Today I attended the talk
on campus where Joshua Buckwalter spoke. He is creative director of the company
Inovat and is the President of AIGA Central Pennsylvania. He started with
telling us that his career out of college did start with him having “crappy
jobs” which was sort of refreshing and scary to hear. It is refreshing because
I feel that for most of the design talks I attend they talk about how they
landed all of these great jobs through all the connections they have. This is
scary because being a sophomore in college; I do not have many if any connections.
He discussed user experience and user
interface and the difference between the two. Being a User Experience Designer
consists of a large amount of skills overall, while being a User Interface
Designer is more about prototyping, aesthetics and interface design. He
explained in detail two case studies from his career, Engine Yard and 403 Labs.
Through these case studies he showed as many different ways to get needed
information from clients to create overall better designs. These included
giving them many descriptive cards so the designers would know what the company
thinks of the product and what they want out of a web site. Another exercise he
mentioned was giving the clients a scale of formality to fill out. This is
another beneficial way to get information for the people a designer is working
with or for to understand what they think of their own company.
Lastly, he talked about
AIGA and what a great resource it is. He had mentioned in the beginning how
after he joined AIGA how much it helped him in his career. This is because of all
of the events they offer, job postings and the fact that in general it is just
this great community for designers and budding designers. As a whole I found this
talk very useful to my future career especially when he mentioned all the job
fair-like events that were being offered just this semester.
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