My name is Chava Light. I’m a staff writer here at The Site Company and I handle the Art & Design Fusion blog. (Examples of some of my work can be seen at www.chavastudios.com.) How I ended up in the world of design is a mystery in and of itself. While I had always been the kid everyone asked to draw their book report covers for elementary school, for some reason I ignored my art calling and decided it would be a good idea to get a degree in English (not the most practical decision I’ve ever made) when college rolled around. In my last semester, I decided to take some courses at a local art college while I “figured out what I wanted to do next,” and in another moment of genius regarding my education, I somehow ended up pursuing my second Bachelors degree – this time in fine art and illustration. I still shake my head and ask myself, “Who gets a second Bachelors degree, Chava?”
Having to work through two Bachelors degrees (and currently my MFA in Illustration) has it’s merits though, and as it turned out, these merits actually came in the form of my work itself: freelance design and illustration. Most often, my jobs turned into a combination of the two. Although I had not been traditionally trained as a graphic designer, my art background helped with composition and creativity, and necessity (who wants to be a starving artist, right?) along with a general love of learning new things (the computer world, especially!) provided the basis for learning the design programs fairly quickly. I’d like to think my clients never knew how I struggled through those first jobs, and I’d like to forget how the very first time I was instructed to include crop marks, I manually made them myself… inverted. (Hehe.) But I accepted every bit of work that came my way – no matter how small – and with every job, I learned a new skill.
One thing that clients have always seemed to like about my design work is that my fine art/illustration background seems to be ever-present. Sometimes it’s an organic texture, a compositional uniqueness, and sometimes its the design itself or illustrations I’ve created for use in a project. I do not think people need to have an art background to be good graphic designers or be a good graphic designers to be artists, but I do think it’s important to incorporate art into design and design into art – to remember that design is art.
I’m writing this blog is to try blur the edges of art and design a little more for other designers out there, to suggest new ways and reinvestigate old ways of bringing more visual and near-tactile life into digital work. Each blog post should address a new skill or idea which I will demonstrate through a new project, demo, or description. All comments, ideas, suggestions, and challenges are welcome! Let’s create an atmosphere where we challenge ourselves in new areas, grow as artists and as designers together, and create some art & design FUSION!
