John Coy was the GAUGE Speaker for Spring 2011. Not so long ago, he was added to the list of the AIGA LA Fellows, which is a big deal! The information he shared with us was very insightful.Now, let's go back to when I met John Coy.
John Coy was a reviewer during the AIGA Student Portfolio day on April 30th. I was fortunate enough to get a spot to talk to him. When it was my turn to see him, I introduced myself and mentioned that I was from CSULA and was looking forward to hearing him speak in a few weeks. He then went through my portfolio and said many good things, and one of them was that although each piece in my book was different, he felt my "voice" peeking through. I had somewhat of an idea of what he meant, and I knew it was a good thing.
Now, back to the day of his speech at CSULA.
Despite the technical difficulties, John Coy was till able to share a lot of useful information. I loved the fact that he wanted a list of questions from the students to better understand who we are and what we want to learn. I was hoping he would mention something about finding your "voice" and he did!
From what I understood, finding your voice meant finding your passion for design. Once design becomes part of who you are and not just a profession, your work will start speaking for you and exposing your passion. Back in Portfolio Day, he was telling me that he could see that design was something I loved, but was not part of who I was.
I am definitely going to keep growing as a designer to reach that level of passion that all successful designers have. I can't wait!
I agree with you Freddy, I think as Graphic Design students, many of us love design since we are studying it, but it is not fully a part of us quite yet, mostly because we haven't had many opportunities for self-exploration yet. Another thing that John mentioned that resonated with me was the idea of an organic creative process, how we often over-think things, and thus it makes things very complicated. What we should be doing is letting things take its course so that ideas come to us organically without being forced. :)
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