2011 was a big year for me; a lot of things changed… my priorities changed. I purchased my first house and found myself biting off a lot more than I could chew trying to do everything at once with no real goal.

It’s taken a lot of kicking and screaming and a few too many temper tantrums but I’ve finally found where the sweet spot is for balancing my life with work.

This Year’s Achievements

• I’ve taken on a lot more responsibility as an In-House Designer being more involved in the product design. I’ve been taking part in the functionality, usability and interface design.
• KilianWalker.com was re-launched in October this year 3 months ahead of schedule.
• I started my first real freelance project for an upcoming product that needed help establishing their brand as well as Web and UX design.
• This year I had my first taste of what I need to do to sell stock illustrations and designs.

Missed Opportunities

• I find myself wishing I had put more focus on my illustration this year, especially involving my T-Shirt design.
• I regret not focusing more of my energy to learning French.

Upcoming in 2012

Now that I’ve grown up a little and found my balance I plan to be more focused in 2012. I plan to invest my time into learning French because I feel it will open up a lot of opportunities for me. I plan to finish my T-Shirt design and end my Hiatus of doing Let’s Plays.

I also intend to do one of two things next year, I either plan to pick up a second freelance project OR focus my time on Stock and Commission Illustration.

Next Updates

Unless something major comes up I won’t be making another post until the New Year, I have a birthday and a vacation coming up and then it will be holiday season. So, to anyone who may be reading this have an excellent end of your year.

This is just a filler post, I received my exam results and I’m afraid I didn’t pass, I passed the written portion of the exam, I just  made mistakes during the interview. So I’ll probably still do a post on the exam focused more on the written portion, and the mistakes I made so anyone else taking the RGD Exam doesn’t make the same ones I did.

Lets move on to this filler post. I just wanted to go over the projects I’m working on right now and leave you with some useful links that I’ve found wandering around design communities.

A little bit on what I’ve been up to…

I have some of my illustrations on stock sites now and am working on fleshing out a few more ideas. I haven’t been focusing on this as much in the last couple weeks since I have some higher priority projects on my plate.

Speaking of illustration, I’m working on an illustrated T-Shirt design at Threadless.com It’s currently up for critique and I’m working on some of the recommendations. I’ve been very pleased with the type of constructive criticism you get back, people offer suggestions and manage to never offend when they pick apart your work. I’m going to take some time this weekend to work on their recommendations and post V2 on Sunday.

A big thing started in the last week or so. I’ve started on my first freelance project. As I’ve said before I much prefer working as an in-house designer but, an offer came up that was hard to refuse. I can’t discuss the project at all it’s in prototype phase but it’s definitely a project to keep me out of trouble.

I’m actually getting a few freelance offers out of my network lately, I guess it makes the hit from failing the exam a little softer. It’s amazing the contacts you find through LinkedIn and Facebook.

Outside of all that I’m slowly planning out a refresh for my website. I think I know where I’m going with it I just have some writing and building ahead of me. The next reiteration of it is going to be big.

Link List:

And here’s a list of some useful articles and blogs I’ve found recently in no particular order:

• An Interesting way of Looking at SEO
• Any Idea what a UX Developer is? Now you know.
• A review on Usability
• A reminder how Logo does not mean Brand
• Helpful Mobile Web Design Tools
• 99percent.com is an excellent site for designers tips and tricks and improving yourself in your career: Here’s a specific selection they grouped together for Career Development
• NaldzGraphics.net is another site I found recently: I specifically found them with this article about Freelance Business Planning, and found through it they have many other good articles take a look

Let’s begin with a definition for each of the more general types of  designers:

• Agency Designer – a person who works as a designer in either a general or specialized role under a Creative Director providing a design service for clients.
  

  I actually once visited an agency that had a 'cubicle' that was a Chinese Lantern and had a chandelier for its light source.

• Freelance Designer – a person who works as a writer, designer, performer, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, day, job, etc., rather than working on a regular salary basis for one employer. (Source: dictionary.com)
  

  Make sure you hide the kid's toys before meeting with the client!

• In-House Designer – a person who works as a designer in either a general or specialized role for a company that does not provide design as its main service; e.g. a software company, or a company that builds children toys.
  

  Am I being a too subtle here?

Now that we know the difference, let’s focus on the In-House Designer:

Pros and Cons of being an In-House Designer

I was recently inspired by this article to write this, using my experience for a reference.

These are just a few that came to me while writing this, there are many more for both sides of the list. You’ll also notice that “Wearing Many Hats” is placed as both a Pro and Con; depending on your skills being required to do many aspects of the design process can be a lot of fun, but when it comes to doing things you aren’t strong with, or have no business doing (Audio/Video work and Development in my case) it does get frustrating.

So, where do I stand?

I’m not a risk-taker by nature so my biggest enticement on becoming an In-House Designer was the Job Security. I’m also not comfortable dealing with all the behind the scenes stuff that a freelancer or agency designer may have to deal with; dealing with multiple demanding clients also doesn’t sound like too fun for me.

While I do enjoy being an In-House Designer, I have had many of the trials that come with the territory.

The main thing that may be of concern to most people is the “Everyone’s an expert” mentality… Don’t get me wrong I appreciate feedback, and being in a very small company (I am the entire design department) I often have to fish for feedback to make sure I’m on the right track.

This is a bit of an exaggeration but here’s my example of what I mean:

I’ve just created some printed piece to be reviewed before sending to the printers; Joe from accounting walks past my desk and sees the samples for the boss to look over and says something like this: “Wouldn’t that look better in a Comic Sans?”

Again, I’m pulling this example out of thin air, we don’t have a Joe from accounting, and I’ve yet to be asked to put anything in (shiver) Comic Sans. But that’s the kind of things that do happen, where they ask questions like “Why isn’t everything centre-aligned?” or general comments about the colours used – when I’m sticking to our corporate colours. Another common question is “Why isn’t this package in Word Format?”.

It’s for the same reason I don’t tell Joe how to do his jobs, there are just certain things that have an internal standard, an industry standard. There are some things that may seem obvious to someone not involved in the project but that would affect the result, decreasing both the efficiency of the project as well as the quality, prevent future revisions. In some cases I’ve had to redo entire projects because a co-worker set the file up in such a way that it was nearly impossible to edit easily and the files were corrupted in a way that we could not compress the files for sending via e-mail (which was the end purpose of those files).

I also find some frustration with my limited creative freedom and a handful of instances involving micromanagement that prevented me from getting work done efficiently or with any standard of quality.

In Conclusion

I am happy with my decision to be, and stay an In-House Designer, I feel secure in my job, and see a lot of potential for growth in my career. I also do enjoy being ‘forced’ to work on all aspects of the design process for multiple forms of design.

I do recommend considering In-House Design as a career choice, every company needs a designer.

What are Your Thoughts?

Are you a designer, or planning to become one? What are your thoughts on In-House Design, or recommendations for someone looking into Agency or Freelance design?

Where I’ve been…

Well not that I have a huge readership to be concerned… yet… I have been really busy. I’ve been very occupied with my work, and with the process of buying my first home, and other general shenanigans. I just haven’t found the time to write, but I’m going to change that, I’m getting things done a lot more efficiently lately.

I just wanted to do a quick post to go over why there’s such a jump in time between posts, and go over what’s up and coming.

Taking my RGD Exam – rgdexamboard.com

Time has certainly flown by; it feels like just yesterday I was unsure of what I wanted to go to college for and where. It seems I have just reached a combined total of 7 years education and work experience in the field of graphic design.

My Exam is this Thursday (June 30^th, 2011) and I’m really nervous, the whole process feels a lot like applying for a job and going to school all in one.

I’ve been reviewing textbooks, preparing rationales and rehearsing my “lines” for the interview, I’m a terrible public speaker.

Anyways, I’ll consider a recap on the process when it’s all over and done with.

Stock Illustration

With the new house, I’ve been starting to find that money is starting to get a little tight, and as a graphic designer I have a lot of options for finding ways to ease my tightening budget.

I chose to start with creating Stock Illustration, now I know there’s some debate out there about the affects of Stock Illustration on the industry, but I personally think that’s irrelevant. (Again I’ll probably go into this at a later date once I’ve had more experience in it.)

I’ve found that creating vector illustrations is something I can do without sacrificing too much of my time when I’m not at work. I’ve just started submitting to a few sites, and am still waiting for approval on most of them, I’ll go into more detail once things are up on more sites and have comparisons for you.

Fotolia is one of the first to get through to approving my submitted illustrations, the rest either haven’t gotten to my work yet, or are only half through.

Upcoming Posts

I’m not making any promises about posts but here are the upcoming themes:

• Trials and Tribulations of the In House Designer
• Stock Illustration – What’s the Debate? How to get started? Where to Sell?
• RGD Exam – Exploring the process, and how I faired.

About Comments on this Blog

I just want to finish off with a little bit on posting comments.

Well I haven’t gotten any legitimate readers… again, yet… I have received a lot of spam comments, I really don’t understand how people assume a wall of text full of links will get them hits to their website…

I understand that people want/need to post on random blogs to increase hits to their website/blog. But, I will only approving comments that meet one or all of the following criteria. (Not that the culprits will ever actually read this.)

• Is a legitimate comment relating to the blog post
• A generic complementary post that makes sense to the post (as in NOT a comment about enjoying the debate on my “coming soon” page)
• Is NOT a wall of text, or an advertisement that has nothing to do with even the theme of my blog
• And is NOT super obviously just an advertisement, a generic post is fine, but use a name of some sort even if it’s fake versus “New TV Shows Online” as the commenter

That’s just my little rant though

Design is Thinking

It’s been a while since I set up this blog and created my first post here. I was planning to start this off with a post about starting your journey on becoming a Graphic Designer, but after reviewing what I had started I felt it came off a bit too preachy to start off with, and I wanted to get some more input from some of my friends that moved into different specialized areas of design for comparison. I also want to wait for the 2010 National Salary Survey to come back.

So, then what is this lovely little post going to be about then? Well I’m glad you asked. 2010 is far from over but it has been quite the whirlwind of a year. In my mind it was just yesterday I took the risk moving south in a job transfer to only be laid off a few months later. That was 2009, and a lot has certainly happened since then. If anything,it shows that you should take everything that happens as an opportunity, sure I was scared, but I’m better off now then I would have been if I hadn’t been laid off then.

Anyways, onto more important things. It’s October! This puts a damper into getting much work done on the blog, as holidays will be starting soon, and once fall hits the woman in me needs to bake. Work also has me incredibly busy right now as well, so my free time has become even more limited. The projects that are on the top of my file right now are business cards, and some minor personal print projects.

The big thing coming up soon is: November 11th & 12th – Design Thinkers

I’m still in negotiations on the how, but my boss and I are working out me taking the time to go without using up my Christmas Vacation Time!

It was hit or miss before, but when I got the snail mail with information and the last call email for early bird pricing I caved. I will be attending, and I’ll be going to both lunches at Baton Rouge. I’ll be sure to come back with lots of interesting tidbits, and news.

Well that’s that, a very casual “What’s Up” Post. Enjoy your fall, now go out and enjoy the crisp weather and some hot apple cider! That’s what I plan to do.

Welcome to Nailkita Designs, as the title here says this blog is attached to my graphic design portfolio website.

If you came here from my website this little intro will be just a more casual version of the one posted on my home page. I’m going to try to keep the tone of this blog a lot more casual and conversational.

So, to get started, my name’s Kilian Walker and I’m a Graphic Designer, a Provisional Registered Graphic Designer to be specific. I have a formal graphic design education from Canadore College, and after a year or so working in the Newspaper industry, building ads and doing page layouts, I decided I wanted to be more involved with the digital side of design so I moved on to complete Sheridan College’s Interactive Multimedia program.

I’ve since started my career at a help desk software company where I take on a variety of roles from print to web design, and even do some extensive work in Audio/Video – creating demo videos, tutorials and client testimonials, which until recently was one of my weaker skills. I’ve really learned a lot working for this company, at my previous employers I learned only how to work fast and efficiently, at things I already knew, to get things done for press time, here I’ve been able to use my efficiency learned there to crank out quick icons for the developers, but I’ve been given more creative freedom and time, to be able to learn and perfect my skills in different areas of design that I normally would have avoided doing.

Anyways, onto a little bit about what this blog is about.

Updates will not be on a set schedule, the topics will range, but I’ll keep them in the realm of Graphic Design, Technology, or Creative Works related. My posts could be about things I’m working on right now, something new I learned at work, the latest design/technology conference I’ve been to, or just tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

I hope reading my posts you can: either learn something, or take away some inspiration. I’m still learning every day to be the best designer I can be so I hope you can too.

P.S. Yeah cheesy line to end off on, but I was feeling kind of cheesy when I wrote this

This is just being added so I don’t have an empty blog and can see how the styles and themes are looking.

The current plan is to have my new website design and this blog up and running before Autumn starts this year.

Currently I am on course but I hope to expedite my progress I’m just needing to write up descriptions for projects in my portfolio and build the last handful of pages.