carves the wood, giving me a solution that is closer to what I had in mind.
Flash Programming - an abstract notion for some of us, even for those who work in this field. Whenever I have to explain what it means, I always choose to compare myself with a puppeteer. The puppeteer makes use of ropes to give life to his puppet and, by analogy, I give life to a design using Flash programming. Continue reading
Time is one of the most common resources for everybody. As any other resource, it is limited and in most cases poorly managed. In any person’s activity, time stands for a variable in the equation. Most of us loose around three hours a day, without realizing how those hours were spent. This “loss” is not intended or conscious. If it were like that, it would be easy to correct it. The time loses are due, in most cases, to unhealthy habits. For example, it’s almost a rule that easy tasks are solved first and more difficult tasks are left for the end of the day. Or you start working on something, you are interrupted, forget what it was all about and start with something else, this way risking not to finish anything in due time.
Schools, universities, books and magazines, classes, tutorials, trainings, they all teach us techniques on how to make the computer work for us, helping us grow from beginners into experts. They help us express our vision, however they don’t teach us the most important lesson: the experience we gain from working on real projects for real clients. These real projects have tasks that need to be completed and limitations to be considered, deadlines to be respected. These are all projects that have an ending, serving defined purposes, for which we get paid afterwards. Having worked on a lot of projects, I can say that all these projects will give you the experience that you need to go on, evolve, and maybe get hired at a better workplace/company/agency.
As a young designer, you can gain experience in many ways and from many directions.
With a bit of delay, here is the second part of the article…
2005
I think this year is the most important one so far in the entire X3 history (short history, to be honest). The beginning of the year was marked by some new arrivals in the design team, Sorin being one of them. And slowly but surely something happened that I hoped would avoid us as a team: cliques - I believe it’s the right term to be used here. We had enough work to keep us going without much pressure, but it wasn’t enough to keep everybody occupied at all times - one of the reasons some discussions emerged, I think.
For almost 2 months now I keep trying to write this article. It’s a lot harder than it seems, trust me. From the very beginning I knew I wanted to talked about X3 and the history of this company - which means the last 6 years of my life (being a true workaholic, there wasn’t much else happening during these years).
I tried to be objective and analyze the company based on easy to follow and measure economic criteria. But that didn’t work - not because I couldn’t read some reports, but because that doesn’t say anything about who we really are, who we were or who we want to become. So, I’ll just be honest and down-right subjective, if I may ;).
