Overall, I had a really great experience working on this project. I got matched up with such a great mentor who was always there for me and always present when working with me.
In regards to challenges my only challenge was getting the amount of work done near the end. There was a lot of logo creation, mockups and creating presentations near the end so I worked really hard to get that all done. But I am really grateful for all the time I had to work on the ideation and research process.
I definitely prioritized this project since I wanted to take advantage of having an amazing mentor and of course because I wanted to impress her and her peers at Rethink. My mentor Grace suggested that I submit this project to as many awards as possible since it was so successful. This project was really fun for me and I learned so much not only about creating a campaign but also about how things work in the professional world.
I would give myself a 10/10 for this project. I put so much of my time and effort into making this project great and I think it was really successful.
My last meeting with my mentor was bitter-sweet. It feels great to be done this project but I’ll miss the fun I had working with Grace. Friday last week, I presented to Grace and some of her colleagues at Rethink. She invited another art director and a copywriter to get a good range of feedback. They were really happy with my presentation but had a lot of insightful feedback which I applied to my final presentation for the class. Most of the feedback was separating some slides to add more pizazz and make sure people watching my presentation as I present instead of reading ahead. This feedback is super helpful to keep in mind when working with clients in the future.
My self grade for this phase is 9.5/10. My mentor and her peers really liked my campaign and the idea behind it as well as the execution. I worked really hard and spent a lot of time on this project and making the presentation easy to understand. I was a bit nervous to present in front of people from rethink so my voice was a bit shaky. Overall I did the very best I could for the place I am at as a third year student. A lot of the feedback I got were things that you can only really know from working and presenting to clients.
Now it was time to start on the ideation phase. I created a document where I jotted down all of my ideas each week that Grace and I would discuss together focusing on our favorite ideas. In the end, we decided to go with a chrome extension that when activated shows consumers the hidden cost of what they are about to purchase. We also looked back at some of my other strong ideas to combine them with this one. We are planning on using some of my other ideas as a means to market the main concept. My plan for the end of this project is to have a solid presentation and quite a few polished deliverables. We have also been brainstorming names for the campaign during this time but we decided it’s ok to land on a name a little bit later on in the process.
During this phase, I learned a lot about having strong core ideas and how to build off those ideas. I also learned that it’s great to have plenty of ideas because then we can start to mix and match a bunch of them to have an awesome 360 campaign. I found it a bit challenging to not only come up with the ideas but do a quick little mock-up for each one but it ended up helping tremendously in the long run because now I’m really confident in the direction I’m going for the next phase.
I would give myself a 9.5/10 during this phase. I put a lot of effort into creating good ideas and my mentor seems to be really happy with them. She also seems really excited about my name ideation for the campaign. If I could improve this phase at all I would say I wish I could’ve come up with more concepts but I think I did the best I could considering the circumstances.
And so we begin with our mentorships! This is a project that I have been really looking forward to. I was lucky enough to be paired up with none other than Grace Cho from Rethink.
What I’ve learned
One of the most exciting things I learned with Grace is that it’s very possible to get hired in a junior position as an art director whereas prior I only thought it was possible to start as a designer and work ones way up to art direction. This was great news to me seeing how I would love to do art direction. And with that we had a great direction for our project! I would be working on an art direction project. I ended up landing on the idea of working on a social cause project because theres a lot of opportunity there. I found it a bit challenging at first to do things the Rethink way but I found that it works really well for me and it’s the way I would love to work on future projects.
For grading myself for this project I would give myself a 10/10 because I’m proud of how efficiently I have been able to work on this project and how organized me and my mentor have been. We have all of our meetings pre-scheduled already and a really good game plan.
Hey guys! Welcome back to the blog. I know you guys are probably so excited to see what logo I choice to represent myself! So here is the final reveal…
Katrina Lashmar final logo
Here are a couple of colour variations
I decided to go with this logo because it’s straight to the point being my nickname and I like for people to call me Kat. Also, Each letter’s font shows off a different side of my personality. The K being my more confident side, the A my fun and bubbly side, and T my more put together side. I’m really happy with how bold and fun it is and I think it looks great in the other colours. If I had more time I would keep messing around with touch ups and maybe a few variations for different applications but I’m overall pretty happy with it. If I had to give myself I grade I would say 9/10 it’s not perfect but it feels like me.
Concept 1 shows off the duality of my style. The sun and moon representing opposites reflects that I enjoy working on projects of all sorts. The overall feel of this logo really suits me. I love that I can take out the wordmark and have a really fun logo that represents my personality.
Concept #2: KAT lashmar
Concept 2 is a bit funky and bubbly and shows off my more playful side. I mixed different typefaces to show off my flexibility. I think this logo has potential for fun application.
Concept #3:
Concept 3 shows off the grungier side of my personality. This logo feels really energetic which reflects my personality in the workplace.
As I navigate through the process of self branding I start to realize that as much as it feels that I don’t know myself very well that’s just not the case. I do actually know myself very well. But it seems that my personal taste varies and wavers so much that it’s hard to tract. Through creating the mood boards it was much easier to visual my personal style is. The best word to sum up my style is duality. Apparently I love extremes and both ends of the poles fascinate me. I tried to show this throughout my mood boards by separating the images to respective sides. Quiet and loud, light and dark, busy and calm. I feel like this helps me as a designer because I can see the beauty in the most extreme of aesthetic and relate to it somehow.
How does working by hand differ from drawing utilizing the computer or from typing on the computer? Do you think you are using different parts of your brain? Why? Are these different ways of thinking/doing? Which media do you prefer and why?
It may seem ironic (since I am typing this essay on my computer) but my preferred method of working is by hand. This is for a few reasons. Working digitally just doesn’t breed the same creativity as good old paper and pencil for me. Also, it’s really easy to get distracted when working digitally with messages here and notifications there. I find it really hard to not get overwhelmed by all of the other looming projects and assignments when I’m working on a task. Whereas when I work traditionally I only have my paper and art supplies in front of me which makes it really easy to focus on the task at hand and get lost in the work.
Although I prefer working by hand I do like working digitally as well for certain styles. However whenever I do digital painting, I love to start my sketches and composition in my sketchbook. I then take a photo of my sketch and upload it into a digital painting program such as photoshop or procreate. It’s hard to get the same flowing lines that come from the wrist by drawing by hand when working digitally.
My preferred traditional mediums are acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink. When it comes to working digitally I enjoy procreate because it gives me almost the same feeling as working traditionally since it allows you to draw directly on your iPad with the apple pencil.
Overall, for art I definitely prefer working traditionally however for written work I prefer working digitally.
Truth and reconciliation is a large and delicate subject to tackle. As designer’s It’s our job to take a problem and solve it but in this case, the problem at hand is so large that one design project will not solve it. However, I realize my design project could act as one brick amongst thousands to help build truth and reconciliation in Canada.
The first step was clear: do more research and pinpoint a concise subject to work on. As Judy suggested, I checked the 94 calls to action in the 2015 ‘Truth & reconciliation report’. After doing so, I felt overwhelmed but It was clear to me what topic I wanted to focus on. Violence against women has always been a subject I really cared about so I decided to focus on MMIW. My goal was now established: Creating awareness to seek justice for missing and murdered indigenous women.
I brainstormed ways I could approach this. I could get aggressive and call out Canadians, the police or even the RCMP for not doing their part in protecting these women but fighting fire with fire is never an effective approach. The approach I wanted to take was to make people feel compassion and empathy for these women.
At this point I still felt like something was missing. I was doing lots of research but reading facts and statistics and news articles didn’t feel like enough. I was missing a human’s touch. I reached out to an indigenous woman named Laura. She has had a lot of first hand experience with racism and friends going missing. She stressed the importance of covering the topic of missing and murdered men as well. She explained to me that women are getting all of the coverage right now which is great but we need to help men as well. In fact, the statistics of men going missing are even higher than those for women. I was so grateful because this was information I was not able to find in doing my own research.
Interview notes 1Interview notes 2
My approach for the project was to do an art exhibit that travels around Canada. The exhibit would feature lights that create the shape of Canada. Every light would represent a missing indigenous person. The lights would change from all white to blue and red to represent men and women. To promote the exhibit posters would be made and displayed showing the individual story of people missing. I feel like this combination of media was the perfect way to physically show the sheer amount of people missing in a touching way but at the same time showing that each of those lights represents an individual with a unique story.
I feel that my concept was fairly strong for the exhibit and posters and filled the needs of my creative brief although I would like to play around more with the imagery and layout used for the posters.
Topic: Between 1980 and 2012, Indigenous women and girls represent 16% of female homicide in Canada while only making up around 4% of its population. The missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW) crisis is being called an epidemic. It is a modern day Canadian genocide.
Objective: British Columbians need to be made more aware of this crisis. The only time I’ve ever heard any discussion about MMIW is at school or discussing with peers in criminology. This is a problem because anyone who isn’t currently seeking a higher education or works in the field is most likely unaware of the genocide currently happening in our country. My objective is to create more awareness for the issue and hopefully make people more sympathetic to this problem. A lot of MMIW cases could have been prevented if more British Columbian’s were aware of the crisis in the first place.
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