Graphic designers & Style

We are soon approaching the end of my fall semester and with that i have finally accomplished pretty much all the styling of my graduate thesis, with that in mind i wanted to make a quick post about graphic designers and their personal style.

When i started graphic design back in Maracaibo, i was very amazed by the portfolios and reels that our first teachers showed us, always thought "oh man i want to be like this, or like that" but in reality as you spend more time creating your design just as any type of artist you start shaping your personal style in your design.

Having your personal style is a good thing, is the way you'll plan your ideas and the outcome of these, however it doesn't mean you should never experiment more about other styles or try some new ideas with clients. It's like fashion, you can tell what's your fashion style when you look at your wardrobe, with graphic design happen when you look at your body of work in your portfolio, this applies to illustrators, photographers, painters, etc.

In my case i'm a very clean designer, i always loved pop art ideas on design but never actually managed to make them happen since i did actually appreciated blank spaces of either color or just white, so yes, go ahead and try styles until you find one that suits you :)

Besides that i wanted to show you my graduate thesis proposal logo which in this case will be the front and back covers of my application book, oh yeah thats my thesis: an application for donating food, i'll post soon the motions i made for it too.

Front cover

Back cover

I hope you enjoyed the post, feel free to leave any comments or questions.

I hope you guys are preparing great for the upcoming holidays.

Mary

Moodboards & the Thesis Change

So as the thesis keeps going forward, modifications happen.

Currently the idea went from: Fridge app, to healthy lifestyle to the final idea which ends in: donating food instead of wasting it.

I can't explain much of how is happening due to -privacy policies while developing it- = somebody stealing the idea D: but i wanted to just show you a mood board a write about those.

So moodboards are good for the design process, when i went to my undergrad i don't remember being told to make moodboards, but they are useful for so much, is like mind mapping but for design. Also you can apply it for house projects, personal projects, etc.

So i'm gonna show you the moodboard i made for my thesis so far. 

Moodboards tend to include:

• Color palettes
• Typography
• In my case: websites or apps that might be similar or inspiration for it
• Design Layouts
• Photography

For finding or creating color palettes, you can check Colour Lovers and for the rest, check the web and do your research for your own projects around google and enjoy. Moodboards are fun and easy to do, and as i already said super helpful. 

Also while i don't want you to read tons of info, you can check this TED video so you can understand why the food waste is such a problem in the USA

Don't forget to follow me in some of the other places.

Twitter - Instagram - Flickr - Random writing

Cheers.

Mary

User Personas & Portraits

This past months (October and September) have been about trying to define my thesis work, even though its yet a work in progress due to many reasons, i've been trying to integrate everything i know in it from photography to things i enjoy like food and plants.

So the other day i had to start doing user personas (you might ask what is that?); User Personas, are often used during the initial design of a website, app or project where one generates a person in which you start basing your content on, it's like a target audience with the difference that you create from 2 to 5 and give them needs and possible user flows, this way you are creating your design, website or app with an specific user in mind besides yourself.

User personas can be real people or can be people we made up, in my case i usually like mixing both because it makes the process of creating them easier and is fun. So this gave me the chance to request friends to get their portraits taken and work on it for a weekend of fun portrait shooting, we had terrible hours in some cases which led to the sun being on top of us or having no sun at all, but i think it worked out, the final layout for my thesis book is not yet finished but this will give you an idea of how User Personas might look.

For the portraits of user personas, often stock images are used, i always like doing my own photography to avoid either paying stock images and because i feel they look more natural than the stock people (sorry stock images people :/ ) so in my case, we used natural light and the one bouncer in some cases, except in the night portrait in which my flash was needed.

Some Portraits

 

         

Some of my User Personas

And thats it for this week :)

Hope the Halloween treated you all great and that you have an awesome beginning of November.

Mary

Organizing procrastination

Today it's been a good day, i finished organizing my new place.
After that i started organizing some images of olds 35mm films i scanned a few months ago, somehow i've been procrastinating a bit on this graduate assignments i have but at the same have been using the time to get some of my images organized so i can update the photography area of the website.

Film always adds the texture to images, is something i can't explain and for also is the magic of the unexpected while waiting for the rolls to get developed. Some of my favorites
      

                                            

You can see this images and some others here. 

Photography: M. Gainza 2010-2011

Models: Luis Moreno, Ana Gainza, Humberto Gutierrez, Sra. Angelina

The Beginning

So, this is for now the blog area of my website www.mgainza.com
If you stumbled upon "yeaaaaay" and welcome, for now i'm still building my webpage and learning other web tools in order to be able to manage the whole website in two languages.

Spanish: my native language and English: the language of the country i'm currently living in.
So welcome to my blog and thanks for visiting, i hope you enjoy the website as much as i enjoy creating it.

Btw, i'm Mary and feel free to ask anything or comment and let me know how would you improve the website or blog.

This photography was one of the first pictures i created for my photography class back in 2008, it was based on a short story i wrote for it and it consisted of 6 images that described the story.

Model: Valery
Direction: M. Gainza
Assistance: Jhoel Tiniaco, Adriana Gonzales.