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Yesterday, I and my fellow animation/vfx students at Flashpoint got to take a tour of Sol Design, which is a design and effects studio in downtown Chicago. You’ve probably seen a lot of the commercials they’ve done. I recommend checking out their “before and after” reel, which is on the “works” section of their website. It shows their visual effects process, basically all the steps involved in going from raw footage to finished product. It’s pretty amazing.

The tour lasted about four hours. We got to talk to a multitude of employees who showed us what they were working on and answered all our questions. Overall, it was pretty inspiring to me to get to see the whole process and get a better understanding of how the commercials I see on TV get made, and it motivated me to work a little harder at school so I’ll be more up to snuff for employers like Sol Design by the time I graduate.

The most recent issue of my school’s school paper features a short story, a poem, and three illustrations by yours truly. You can check it out here, or you can go directly to the story, the poem, or the illustrations.

Today I attended a one-day course titled “Presenting Data and Information” taught by Edward Tufte in Chicago, which I signed up for on somewhat of a whim a month or two ago. Though the topic of the seminar wasn’t directly related to my field, per se, I thought it was relevant enough to my work as an animator and illustrator to warrant attending. I am, after all, a creator of graphics. And even if it had no relevance whatsoever, I still find Tufte’s work intriguing. So that alone was reason enough to go.

I enjoyed the course greatly. Topics covered included interface design, integration of graphics with text, the importance of resolution, what makes a graphic engaging and communicative vs boring or confusing or irrelevant, and why PowerPoint is the most god-awful way to present information ever. A lot of time was dedicated to that last point. Too much time, in fact. I guess it was justifiable considering that the audience consisted mostly of business types who probably give PowerPoint presentations all the time. I, however, wanted to hear more about the graphics.

Overall, I would say that my biggest take-away from the seminar can be summed up in a quote that Tufte said toward the beginning of the day,

There is no such thing as information overload, only failure of design.