Graphic DesignerTypical Day

Steffi Graph tiptoes into her office at 8:30 am. As soon as anyone at the public relations agency sees her, she’ll have twenty emails from art directors, copywriters, clients and other people working in the company wanting projects completed. Sure enough, she has ten emails already. One client needs a packaging design for their new chicken sandwich. Hmmm… she considers trying to incorporate their logo in-between two delectable looking sesame buns, and starts to draw a rough sketch. “That could use more lettuce,” her co-worker Mindy suggests. Ugh. Vegans.

^{No thanks, we're trying to put on a few pounds.}

One of the pitfalls of working as a graphic designer is that everyone has his own opinion about what a design should look like. (That’s also one of the fun, exciting parts, because how boring would it be if everyone envisioned everything exactly the same way?) She creates four mockups for the client and emails them off. As soon as she attaches the JPEGs, another email comes in asking her to design a banner for “Russian Appreciation Day” at the local museum. Steffi knows very little about Russia, except for what she has picked up from James Bond movies. She appreciates those, at least.

Because this isn’t her area of expertise, she needs an external source of inspiration. She searches through the museum’s website for banners that they have used in the past. All of them have a streamlined look that is similar to the contemporary logo that the museum uses. She wants to continue in this vein, now that she knows roughly what they’re looking for. After trying a handful of fonts, she finally settles on using Cyrillic script to give the banner that Slavic, old Russia look. The background uses elements – and the same color palette - of the Russian flag. Red, white and blue – who knew? All of these elements combine to represent “Russia” in much the way they have been represented in the past, but with her own personal touch and flair. This is an example of a project where she doesn’t want to get too insanely inventive with look and style, because she’s being asked to honor something with a lot of tradition, stylistically as well as historically. She sends the image to an art director.

It’s noon and Steffi is itching to jump out the window (calm down, she works on the first floor) and into the sunny afternoon. Another email pops up asking her to attend a meeting with a client. She responds to the email by asking if the PR agency is catering the meeting. They are indeed. Score.