Ashley Reub joined our teams meeting today and gave us a glimpse into how she may have started her design career in something completely different but managed to go from that medium to a completely different one. Initially Ashely started out as a UI UX designer and she started working on a multitude of different projects and was given the opportunity to design packaging, and that’s when it started clicking for her and she realized that she loved packaging design so much that’s all she wanted to work on. This made me think about how I’ve touched on all these different mediums in school so far and I’m still left with a not so concrete idea of what kind of design that I’d really like to focus on and learn more about. I think its going to take some experience in the field to understand what kind of design that I’d like to investigate further and really get into. In her experience she had made some packaging for the production class and it didn’t really grab her then, but working on the same medium with more experience and post graduating it was a different experience for her. The way Ashley talks about product packaging design really reflects how passionate she is about this kind of design in particular. It feels kind of surreal when I get to listen to the designer who has work that is currently in my fridge, and now every time I drink silk almond milk I’m reminded of this designer that I’ve only kind of interacted with once. Personally packaging design is something that I have always been interested in as it seems to be the kind of design that people from all walks of life interface with most frequently. If I were to make a packaging design and show it to someone who doesn’t really care about design or understand the application of it in society as a whole, a product package is easy to understand and needs little context to understand it. Personally I think it would be interesting to revisit this medium in the field and try my hand at designing packaging for a product that is not of my own design unlike my kit from integrated production techniques that is solely based on my own ideas. Ultimately this session gave me a lot of new information to process and utilize for my own career development. I no longer have this kind of fear that I’ll wind up in a certain section of design and be trapped in there until I retire.
