Special Guest: Lauren of creativecurio.com (Part 1)

Well I was twittering away the other day when I saw a post from Lauren at creativecurio.com. She was in need of some blog inspiration. Well, after a little back and forth “twitter-sation” we came up with the idea to interview each other for our blogs…Cool huh?

I have been following Lauren (or LaurenMarie as some of you may know her) at creativecurio.com for about a year now. For those of you who don’t know about Lauren and her fabulous site, she is a graphic designer that loves to share her techniques and inspiration via her blog. I have learned so much from her. She is a real whiz!

So, without further ado, here is the first part of my interview with Lauren from creativecurio.com.

Kelly: First, what is your day job?

Lauren: I’m an in-house graphic designer for Prudential Real Estate (corporate
office, they are a franchiser). I love the variety of the projects I
do—large format banners, trade show booth graphics, booklets, brochures,
logos and some web graphics. 85% of what I do is for print, and I really
like that part.

Kelly: How did you get into design?

Lauren: When my (now) husband and I were just friends, he started teaching me
Photoshop (the way to a girl’s heart, LOL). I’ve always loved photography
and thought everything you could do with PS was so cool! Then he said he
was going to school for this so he could eventually do it for a living. I
was a Psychology and Spanish major at another university at the time. I had
always been interested in art, but of course, They said you can’t make
money being an artist. Graphic design seemed like the perfect compromise! I
absolutely love being creative and learning new things, two musts in this
industry!

Kelly: What is your favorite thing about designing?

Lauren: Being creative, which applies more to ideas than artistic capability. I
have a passion for creating (the art side) and being creative (the thinking
side). I really admire people who have creative ideas, and I cultivate that
skill in myself.

Kelly: Where do you draw design inspiration?

Lauren: Communication Arts is a big source for me. Online is good, too, but I think
more often than not the galleries online feature art/illustration rather
than real graphic design, which focuses on effective visual communication,
not pretty pictures.

Kelly: What is your a quick overview of your design process?

Lauren: Define the objective of the project and gather information on it. Discover
and research what’s been done before and/or possible styles. The thumbnail
stage is very important and one that I am often tempted to skip, especially
when there are tight deadlines. But I know I don’t produce my best work
when I skip any of these steps. Thumbnails allow me to get out my initial
(and obvious) ideas/solutions out of my head so I can start digging to the
deeper, more creative stuff. Then I take the best ideas and create 2-4
rough comps on the computer, get approval and changes from the client and
finalize the design. The part I really dislike is the 3+ rounds of little
changes or when clients come back with their own mockup in PowerPoint
because none of mine “worked” for them

Basically, these are “the 5 D’z of Design,” which I wrote an article on if
you’d like to take a look at that, too!
http://www.inspirationbit.com/the-5-dz-of-design/

Thanks so much to Lauren for answering my questions…Check back on Wednesday for a more personal insight into Lauren.

So, what do you think Lemonheads? Great interview, right?

For more posts about graphic design, tips for working in InDesign and other programs, and design in general, click on over to creativecurio.com. You will be glad you did!