Looking Back: 1st Quarter

By Rachel Tranello

I came to Portfolio Center with a background in advertising. I had been writing scripts for GMC Trucks and Raymour & Flanigan Furniture ads. My mission was to improve on that, hone in on some photography skills and learn the Adobe programs. When I started here, I was clueless as to the absolute bittersweet hell I was about to encounter. I knew it would be hard, going to design school with no design background. My biggest concern was that I would be so far behind everyone else.

When I got my schedule with a list of supplies to get, I was dumbfounded. I’d never even heard of half the things included: a bone folder, a brayer, a burnisher, Bienfang paper, marker blender, and bristol board. I entered the art supply store and started to wander around aimlessly to try to locate anything I could on my own. “Can I help you?” asked one of the employees. “Yeah,” I thought. “I’m supposed to be a design student and I have no idea what any of this stuff is.” I silently handed her my list of foreign artifacts, and she helped me locate them.

At first, it was like a really bad dream that just wouldn’t end. Make up a band and design one hundred logos for it…write a song emotively…research and retain everything there is to know about an egret… research and retain everything there is to know about the Kuba tribe...be prepared to give a full-blown presentation on each… draw one hundred and forty-one thumbnail sketches with forces and AOF’s…come up with five concepts for a Jem and the Holograms secret society handbook…make three VHS boxes…put together five cropped letter collages by typeface. Wait…what the hell is an AOF?

That was just week one. My first thought was that all of the teachers were nuts and each under the impression that theirs was the only class I was taking. In the weeks to follow, I kept hearing that old Sesame Street song running through my head, One of These Things is Not Like the Other.

Here I was, back in school, walking among soon-to-be design legends who already knew the secret handshake and how to use the artifacts on the foreign supplies list. It almost seemed like freelancing was a prerequisite. I was inspired by the work displayed, but it was also intimidating. I remember looking at some of the bags from Sylvia’s class and feeling like I didn’t have the skills to execute mine on the same level, when it was all I could do to learn the basic craft.

I had never even opened Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign before I got here. I muddled through, however, thanks to one of my classmate who took the time out of his already insanely busy schedule to answer and explain every single question I had. Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Frank, because if it weren’t for him, I would be twitching in a corner somewhere.

As if that weren’t enough, there was Sylvia. Sylvia is awesome. When you’re a first quarter student, everyone warns you about her class. People get you so terrified that you believe she runs with the same crowd as Jason and Freddy Krueger. As I sat through the first class, it was ok. We talked about ourselves and where we came from; then she went over placement and where the strongest area of a page is. She assigned us our animals and civilizations, and had us start drawing. Not so bad, right?

Then, it was time for our homework assignment. We knew we were in trouble when she announced she’d reserved forty-five minutes to go over it all. She stood up, walked over to her tote bag, pulled out a couple of spiral notebooks and started reading: “three repetitive pattern with variation, five close-up cropping of animal, three with horizontal movement, ten notons, three with curve linear movement…” It just didn’t stop.

There were five more pages where that came from. She might as well have pulled a three-ring circus, complete with a three-legged man out of that bag. She read the items off faster than we could write. Having completed her class, I now know that there is nothing anyone can say or do to prepare you for it. It’s just a deadly storm you must survive. Oddly enough, you love her in the end.

Did I mention the lack of sleep? If I was lucky, I slept an average of three hours a night with the exception of Sunday and Monday nights, when I got none. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. I never thought I would have to flip a coin to decide whether I should eat or shower.

As we got deeper into the execution of our projects, words like INT’s, safety, bleeds, gutter, slug, and trim started getting thrown around. And the process of getting something from Illustrator into InDesign, then to the printer…it still has me perplexed. Export from Illustrator, save as a tiff (Or was that a gif? What the hell is the difference anyway?), place it in InDesign and make sure you outline the text. There could be a whole class on that alone.

I had never even thought about making CD packaging, bags, or anything like that. Besides, isn’t that what the production department was for? The craziest medium I had ever used before I came here was paint. I had no idea what other media were out there, but before I knew it, I was drowning in mold builder and resin. And what was worse, my teachers weren’t teaching me. At least they weren’t teaching me exactly how or what to do. What they were teaching me was how to teach myself.

I was so used to the conventional way of learning that I totally freaked out when someone said that I was going to be critiqued on a CD package that I had to make, and no one was going to show me how to make it, print it, or put it together. That’s the way of it, though. It doesn’t seem like it would be effective, but it is.

Now, when I compare where I was when I started here to where I am now, it fascinates me: Besides the myriad design fundamentals I've mastered, I’ve become expert in the art of sleeping as little as possible, skilled at operating an X-acto knife without too much bloodshed, and I’ve discovered that I’m capable of a lot more than I thought. But most important, I’ve learned how to learn.