Day of Design Write-up

On March 1, 2014 we had the choice of attending Skype presentations from 2 out of 3 professional designers, and I attended presentations by Aaris Sherin and Jennifer Alrich.

Aaris Sherin is the author of Sustainable Design, which is the subject she mainly presented about. She featured a few people who took simple ideas of sustainability and turned them into successfull businesses. One includes an illustrator from the UK who designed his own characters that were made into stuffed toys, which are part of the fair trade organization in Nepal. Sherin said that fair trade has the most potential because it makes the best out of an imperfect world. I really like her idea of sustainable design, because I believe in going green to protect the earth, and integrating this into my potential career would be very exciting.

The next presenter, Jennifer Aldrich, is a Content Strategist and UX editor at Schoolwires, Inc.She started out with a basic introduction to how she got to this career, then went into the nitty gritty about UX design, which I found to be very interesting. I didn't realize that is is comprised of many different careers, and that it is best to have experience with several different fields of design. For example, a Content Strategist and UX designer edit wireframes to ensure usability of new designs, collaborate with other departments with areas of improvement, conduct remote and in-house usability research with clients, and analyze Google Analytics Data. She also gave other advice such as creating several social media accounts to follow leading industry professionals and start professional networking, don't expect to get your dream job right after college, and don't be afraid to try new things outside of your degree. I have to say it was very interesting to hear what she had to say, and it made me more interested in User Experience design, because it seems to be more of what I would like to do as a career. Of course, I still have time to figure that out, but I will definitely do more research on that field of design to see if it is really what I would like to pursue.