{ Throwback Thursday - 1 }

As I may have mentioned in some of my past post I have been studying design for the better part of six years. I started in high school at a local BOCES center and have continued my education at Villa Maria College where I am a senior. In those last six years I have created somewhere between 150 and 200 designs, some I'm proud of, others not so much. As a Twitter user I have noticed that over the last year or so that Throwback Thursday has become something very popular. So it only makes sense to me to start my own Throwback Thursday, but instead of posting old photos of myself I'll post old design. I give you a brief description of the design and tell you what I would change, what I like, and what I was thinking when I designed it. So without further or do I present to you the first Throwback Thursday Design on Rkaye Design. And remember to check back on Thursday to see more of my old designs, who knows you may learn something new.

First Throwback is back to my junior year in high school, the year was 2010 and I had just started at the BOCES Center earlier that year. Being 16 I was still unsure of what I wanted to do with the rest of my live. I knew that I was good with computer, was an okay drawer and all my best grades came from classes were thinking outside the box was important.

For those of you who are not all that familiar with BOCES Centers, it's a vocational school that high school juniors and senior have the option of going to for half of their school day. The one that I had choose out of the eleven or so options was Communication Design. The class forced on Graphic Design, Photography, Press Printing, Silk screening, and a light look into animation. Graphic Design was the thing that I loved the most. One of the many parts of BOCES was the their involvement in SkillsUSA.

SkillsUSA was a membership that all BOCES student could sign up for. It was a career and technical student organization. It has around 335,00 student members, in the United States. Ever year they have a National Leadership competition that all the winner from each state get invited to compete in. To get to National, you had to win states, to win states you had to win regional. These were big deals in all BOCES Centers, everyone wanted to win National for their program.

As a junior in my class we completed in Regional. In our class we had to create a t-shirt design, that would be used for the next years Regionals competition. We had some guidelines and rules that had to be followed. The design had to use SkillsUSA colors which were red, navy blue, and gold. It also had to say SkillsUSA, 2011, Area 1 and New York.

In my class of nineteen all of use designed and created something we all thought could win. The design would be submitted to Regionals and also in our local BOCES Center competition. It was judged by three of the schools employees.

Below is my design for the competition.

I'm proud to say that my design won the local competition and even prouder to say that it won Regionals and was used for the t-shirt design the following year.  Here's a picture.

Are there things I would change, or course. Looking at it now with six year under my belt I see a lot of mistakes that would defiantly not fly in the real world. The stroke on the letters in a huge graphic design mistake that is embarrassing to show on a design blog. But from this mistake I've grown. If I could go back and tell myself what to change or how to design I probably would suggest to change the shape of the design and get rid of the jagged edges, change the type and probably not use so much clip art in one design.

Honesty if I ever when back I would never change this design. It was really the start of my design career. This now awful design gave me the confidence that I needed to start the career of my dreams, and for that I thank my t-shirt design for all it has done for me.