Welcome to the Joy Ride

Hello and welcome to my blog. This will probably be the longest blog entry on here, so bare with me.

My name is Brooke Armstrong. I'm a 21 year old who is just trying to live day by day without getting in to too much trouble. This is a blog dedicated to my Graphic Design III class where I will be posting creative designs and my reasons for why I liked it and why I believe the design to be good solutions to the problem.
I fell in love with design when I was in high school when I took my first graphic design class. I decided that this was the career I wanted when I took a tour of my cousin's office at Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago. It's been a slow going process because of my medical issues, but I don't let it slow me down nor do I wish to be defined by it. Instead, with the time that I have I pour all of my energy into my studies, hoping to learn as much as I can while I'm here at Parkland.

My creative process isn't much different than my peers. I begin like anyone else and research, research, research. I love looking through other's designs and ideas. It really inspires me and gets my brain thinking about my own direction I want to go in. Then after that, of course, is the concept stage. While I'm researching I like to draw or write down specific ideas that I liked in someone else's design. Throughout the beginning I try to get down everything on paper so that I don't lose any of that valuable creative thinking. I spend the longest on concept sketching and find that this is the most important stage in a creative process. If you don't have a good concept when moving forward, you most likely won't have a good end product.

I struggle from time to time with the fact that everything has been done before. Design is just a collection of borrowed ideas and my time on this earth will probably never amount to coming up with the next Helvetica or being a founding-mother of the next art movement. Which is ok, I don't aspire to be that. All I want is to be happy, pay the bills, and have some sort of creative outlet where I get to let my craziest ideas run wild.

This image below is a piece from my portfolio. It's a menu design for Maize Mexican Grill. I really enjoyed this project because it was a project that went so smoothly, the ideas came so naturally to me and the end piece was a beautifully minimal and elegant menu design.

I consider this a creative piece because it uses few elements, but the elements that are used are done well and it solved the problem that the original menu had which was messy, over-crowded with information and inconsistent. I think this has a nice balance and is aesthetically pleasing overall.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy the posts to come.
- B