Introduction Statement of Intent &

Dear Faculty & Staff,

Hello, my name is Joseph Churchill from Columbia, South Carolina, by way of Des Moines, Iowa.

During my thirty-year career in information technology, I always found the best parts of my days were: working with users to elicit requirements, building user interfaces, designing websites, and finding new ways to tell the story of a project’s current and future performance through data visualizations. However, the aspects of my career continued to become more and more focused on maintaining the status quo. Struggles with toxicity in the workplace led to my resignation in February 2022. After taking a month to unpack, reflect and contemplate my next chapter, I focused on what brought me joy during my free time, occasionally as a side hustle: photography, drawing, website design, and helping friends try to develop their brands. This led me to apply for readmission to the University of South Carolina in Studio Arts. After completing Summer/Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 classes, I am even more committed to earning my degree in a creative field.

I intend to apply to the GD+I program in Spring 2023. Professional experiences gained during my previous career directly correlate to GD&I: Photoshop, Acrobat, HTML + CSS, problem-solving, analysis, UX/UI development, and data visualization. I seek to hone my skills, learn new skills, and try out new ideas in design and illustration.

This process book illustrates my work from arts102, my creative interests, and my abilities in other creative modes.

Project one involved six-word stories. I developed two quick stories about what led me back to school after almost a 30year break from the university. After collecting the stories, word maps were built for each to flush out ideas and words that might help drive the visual narratives image and typeface.

The best part of using the word maps was helping search through stock images and typefaces to sync up the stories. For example, there are a lot of pictures of crows, but I saw a photo of crows with a very bold yellow backdrop; it felt right. The second story’s search relied on the word map from the word pivot to switch.

Typefaces again, thanks to the word maps, I had a good idea of what sort of mood I wanted to set with each story. For the first, I wanted something bold with movement below the typical bottom. That’s when I found Bree Semi Bold; the ‘f’ sold me on this typeface. In the second story, I was torn; the original image had etched labels under the switches, removed through clone brush, but elsewhere on the picture was this excellent sharpie text that I tried to duplicate through typeface using Permanent Marker. Which I used for all the words in the story.

Question: When working with type, what are some excellent techniques/ questions to ask yourself during layout to know when to push the text to the bleed or beyond? It seems much easier to visualize an image and when to lead the viewer out of the frame.