In any design job, you face deadlines. Clients want things right this very minute! Or, they needed it yesterday! (My boss likes to throw that one out at me a lot.) But what if you had only 30 minutes to design something … and it was actually kind of fun?
A couple of weeks ago, I got the privilege to participate in the annual Sacramento City College Show-Off Competition in the faculty division. The competition is part of our annual end-of-year student show for the Graphic Communications department at the college. There’s a faculty version, a student version and a 3D rendering version. And yes, it was as much fun to participate as it was to watch.
The faculty version pitted myself; Don Button, department chair and Photoshop whiz; Chris Seddon, my boss at the graphic design lab and an Illustrator whiz; and Tom Cappelletti, teacher of many disciplines in our department.
Our task? We were given a topic on the spot, had 15 minutes to brainstorm and then 30 minutes to design an 11″ x 17″ poster on said topic. Our topic was “Tagging Yourself.” We had to choose five words that described ourselves and design a poster using mainly typography to convey the message.
Don won the competition (winners were determined by popular vote). I came in second by a tiny margin. I was quite honored, as Don was a teacher of mine and is highly respected here in Sacramento. Don also won last year’s competition so he’s an old hand at this. 
This was my entry:
This was my brainstorming sketch (you can see that I thought of the concept pretty early … drawing the profile face was the biggest challenge):
This was Don’s winning entry. If you know Don, you’ll know this is very much him:
In all, the whole experience was a blast! There was also a ton of great student work at the show. If you want to read more about it (and see the winning student and 3D entries), visit the GCOM@SCC blog!
[Super thanks to Andrea Diaz-Vaughn, who headed the planning committee (and invited me to participate in the faculty show) and GC Club president Priscilla Garcia)!]
