Hi. My name's Amanda. Welcome to my blog :)

For those of you that don't know much about me, let me give you a quick summary:

I'm a 4th-year junior at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. It's tough, but I enjoy it. iDAAP will mostly pertain to that part of my life, so get ready for some design discussion!

I just returned from my 4th co-op quarter, working as a packaging designer for Evenflo and learning a lot about corrugate and CAD. I'm really glad I got exposure to that side of design, and would not be upset with another packaging job in the future. The co-op quarter before that, I was also at Evenflo, but in the Playtime & Feeding department, spending a lot of time making Alias models and Photoshop renders. That was a lot of fun.

My first two co-op quarters were spent at a small company in Irvine, California called Aspen Medical Products. It was a great place to start my design experiences, and the people there taught me to always look for new design and form opinions about it. The geographical location was an excellent bonus.

As far as design goes, I still feel I would likely be content designing anything if I was in the right environment with good, friendly people. My dream job, however, would be to work for Disney some day. I suppose I should start sketching Mickey ears- get prepared and all.

In fact I think that's a good way to start out my goals for the quarter...

1. Improve my sketching. One of the most depressing drawbacks of coming back to school currently is that I seem to have lost my sketching skills, which by the end of last quarter had been doing so well. My goal is to sketch more outside of class and really become more comfortable with a pencil. A good way to do that would be to draw Disney characters ;)

2. Amp up my portfolio. It's getting tougher out there, and currently my portfolio does not reflect my full potential. I have finally invested in a Wacom tablet, so I'm hoping that will help me go to that next level. I'm also hoping for a lot of good feedback Thursday.

3. Give an interesting and persuasive final presentation. Under this same goal should fall the sub-goal of anti-procrastination, which always seems to go by the wayside. It is because I always rush through the final presentation in a time crunch that I never give myself time to prepare and practice an organized presentation. "Winging it" never worked for me, so you'd think I would have learned my lesson by now. Well, this time, I'm gonna do it right. I hope.

Wish me luck.