Christopher Allan Barnes - Cry Wolf

10 – Tradition Shmadition

2008-04-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

I can’t say that my portfolio is terribly untraditional. It’s rather traditional actually, web-page, content, type, links to resume, etc. Rather normal and expected from a college student. Which is good, in a sense, because if you stray too far from the norm you risk going over the edge into the deep sea of unhappy folk who will steal your lunch money.

If I were to do one though, I’d imagine mine being like a tome. One of those secret books of an underground civilization where it can lead to great riches or deep curses depending on the heart of who reads one. Have it look all mythic and ancient and somesuch. I dunno, I’ve always found those books to look so neat, although kinda creepy. Like it’ll reach out and bite your face off if you wrinkle it’s pages. Regardless, that’s for the future, y’know, when half of my stuff isn’t web pages and would look half decent in the aforementioned dusty old tome of face-biting.

While writing this and looking over the final chapter of Designing a Digital Portfolio, I already have my web site completely done, for the most part, so a lot of this is redundant. At least the static designing parts and somesuch. They do, admittedly, have some interesting parts in there, such as the whole bit on navigation and whatnot.

At this point though, there isn’t much that I can say that I haven’t said before. This portfolio is gonna be the spring board into the real, horrifying world of face-biting books.

On that note, I leave this final posting regarding the books that I’ve read with a simple, yet elegant animation.

9 – Writing on Water

2008-04-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, so writing. Everyone who has read this knows by now that I have a really weird writing style. I basically write as I talk. There’s a little nagging voice in my head that’s like “Yo, what the hell you think you doin, goin ahead and typing like you some fanciful artist or somesuch? That ain’t you, now get your ass to writing like you should or else I’ll have to tell the Mrs. , and you know how she is when she’s angry!”

Okay I lied, it’s not so much that. But regardless, I can try and type all fanciful, but that’s not me. I had a hell of a time typing in my resume without using the general terminology that everyone knows and loves me for. Though I don’t think my employers would find “Shiny” and appropriate term for how much I liked my semester abroad.

I try to keep things short and sweet, at least when I’m talking about myself. I don’t enjoy going into long winded conversations about my life story and how my friend Joel and I ran into a “madam” that tried to sell us “Very pretty girls, only 20 American dollars” in Qing Dao. Holy hell that was creepy.

Regardless, once the semester is over I get to sit my butt down and write cover letters. That’s gonna be one hell of a hurdle for me to overcome. My grammar is far from perfect, and I continue to feel this urging need to type the way I talk, which is what I’m doing now. I’ve also been told that I’m way too shy when presenting my work, and that I’ve got too much of a nonchalant attitude. It’s how I am though, and in that department I can’t win, bottom line.

In other news, my brain is slowly imploding while trying to figure out “Rawr, this is the end of college”.

If I’m going down, I’m taking you all with me, here’s TF2’s latest video

8 - Optimization Explosion

2008-04-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

So this round of blog poker leads way to optimization and various aspects of print portfolios. I learned quickly when getting my stuff together that I would have much preferred to have the original work that I did it in, only to find that in one of my “cleanups” of the hard drive, my stuff was lost into the abyss formerly known as the recycle bin. Epic fail on my part there. Regardless, I’m doing what I can to pull out various designs and other things for the fuzzy wuzzies of the world who wish to see some original stuff.

I’ve grown to become buddy buddy with exporting as PDF’s lately. Not only for my main PDF, but also to bundle a bunch of my stuff together so I’d be less likely to lose it. Just trying to jack as much stuff as I can and get it on one disk and the like before I run away and never see QU again. I’ve already lost enough at the hands of Marcus leaving, I’d prefer not to have my one copy of my work implode and, once again, fall into the abyss. It’d be like that one sock that you can never find. You could totally have a match if you could find that one sock, but it eludes you, and forever will. Until you lose the second one, then of course the first will come up.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that optimized JPEG’s never look how I want them to. Even if I crank it up to full quality, I can never be happy with it, and I probably never will be.

So, my self promo is gonna be a drink coaster. To hand in for class though is probably gonna be el cheapo cork coaster bought from Wal-mart with my logo glued onto it and passed off as a prototype. It’ll work, I’m just kinda miffed that I couldn’t get a particular number made. No thank you, I do not wish to have 5000 drink coasters sent to my house. Needless to say, try as I might, I don’t believe I’ll be having 5000 drinks out simultaneously to occupy said coasters.

I’m also shying away from having a print portfolio. If I can deck out a good enough PDF that’s eventually print worthy, it’ll be one up on any print portfolio that I could make. Which is good.

I leave you now with some information regarding 64-bit Photoshop CS4

7 - A Self-Promotion

2008-04-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

So, the second part of "Building Design Portfolios" led me into thinking about my self promo a bit. And in this thinking, I came to the conclusion that I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with it. I'm seriously stumped. I've looked through the book, what's up on blackboard, and various other sites across the web, and it's like there's this irritating block in my head that's all like "So, you wanna do something? Too bad. Now go make me a sandwich". It's like I'm a slave to this aforementioned block and he is just nagging at me to go do something else.

On a completely unrelated note, every time I pick up this book Riverdance somehow starts going through my head. Don't ask me why, or how. It just happens.

Once again, it seems like Designing a Portfolio seems to come up at the perfect time when I need it. Just a few days ago I was thinking to myself "Man, I've got my stuff, and how do I know if it's gonna look happy when I have to scale it down" and lo and behold: "Chapter 7 - Cleaning up". The book is made of win. I've been looking through my stuff and weeding out bits and pieces so far, still not sure which ones I want to stick up in the portfolio for real. I've been thinking of creating something Semester at Sea related, a banner or picture or something to, for one, help push the fact to potential designers that I did actually go around the world and it's worth mentioning again, and two, for my own pleasure. I've been stuck with this nasty case of reverse-culture shock ever since that trip, and it's been hanging over my head like a mildly constipated rain cloud, who only shows up and rains when it feels like it.

Regardless, the various freak-outs have began. The whole "I graduate in one month, holy nosebleed Batman" has taken over a good portion of my everyday thoughts. I just try not to think about it too much, and instead indulge myself on various hilarious videos across the interwebs. Like this one, from our good friends Igudesman and Joo.

Oh, also, I would just like to mention that I'd love to be this guy. Nobody can ever argue with him...

...ever

6 - Pulling it Together

2008-04-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

Now we jump into the new and exciting chapter concerning "Books about portfolios", putting "Building Design Portfolios: Innovative Concepts for Presenting Your Work" in the spotlight. Written by Sara Eisenman, this starts off by going into what you should be using to present your portfolio. I applaud her in this decision, because nothing else really matters if the person you're showing it to loses interest by simply looking at it. My favorite portfolio case out of all that she listed was on page 27, number 6 for those of you who have access to the book. It's a black case made of linen with retractable chrome handles. Seems fitting for some of the work that I create and my overall style. I do have a black and white wolf logo after all.

The first thing that caught my eye with this book was the way that it's case worked. It's got a very nifty fold over that, while a little awkward when the book is open, closes it nicely and protects it from the elements. It's a very clean design that helps it hold up very well to weathering.

The bits that she's gone into so far has made me sit back and think a bit as to how I want to design my portfolio overall, and once again what I need to be doing to get everything printed out and happy. I'm thinking possibly print for my alternative portfolio, but we'll see when the time comes which would turn out to be more beneficial.

In "Designing a Digital Portfolio", it seemed odd to be thinking about some of the things they were going over, seeing as I've never really had to deal with them myself. I can't say that I've thought about digitizing anything from a VHS anytime...well....ever. I'm sure I'll look back on this someday and be like "Oh, right", but until then, a lot of this just seems so far away.

Overall it's been a bit of a crazy semester, but I'm looking to get my blog postings much more squared away than they have been, which means picking up where I left off and getting these to where they should be. I'm finally happy with my logo, and I've got a solid design for my website that, despite my efforts, reminds me why I'm not going specifically into web design. Dreamweaver doesn't so much weave my dreams as it takes them, eats them, then spits them into the sun.

This is also perhaps one of the funniest things of all time. Riverdance for life.

5 - Shot in the Dark

2008-04-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

And so with this post comes the end of one of the first books, "How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul". The ending came with many good notes, primarily those about what it takes to be a designer in the first place, rating talent, albeit important, closer to the bottom of what's needed, behind a voice, initiative and fearlessness. With the section concerning your inner voice, I think my situation can be summed up by quoting a game I played a bit back: "Hurry now, my muse is a fickle bitch with a short attention span". Murphy's Law covers me like a raincloud, where I have a ton of inspiration when I neither have the time, nor the materials to work with it, and when I finally do decide to sit down to do something, poof, gone.

Moving forward a bit, this section in Designing a Digital Portfolio really hit home with me, and not for the better. Over my years here I've printed and given out some of my work, and always kept multiple copies in the event worst case scenario happened. Unfortunately, worst case scenario happened in all three of my backups: Laptop crashed, Desktop crashed, and MP3 player being used as a storage device got ruined during my semester abroad due to the large number of magnets in the ship. Needless to say, I have a few pieces that I currently no longer have access to, and it's rather infuriating. I've decided from here on out that hard drives are evil, and that I need to resort to something else, such as disks. Luckily enough, I'll soon have my own domain so I can stick things on there.

As a whole I've been working a lot more in photoshop recently, primarily using the travel tutorials that Dan showed me a while back. I've been making some pretty neat stuff, some of it arguably portfolio worthy, though that will probably change as I get my stuff together. I've just got this nagging feeling that I won't have nearly as much to put on there right now as I should, and that I need to get cracking on some more stuff to "fill space". Which is a horrible way of thinking, I realize this, but I can't help but having that little voice screaming obscenities at me.

I did finally get a new desktop a few weeks back. Thing is a beast. I can finally open more than one adobe product at once, and work in them almost flawlessly. Greatest. Investment. Ever.

I've also decided that photoshop is, by far, my favorite program out of the adobe suite, bar none. Illustrator and I have a love hate relationship, Flash and I have a hate, hate relationship, and InDesign and I are just sorta meh. Photoshop is the only one that's been kind to me throughout all of these years.

On the bright side, I have a possible job opportunity at a company called "Medi-Tech" in MA. They have a few places, closest to me being Fall River. They make software for hospitals, so I'm not sure if I'd be doing something web based, or perhaps interface based for their software. Who knows? We'll see what happens.

In closing: [insert mandatory ending video of something cool here]

4 - Destructive creativity

2008-02-27T18:23:00.001-08:00

So the world of designing compositions for my website has been an interesting task. There seems to be an internal struggle between parts of me that want something, then see it, decide that I don't really want it, discard it, wonder if I really do want it, recreate it, discard it again, then come up with something completely different and repeat the entire process over again. It's been exciting. I'm debating if I want to do some incarnation of the banner that I had for my SAS website, but I don't think I want to revisit the past on that site and pull too much from it. I've come to one conclusion though:

I am absolutely, positively, undeniably, maybe indecisive.

Logo redesign is going, slowly but surely. Looking to redesign the wolf soon enough, more rugged look and less-seal like is the plan.

In other news, Chapter 4 of Designing a Digital Portfolio has led to a few ideas rolling around in my head. The main one would be possibly creating a second portfolio for my photographic work. I don't have a ton, namely only really what I have from going abroad. But I have a nice camera, I consider myself halfway decent at taking said photographs, so I figure it's worth a shot once I get my design work all squared away. Granted, that will most likely never happen, as I'm never satisfied and will probably be picking at various bits of code and design aspects until judgement day, but until then I can hope.

Also looking at various ways to transport data was a nice touch in this book. I know for certain until I get a new laptop, I'm not letting my current one out of it's cage. Seriously, it's old, cranky, and isn't house trained. It's the one I got freshmen year, and it's on its last legs. I, for one, never even considered zip disks, which I'm figuring is for the better considering how God-awful the book made them sound. I think CD's are the primary way for me to go, with e-mail attachments being a close second for those little tastes.

The chapters of "How to be a Graphic Designer, without losing your soul" are starting to run together a bit, but I'll try to sum up what I've seen so far and how well it's influenced me. First and foremost...

The interview. The dreaded interview that I long and dread simultaneously. Few good points were made about this, primarily about showing the interviewer the portfolio instead of yourself. It's a common mistake, and I don't think I would have been likely to make it beforehand, but I know for certain I won't now. And certain is better than likely.

Secondly, the whole section of freelance design intrigued me. I've considered going into freelance from time to time, although I see now that I'm not yet confident in my web design skills to feel as though I could pull that off. Although to be honest, making sites for myself has proven much harder than if anyone gave me any sort of direction, so I suppose I'd have to wait and see.

The whole personality aspect I think I'd be somewhat strong in. I consider myself a somewhat likeable person, although the ruling is still out on that, I think it moreso depends on who I'd be working for and what their attitude is. I'm somewhat timid when it comes to putting my foot down on things though, which means I'd be horrible at charging people money, and therefore would have a hell of a time making by. Just like when I was abroad in India, and people were latching themselves onto my arms to the point where I had to drag them shouting "No, I don't want to buy that". I felt so bad afterward.

The idea of running a studio is an interesting one, but not one that I'd like to think about in this stage. I'd like to take things one at a time, step by step, get out of college and see how the world works from there. From what I can see though, it's just a glorified portfolio for the masses. That is to say, you come up with your identity, you show your work, and then you take on jobs to sell said work. The difference is that it's with many more people, you need a common space to do it, and there are a larger list of variables.

At any rate, there will be a continuation of posts as I progress further and further through the books. I leave now with my complimentary video-at-end-of-post. It's not flash, or anything graphic design at all, but it's a funny video regardless.

This one's for you classical music fans: A rant about Pachelbel's Canon in D

3 - Ketchup and fine dining

2008-02-27T17:15:00.000-08:00

Alright, I've fallen into a slippery slope of not-posting as of late, courtesy of some issues that have come up. Things are starting to get back on track though, and the catching up has begun!

So I finally got my hands on "How to be a graphic designer, without losing your soul" by Adrian Shaughnessy. Needles to say, it's an interesting take on some of the more simpler things in graphic design that you don't often think about, such as basic interaction with the person you're working with or for. Admittedly, I'm the kind of person who would probably submit more than anything else, and it was a good idea to read that section because it made me understand how sometimes, you just need to put your own ideas forward and not let someone who's incredibly indecisive keep a project from moving forward.

The whole area on personal integrity also caught my eye. I always follow my own personal code of honor, and the area about integrity really struck home at some points with me. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who will step over whoever they can to get what they want, with no regard as to who they hurt. Sure, you may get to a particular standing, but who else do you have to share the experience with, to congratulate you and write home about? Nobody, cause you stepped on all of em to get where you are and nobody likes you anymore!

I found it funny that the third chapter of Designing a Digital Portfolio had one of their top suggestions is to do a Yahoo and Google search. It just goes to show how integrated Google has become in our lives as of late. I'm actually surprised that Blogger, as I type this, is showing Google as being a typo, ironically only when I have it as lower-case. I suppose it's only a matter of time before it becomes a word added in the dictionary, if it hasn't already.

It's true though, a ridiculous amount of information can be recorded by just doing a simple Google search and seeing what comes up. You can find anything and everything related to whatever you could possibly imagine through Google. It begins to lead one to wonder what life was like before Google.

In closing, for you 3D junkies, this came out a while back, but it's still a pretty nice tech demo. Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't give this video's graphics justice. The HD versions are great, and are available on their site.

Week 2 - A step sideways

2008-02-06T22:10:00.000-08:00

Designing a Digital Portfolio by Cynthia Baron continues to add more and more insight into the little things that I, personally, wouldn't have considered. For example, in the second chapter, the checklist that has you look through various aspects of where you are and where you aim to be brought some particular light to me about my current situation. If you answer it truthfully, I think that it's possible to see things that you wouldn't normally stumble across. For instance, just looking at the products that I've had training, I've dabbled into a lot more programs than I had originally thought. I was also able to take a step back and look at the question "Why am I making this portfolio?". Yes, naturally it's for a class, but more than that. This is going to symbolize who I am and who I wish to be; let the world know what I'm capable of and that I'm searching to find my own place in it.

I also considered the various aspects of putting it together. It was good to read that they don't recommend loading up your portfolio with a thousand different things that you've worked on, and that quality is better than quantity. Aside from my website, I've only a few things that I'd really like to put up there at the moment. I do, however, have a lot of things that I'd like to rework in an attempt to bring to light a few things that I've learned. Primarily photoshop things, I don't have any readily available that I'd be willing to put up there. That and Maya.

I'm also realizing amidst my logo generation that I can't draw worth anything. Sure, I can make relatively nice things in photoshop and illustrator (well, moreso photoshop), but my drawing isn't nearly where I'd like it to be. Which is disappointing, because I used to be able to draw. At least better than I can now.

As a closing note, The YuYu still remains one of my favorite and one of the best flash animations I've ever seen. Actually, anything by Adam Phillips is amazing. His site can be found here.

Week 1 - DDP Chapter 1

2008-01-30T19:41:00.000-08:00

While short, the first chapter led me to see a few things in a different light. The short point about variety really struck home. It's understandable how too many different things can be jarring to a prospective employer. Similarity can be key, and going back to a solid state can most certainly help. The various examples of the sites designed to highlight ones strength were also a nice touch, leading into my own thoughts as to how I might want to design my page. I particularly liked the site depicting the three graphic expressions of that one character on the entrance page.

I still find myself at the crossroads though, I enjoy 3d design, but I also enjoy print design and flash work. I've recently gotten myself some 3d books to delve deeper into it on my own seeing as I couldn't take the advanced Maya class due to scheduling. I'm leaning 3d, but everything is still up in the air at this point.

2008-01-24T11:41:00.001-08:00

In America you have fork in road.

In Soviet Russia, road forks you!