By Kevin Akins

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INVEST IN YOUR PROJECTS: HOW TO DELIVER COMPELLING CONTENT

Invest In Your Projects: How to Deliver Compelling Content One of the most looked-over opportunities in a project is when designers don’t take advantage of how they present and deliver a project to a client. Whether it’s a meeting to show off preliminary designs, concepts midway through the project, or final touches on a chosen design; there is a real o...

Sherman Family Fitness: An Investment Project

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Sherman Family Fitness: An Investment Project I realized it’s very difficult to reference a site on a portfolio months after I’ve designed it, because it never appears the same as I last saw it or it’s vanished from the World Wide Web altogether. Sites aren’t something a designer should just build for a client and see them on their way ...

Damn… I haven’t posted since June. It’s safe to say that I discovered where all my time and energy go from day to day when certain things “open” back up. I came off of my hiatus back in January this year and went right back into designing content in hopes that I’d be able to resign from my day job and get right back into my career field as a content designer. The pandemic came and messed things up of course… I was able to collect a check for a period of time from my day job throughout March, April, and May. Once June came around, I was back in the store and witnessing first hand how negligent, ignorant, arrogant, and misinformed so many people were as we tried to practice safe social distancing.

So once I got any break at all from the day job, I had all the time in the world to get back to creating content. It’s funny how that works, right? If you ever wondered what the phrase “all money ain’t good money” actually means, there’s a clear example for you! Hey… no shade towards my day job. My team that I personally work with has looked out for me in so many ways and has even been a big part of encouraging me to design content as well. It’s a real and transparent situation… an accountability system at best! I praise all those I continue to work with.

Enough of that though… here’s a quote from someone who actually opened my eyes while on my journey of self-empowerment. Joe Budden is very vocal on creatives getting the social and financial respect and recognition that we all deserve. He voices it quite often and quite effective on his platform. He’s all about the creator! And god damn it, I couldn’t agree more! What he’s mentioning in this quote has everything to do with the microwave era that we currently live in today. Read it, and let it sink in!

I want to share some personal experiences and things I’ve concluded with you all (if you don’t mind). At the time of this post, I am now 34 years of age. I am also a black man in America. On October 27th 2019, I was robbed at gunpoint after closing up and leaving my day job one evening by a man stalking employees in the parking lot during closing hours. When I had a gun pulled on me and aimed right at my face for a very long minute or two, I thought about my mom and my daughter. George Floyd called out for his mom as he was being held down by the police. Imagine having a nightmare that you were suffocating until you died. Your legs and torso are being held down by two other individuals so you can’t reposition yourself even a little bit, and another man weighing at least 150 pounds is kneeling down into the back of your neck at the same time. That’s like drowning without being in a large bod of water. I couldn’t help but empathize with Mr. Floyd in those final moments of his. It triggered me. The point of this entry is to express how I’m feeling as a black man right now in this country.

Anyway, about this post. A good friend and I have been behind the scenes creating and developing a small graphic tees line made to spread awareness of some powerful people (past and present) and their most famous quotes. A percentage of profits will go towards organizations helping those who are falsely arrested and those that are educating communities on African American issues.

This is one of the first projects I worked on before the country went on lock down and the first project I had the pleasure of working on with . It’s a simple project, but it’s one I enjoyed working on as well… a simple flyer for the 1st anniversary private party of in Midtown (Sacramento). I don’t do flyers that often, and typically take on far bigger projects than this, but these are those fun little projects you cane experiment with new creative ideas as well add them to your catalog.

There is so much truth to this quote above by the brilliant . The fact that if anyone has enough mind to hate something you design, there has to be someone who loves it. You don’t technically hate something without having a reason to hate it. This especially goes for the bold creative trend-setters in the fashion community. When someone creatively comes up with something bold, different, and new; someone will hate it! On the flip side of that hate, others will have an eye for the boldness and newness of the trend. You can apply this quote on so many aspects of life and things we see and engage with every single day… politics, fashion, and even music!

2020 marks the beginning of a new decade and a very special one (sorry for the choice of words). Despite the current state of the world, it has in fact challenged every one of us to be creative in terms of communication and how we conduct business on a regular.

This is the Rock With The Dead EP post redux. Since I’ve gone through a rebranding and improved the way I post content, I was faced with a challenge on how to share some of my recent work. I want all of the work I do to appear visually as it’s meant to be… if it’s album artwork, I wan to display what it looks like on a CD jewel case. If it’s a logo, I want to share what it looks like on business cards, letterheads, or even shopping bags. I always want the message to be delivered as it’s meant to be!

Being about your business can mean a lot of things, but paying close attention to it is a key factor to success. Think about who your audience is… who you are of service to. Think about what your brand means to them and the message you want to relay to that audience. Remember that as designers, we design for the end-user (the person on the receiving end of the goods and/or services). The end-user of a particular B2B software might be in customer service while the end-user of a mobile app just might be your typical and everyday consumers. If we don’t design for those in particular and with them in mind, they will pay your products and services no mind.

This is an icon set I made. It consists of the most commonly used icons throughout a website or mobile app, and are great for UI designers (like myself). I will make this content downloadable at some point in the next two weeks!

As designers, we don’t talk much about the hard points our clients and clients’ audiences are faced with. We get caught up in trying to fulfill our clients wants for something cool or simply what they think they want and need. In the end, the audience is left out, and a client is back to square one with figuring out the ongoing problem.

Remember, as a designer we must ask ourselves if we’re asking the right questions.

Another throwback project; this time from 2017! Kee Her was a former co-worker of mine who worked in the marketing and sales department of what is now CodeStack at SJCOE in Stockton, CA. In the midst of working on the CA School Dashboard — a metrics system for the LCFF and LCAP for the CA Department of Education, Kee and his cousin Koob hired me to help them with their very own RIA business. This project came complete with both brand identity and a landing page. Unfortunately, the website has been down since then, but this was still one of the logos I made and am very proud of! I also enjoyed doing this project altogether. Kee… Koob… we’re going to have to go to Track 7 again soon LoL. This is KH-Squared RIA.

I’ll leave this quote here for some of you to think about it. Reflect on a time you used a mobile app and at any point of time you navigated through that app, you often thought to yourself “Hmmm, this app would be so much better if it had ‘this’ or ‘that.’” Oh! Maybe you’re a “delivery app” courier and in certain restaurants that you pickup orders from, the menu draws inapplicable for the customer in terms of modifications to a hamburger or side salad. If you can reflect on those moments (as a courier), you’re probably thinking “now I have to call the customer, hope that they answer this random hashed phone call, and they’ll let me know what they want on their burger while the cashier rings up the order.” In those moments, it can seem like a lot. Especially if it happens back-to-back from one customer to the next.

I can go on for days with examples of when these types of scenarios occur. I’m sure a lot of you can too! That’s the difference between good and bad design. If it is good, you won’t even think of anything you’d improve to the design personally. In fact, it’ll be so pleasant, it won’t even cross your mind.

We are constantly being faced with challenges that come in various forms… health, finances, difficult tasks at work that resort to improvising. One thing is for sure: these challenges encourage us to assess our strengths and weaknesses and reflect on past experiences that challenged us before. With all that is going on in the world today, it is important that we seize the moment and live life to one’s full potential.

There’s a major difference between design and art. Art can actually be design, but design is a solution to a common problem. Designing solutions will improve our everyday lives. It’s one thing to design something that looks cool… that’s art! It is too often that I see people designing cool things, but they don’t hold up to the actual needs nor communicate the intended message to a company’s target audience. This usually comes in the form of a logo design… six months later the company is looking for yet another logo because the current one they’ve invested time and money into doesn’t go with the packaging. It doesn’t sit well visually on their website! Most importantly, the target audience can’t relate to it. So it’s back to the drawing board. Does the company rehire the same designer who made the current logo? Or do they hire another designer to clean up the mess? It is always important to know the difference.

Intelligence is visible through design! When that occurs, the message is delivered properly to the audience. This is because the designer did enough research on the audience or the end-user of the product or service. This research determines what the audience wants and needs from their favorite brands vs. what the company wants to deliver to them.

Today, I’m excited to show a project I did back in the Summer of 2018. In fact, it’s one of the only projects I did that I thoroughly enjoyed that year! This is part of a logo and brand identity project I did for (Ian Blackstad) a real estate agent and founder of Blackstad Realty Group (). When it came to ex*****on, this project was textbook from start to finish!

There are a lot of Swedish design influences (Stockholm Vibes) throughout the pictorial mark and word mark of the logo and for great reason! The best part about this logo is for ALMOST two years now, Ian is still using this on all of his throughout his services which makes me very happy to know. The mark has lived up to its purpose from the looks of it.

Yes, it’s a character quote! If you’ve never watched Mad Men and you’re in Marketing, I implore you to watch this show. Though it’s more about the ego-driven world of people making an art of selling, it’s still an interesting show! I love me some Don Draper!

People have been talking about cancelling 2020. You can’t cancel what is already here… what you can’t control. It’s not a simulation! We can’t decide to fast-forward and rewind and revise the events that lead up to today. We collectively and individually reap what we sow. Let’s leave the trends of last decade behind (cancel culture, conspiracy theories without tangible evidence, flat earthers, etc.) and let’s make this decade about “accountability!”

Accountability is probably the biggest motivator in life… if you hold yourself accountable, then you know it’s up to you to get something done. It’s not just going to happen because you want it to. You can always count on someone else getting it done if that’s the case, and when that happens, you’ll be left to wonder how much better it could have been done had you decided to do it. Better you than the next person, right?

I don’t know about you all, but I personally am not canceling 2020. I’m kicking some ass this year! All this time I’ve been afforded is allowing me to get things accomplished that I was only ever able to make time in putting it on my vision board six months ago. I’m doing it all in just a few weeks. Put your lives into perspective and let’s kick some the year’s ass!

This is one of the realest things I’ve ever heard someone say. If you haven’t done so, follow and his YouTube channel! His content has helped me a lot in organizing my workspace as well as utilizing Notion.so to the fullest for project management (and life management). Aside from the organizational content he posts, he’ll drop some gems about life in a mind-over-matter sense in some of the most transparent ways!

He says (and not verbatim) “happiness is like a moving target,” stating that if you basically set a goal and achieve that goal, you shouldn’t gauge your happiness based on achieving that particular goal. Once you achieve that goal, you’ll soon find out that you have new goals to achieve and your work cut out for you. It’s one thing to lose 50 lbs, but it’s another to maintain being at that new size. Your goals change! Instead of gauging your happiness on meeting those goals, in hindsight you’ll find that the overall journey it took in meeting that goal is when you were truly happy (the moving target). You were doing something great for your own cause. You were eating right, you were exercising daily, sleeping regularly, and most importantly you felt physically and mentally great! The goal that you achieve just becomes a milestone. Instead of this new found happiness you were hoping for, you just have more goals to make moving forward!

When you truly know your self worth, the work that you put in will show for it. As the saying goes, “you get back what you put in.”

I’ve made it my duty this year to leave no stone unturned so when it comes to design, it’s all about solving a problem down to the smallest details. With that being said, a great product will have guidelines in how to use it, how to read it, and how to adjust it if need be! Those qualities being implemented in a digital product will go a long way, and your audience will love you for it!

For a long time, I struggled with displaying the process of how I get from start to finish with my work. If you can think of any powerful idea; referring to an idea of a startup, you’re not thinking of the process it’ll take to make it all happen. Your ideas are typically thoughts of the “end result” of those great ideas… the finished product!

I’m a firm believer of the process! There is no progress without process!

There’s a gem in the heart of Elk Grove’s historical district called Loc City Parlor, created from the brilliant mind of loctitian, Phet Phomthisane .

If you’re part of , you’ll definitely want to check out his parlor and the amazing work he does! I had the pleasure of designing his new logo for his parlor, with an infusion of Laos tradition. This was one for the books and one of the projects I enjoyed working on the most. Enjoy!

Let’s face it; our world will never be the same again. As humans, we’d be arrogant to think there’s such a normal in the first place. What is normal is simply relative to any particular individual. Everyone’s perception on what is normal is different.

Here’s one for you: this is our new normal.

While I spent the first half of last decade designing content and posting it to my social media platforms, I created quite a buzz for myself. The latter-end of last decade was met with a lot of uncertainty and life changes. Life has a funny way of doing as it pleases with us; even if it’s not in our own plans we’ve set forth. A new challenge for me developed: figure out the social and business landscape of Sacramento, CA and be noticed enough for my audience to engage with me. That wasn’t working. In fact, while I moved back to Sacramento in 2016, I picked up a job as a UI Engineer with what is now known as CodeStack in Stockton, CA and learned very quickly that working for a company doesn’t quite sit well for us designers and creatives. Being a creative professional is a very abstract thing. Implementing something abstract with that of a traditional workspace almost never works in favor of the creative.

So here I was, working at CodeStack and not agreeing to terms and conditions of the job I consciously signed up for in the first place. On the flip side of that, Sacramento was still very different in figuring it out.

So here’s the challenge I’m faced with: taking responsibility for my own actions in becoming better, smarter, and exercising those intelligent muscles to be a far-greater designer and developer. One life situation after the next has presented itself; not just for me personally, but now for the world! In times like now, it’s important that we be brilliant.