Holy hell, a per­sonal post! You know what that means every­one: Corey doesn’t have any­thing spe­cific to write about, but is guilt-​ridden enough to write some­thing in an attempt to rid him­self of the self-​loathing that he’s now feeling.

Thank­fully, I’ve got enough random crap to talk about, that it will actu­ally seem like I’ve some­how planned this post. I should at least be able to get back to my reg­u­lar sched­ule for post­ing stuff now that I’m in school (some­body quote me on this when I’m study­ing my brains out and aban­don the sched­ule once again.)

Side note: Do you say “skedual” or “scheduel”? I found that after watch­ing far too much Doctor Who over the years that I’ve been con­verted to saying “scheduel” instead of skedual.” Ruined me, I tell you.

Seri­ously, it’s so white that it actu­ally seems to give off light itself. It stands out so harshly against the rest of my room because it looks so clean and min­i­mal. It’s like a work of art sit­ting on top of a rubble pile in Cher­nobyl. It’s so clean and pris­tine that I feel like I’m sul­ly­ing it every time I lay my grubby fin­gers on it.

Some of you may be won­der­ing why I’d now be a Mac owner. Those of you who know me know that I’ve never been a fan of Macs gen­er­ally speak­ing. I find them overly simple, their mouse scares and dis­trubes me, they have some extra keys, and Mac users tend to be just so damned snooty. Have I sold out?

That’s right, I’m school-​bound once again. Two more years of weird sleep sched­ules, assign­ments, cliques, teach­ers, and too many people walk­ing around in pajama-​bottoms.

Joking aside, I’ve decided to go back to school for Graphic Design. Over the past two plus years, I’ve felt that though I’m rea­son­ably good at pro­gram­ming, it’s not really what I want to do for the rest of my life. I’ve had a good run at my cur­rent place of employ­ment, but I feel that it’s just not the direc­tion I want to go in the long-​run. You see, as I worked along side every­one I con­stantly felt myself obsess­ing over cer­tain points; namely UI design, usabil­ity, and common sense in design.

This is the sixth part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

More learning

This is a con­tin­u­a­tion from the fifth por­tion, because had i com­bined them the arti­cle would never be read through fully. They’re long people, I can’t help that. Well yes I can, but I refuse to censor myself. Here I will con­tinue to explain to the best of my abil­ity ques­tions that I had asked way back in the first part of this series. Let’s continue.

This is the fifth part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Don’t Freak out.

Now for the sec­tion that makes or breaks a would-​be designer. Real­iz­ing that you know noth­ing about design. Every­one hits this when they start, and it’s noth­ing to be ashamed of. Have you ever shown some­one some of your work and when asked why you did what you did, you responded with some­thing like “because it looks cool”? Believe it or not, this is not a valid expla­na­tion for art­work. Well okay, some­times it is but most of the time, this is the stamp of an ama­teur, or some­one who knows how to use a program.

Let me stress now that know­ing how to use a pro­gram in no way dic­tates your under­stand­ing of design.

This is the fourth part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Mess around.

In this sec­tion I’m going to be fairly resource-​heavy, and hope that it helps some people out. When I say ‘Mess around’ what I mean is lit­er­ally get your hands on some of the tools you know you’ll be using, and go to town. If you don’t know what tools you are going to be using, do some research. Check out those schools I talked about pre­vi­ously, and find out what soft­ware they’re going to be using. Dig around a little to see what others in the field tend to use. Since I’m trying to get into graphic design, I know that my pri­mary tools will most likely con­sist of the Adobe family, though I will also give an hon­ourable men­tion to 3Ds Max, Maya, and ArtRage 2 (if you want to have some really impres­sive paint effects).

This is the third part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Self-education in the workplace

I admit this part is prop­erly inac­cu­rately named, since it really bleeds into other posts that I will be making in the future. There­fore I shall clar­ify: this arti­cle relates to actions you can take to get your­self edu­cated while you wait for your school of choice to accept you, job-​wise.