When I started college, graphic design was not part of the picture. I was happy to stay with photography, but God had other plans.
There’s a class at my university that everyone under the College of Architecture, Visual Arts, and Design has to take and it‘s called Design Thought Foundations. I didn’t know what the title meant but I knew that the class was taught by a professor that everyone seemed to love. Despite the classroom, being about as far away from my dormitory as possible, the walk quickly became something I looked forward to every Tuesday afternoon.
We had fun assignments like weekly sketches and some crazy ones, like creating 50 things in a two-week time frame, and we also read from some pretty awesome books. I made sure to keep my copies of Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon and The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp. Steal Like An Artist is a short book, one could easily read it in a day, and it covers ten ways to jump start your creativity. It was a quick, easy read and I highly recommend it to any creative or anyone who wants to up their creativity. I also enjoyed Twyla Tharp’s book, she wrote about making creativity an everyday habit instead of something that comes and goes. She is also a famous choreographer, and I used to dance as well, so I loved reading about her experiences in that field.
The weekly sketch assignments were designed to take what we were reading and put it into practice. Every week the professor would give us a simple, somewhat vague prompt, like “egg” for example, and the next week we would return with a sketch of whatever the prompt brought to mind. We were not meant to just draw eggs though, that would be missing the point of the assignment. As the semester went on, we learned that we were meant to take the prompt and go down the rabbit hole, away from whatever cliché first responses we had in order to create something interesting.
So so if you can’t necessarily draw eggs by themselves, how else can you interpret the prompt? I decided to draw from my own personal experiences. In the summers of 2015, 2016, and 2017 I traveled to Ecuador on missions teams with my high school. Every year we would visit the equator and the equator is the only place on earth where it is possible to balance an egg on the head of a nail. That’s what I drew, and while I did literally draw an egg on a nail. It was a creative response to the prompt because no one else in the class drew what I did. In fact, every sketch was different! Assignments like this were teaching us to think outside the box.
The class also gave me experience working with others. For one assignment, classmates were paired up to design logos for each other. We had to listen to our partner and get to know them so we could design a logo that was perfect for them, and then got to see what they came up with for us in return. Our final project of the semester was to choose a problem we saw on campus and design an app as a solution to the problem. I worked with a group of five other girls to delegate tasks and create faux promotional materials for it. We divided the responsibilities and worked together to finish by the deadline. It was a great simulation of how design jobs in the "real world" tend to go.
It happened quickly, but that class helped me figure out that I wanted to be involved in design somehow. In March of 2018 I declared a double major, so now I am working towards degrees in both Graphic Design and Photography. The two fields overlap quite a bit, so I think having experience in both will be beneficial in the long run, and I really enjoy both of them.
If anyone else has had passions surface in an unexpected way, comment and tell me about it! I'd love to hear your stories.
Thanks for reading!
xx, Hannah
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