Thank you for visiting my blog! My name is Kate Nickerson and I am a fourth-year Graphic Communication student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. I blog about graphic design, web design, and technology. I hope you enjoy my posts, and if you do, remember to subscribe to my RSS feed!
I designed the sports pages five days a week for Cal Poly’s student-run newspaper, the Mustang Daily, and it is printed with an on-campus offset web press, also run by students in the Graphic Communication department. After designing close to two hundred layouts for the Mustang Daily, I am beginning to see what works and looks good…and what doesn’t. Read more
I have a digital point-and-shoot camera, so I am fairly limited with creative options for photography. However, photo composition is something that anyone, including myself, can learn about and apply to their photography. Here are some basics I picked up from my Digital Photography class last year, and were discussed in Get the Most from your Digital Camera by Simon Joinson. Read more
Using Illustrator, I was working on some ideas for a brochure at my Campus Dining job today and decided to do a “graffiti-style” look. Using basic tools, I came up with a type effect that I thought turned out pretty neat. Here’s how I did it. Read more
In all my years of drumline, I had never gotten a chance to wear a drumline shirt until this past season at Cal Poly. While it had been spoken of in the past, it never formulated into an actual plan. This time, I decided I would take the challenge of designing the shirt, and the members were all very excited about it. Find out my thought process for designing this shirt. Read more
I am a beginner with Photoshop, so I refer to online tutorials very often to learn about different tools and photo effects. Today I stumbled across a tutorial by Chris Spooner for making a modern, trendy typographic poster using a simple word or phrase and scaling it to different sizes while fitting it together like a puzzle on a 45 degree grid. Here’s the approach I took to this design. Read more
This logo that I made is for a friend that founded a program for older students (in high school and college) to run extracurricular activities they are passionate about for younger children. Here’s how I approached this logo design and the creation process. Read more
After using Twitter for a couple weeks, I began to realize how many designers had a blog. I follow a few designers on Twitter, read their blogs, and was really impressed with how informative they were. And then I learned about WordPress. Read more
