Week 2B

Day of Design

12:10 Lara McCormick

The first speaker I listened to was Lara McCormick. She is an experienced designer who has an obsession with hand lettering. Lara's whole interests and research was about the idea of playing with type. She took the idea of balancing work and play and wrote a book called Play with Type. In her lifetime Lara has overlapped her work and play together to create her love affair for typography. In her lecture she talked about her role model Jessica Hische. Jessica is very well known designer for her lettering and illustrations. Lara McCormick also talked about how to get inspired. As young eager designers we should go to workshops, classes, and practice our typography skills because thats the only way we can improve ourselves. Young designers can also use the simple tools and techniques to practice their typography and lettering. One of the first things is to know your terminology because if you can't define the letters correctly then you won't know how to change them correctly. The next step is to find existing type, different types of papers, pens, pencils and writing tools.

I personally felt inspired after her lecture because I have always had an interest in hand lettering but never thought I was very good at it. Lara McCormick may not be the best of the best but she practices every chance she gets so she can improve herself and her designs. About 4 years ago, I also went to a calligraphy workshop in Philadelphia and I thought it was very interesting how they taught us how to use different tools, just like the way Lara explained she does when she is first starting out.


3:10 Tobias Treppman

Our second speaker was from Germany and luckily filled in for Patrick McNeil at the last minute. Tobias started drawing and sketching from inspiration at an early age. From books and resources he taught himself html and css. Without any true formal training he still managed to work for small graphic jobs and now works for a company called Spreadshirt. Spreadshirt company is a creative way to interactive and design your clothes online. Tobias is now focusing on how to make his company responsive because most people are now using their mobile devices rather than computers because its more effective. Although Tobias is struggling to create an accurate responsive page because the amount of control when designing a t-shirt on your mobile device is much harder because your limited to only a few options on the phone instead of on your computer.

I took a lot from this lecture because Tobias explained that you don't need to have a formal training to be successful you just have to be motivated to learn. If you constantly read, practice and learn your career path is endless. It's important to stay up to date with trends and current UX design process.


In Class

In class we went over which projects we were going to do. I was down to two options. Both of the websites were poorly designed and weren't responsive but they both contained a lot of content, that I could work off of. I could of picked the Cupcake Challenge but I thought I could pull more inspiration quotes and content from the Slam'n Salm'n Derby.

The Slam'n Salm'n Derby is a salmon fishing contest in Alaska and anyone can sign-up and join to help catch fish and donate their findings to the locate soup kitchen. Not only is this event creative and original it is also inspiring which will allow me to have more fun with this website.