Hughie's and Life Updates

It's been a while since I've posted anything and I felt like since I wasn't doing anything right now that I would do a quick look at what I've been up to. Let's start from the top. I still haven't found a job and I've been stuck at home taking care of "mommy duties" due to family problems. When I say "mommy duties," I mean like waking up early to drop the kids/siblings off at school and going to pick them up when school was over which is all fine and dandy except for the fact that I have 7 hours of nothingness to burn. I found out that I would hate to be a stay-at-home mom.

On to my Hughie's project. While I haven't been able to find an actual job, I've been doing some freelance work for a restaurant/lounge that's opening in Houston sometime this year. The person that approached me is an acquaintance from church who's aunt owns this restaurant. When I first received my creative brief it was labelled as a casual Western themed bar/lounge. My job was to create a logo and to help with marketing. Sooo many logo designs were drafted between November until now and I'm still not sure which logo was chosen...

To see all the logo designs I drafted up, click the link below:
https://plus.google.com/photos/112994609708042405063/albums/5841725880853578785

Marketing is something that I'm not really comfortable with at all. I guess it's time to put my minor to use. Actually, I find that my ATEC class is more useful to me for this project than my marketing classes. Without my ATEC class, I would have never found out about HootSuite. So far HootSuite has been a lifesaver when it comes to digital marketing. What it is is a consolidation of different social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ all in one platform. This site allows me to create a post and post it on several different sites at the same time. It also allows me to schedule posts so that they'll show up at certain times so that my target audience can see them. Anyways, I hope this project provides me some useful experience that might land me an actual job. Freelance work probably can't support me cuz I don't have enough clients looking for me. Blehhh...

Seriously, though. I feel like I'm dying at home and need something to do. I think I would rather go back to my crappy job at Studio Movie Grill if it meant being productive. At least I made money. All I do at home is take naps while waiting til it's time to pick up the kids...

Don't Be Afraid to Aim High

So here's my official rejection email from the marketing team for the Dallas Mavericks. My buddy Leon was surprised that I even applied because he said he wouldn't even have the confidence to try. It's not about confidence. It's about going after what you want. 

Long ago, back as a senior in high school, my advertising design teacher talked about when her son was going job hunting for a graphic design position. He applied starting at the most prestigious ad agency in Dallas and landed the job. When you aim high, you have a chance of actually starting out with a great job without having to climb from the bottom. Plus, it's not like your chances of getting hired somewhere decreases just because you were rejected somewhere else. I'm taking the tactic of applying at the most prestigious places first and moving down to the least prestigious. Rejected by the Mavs? Fine. Let's see if the Richards Group will take me. If not, there's still Reynolds and Reynolds. Worst case scenario is that I'd be stuck making brochure templates for printing shops. Let's hope I never have to apply for a job at that level. 

That being said, I will accept my rejection with a smile. Why? I've managed to impress a senior designer AND he gave me good tips. His advice actually does make sense, though. I use too much sans-serif fonts in my design and don't branch out into other typefaces. Adding logos to my portfolio is going to be tricky, but I can try. I'm not sure about going to portfolio school, though. I don't even know any portfolio schools nor am I really sure what is the definition of a portfolio school. I tried Googling it and all I got was stuff like the Art Institute and I cannot afford that. What to do...

Photoshop Tutorial: Different Colors and Overlaps

Requested by my buddy Angelina. Haha.

First, set up the text that you want to use. Make sure they overlap.

Duplicate one of the layers and rasterize it.

Make sure the rasterized layer is still selected and then press and hold CTRL then click the rectangle with the T next to the text layer that you didn't make a copy of.

 Click and hold CTRL, SHIFT, and 'I' to inverse your selection. Then press delete to get rid of the parts of the layer that you don't want to recolor. Then click and hold CTRL and 'D' to unselect everything.

 Double click on the copied layer and select 'Color Overlay.' Click on the color box to change the color of the overlapped font area.

The end.

Finished my online portfolio!

Hooray! I've managed to complete my personal online portfolio! Oh my gosh. That took wayyy longer than I thought it would. When did I start? I think on Friday. And I just finished so that's about 4 days to build this site. I really do need to learn how to use Dreamweaver or something. Coding a website in pure HTML and CSS is the most tedious thing ever. The worst part for this project was including a lightbox for the graphic design and photography portion of the site. I've never used a lightbox before so I had to learn quickly how to implement jQuery and stuff like that. I guess this was a good learning process. At least I'll be satisfied with the layout of my site for a while and at least it sort of works across all browsers. I will forever hate Internet Explorer for making my life a living hell. My last layout was rather blah and it didn't appear correctly on Internet Explorer at all. Tien says that I should try using Blogger to build sites instead cuz it'll be easier to update. The only downside is that it's less customizable. Oh well. If you guys want to check out my portfolio, you can. I still haven't added any images to the photography section yet. I'll work on it later. I was more focused on the graphic design portion. But yeah!

Click to see my portfolio: http://ae221.co.nr (I'll try and get a more official domain later.)
Check out Tien's blog: http://hungrytien.com