Posts Tagged "About"

Twenty-Thirteen Update

I am in now within my 29th year of existence on this planet and things are pretty good. I started a new job a little over a month ago and I am completely loving it. It holds the same pains that many places do within my industry, however at the end of the day I feel like I am where I am supposed to be.

Perhaps I am becoming a little reflective as my 20s come to an end, however reading through my posts since my last birthday makes me realize, with pride, how much life has evolved. As well as moving I have switched jobs not once, but twice. My 28th birthday seems like a long time ago.

Before I changed jobs I was in the middle of a series of posts that were very dependent on my workplace environment at the time. The sudden stop halfway through is bothering me however I am working on reformatting them slightly and may pick back up in a few months.

This years Towel Day graphics are now live. Instead of producing one graphics in all of the various sizes, instead I uploaded the high resolution versions of the images and produced two new images with help from local photographers.

I have begun to see them out and about in the world and I am truly loving it. It actually gives me a new idea for the twitter competition for next year.

I have arrived

About a week or so ago I finally got drafted and now I am officially part of the Dribbble community.

Once again, life has a way of getting away from me. I have been posting fairly regularly lately, and I have bunch of updates coming up soon. I should have probably posted something on here back when I started dribbling, however life has been keeping me pretty busy. I don’t have very much posted yet, but I am slowly working on it. Thanks again to Jon Phillips (@jophillips) for drafting me.

Next week I am officially moving to out of the suburbs and closer to the downtown area of San Diego in order to be closer to work, but honestly I couldn’t be more excited about.

Online Identity Crisis

My name is Travis Avery and I am Graphic Artist, however it is not necessarily that simple. Social networking has become increasingly important; your online persona can sometimes become a representation of who you are professionally as well as personally. When your life becomes separated into various different accounts with various handles representing you, keeping track of the spiderweb of usernames spread across the interwebs can sometimes feel like multiple personality disorder. It doesn’t help that I legally changed my name from “Travis Alan Jackson” to “Travis Avery” back in 2002.

Much to my surprise, and somewhat accidentally, I have come to realize that I have a fairly consistent online social identity:

twitter.com/TravisAvery
facebook.com/TravisAvery
vimeo.com/TravisAvery
linkedin.com/in/TravisAvery
dribbble.com/TravisAvery

XY(Z)

I had a discussion with co-worker the other week about how we had gotten the direction to make our designs more “modern” and in the same breath we were told to appease to the “MTV generation” of people in their “mid-twenties.”

Now I was not there in person when we had gotten this direction, however I got quite a chuckle from this when my co-worker told me about it. The so called “MTV generation” is in fact also called “Generation X,” and it has been a long time since they have been in their mid twenties. We have long since moved into “Gen-Y” and arguably even “Gen-Z,” however I feel that this terminology in and of itself is outdated. Now, me being artist who actually is in his mid twenties I can honestly say my generation would probably be much more willing to describe ourselves as the “Rock Band Generation.”

Appealing to my generation is a more difficult task than most people think; the old ploys don’t really work anymore. The consumer is now educated; we have grown up with technology, with information at our fingertips, and we can easily research to discover if we are being bullshitted.

What I have found is that the trick that works the best is to catch someone’s attention as quickly as possible; show them the product in a way they weren’t expecting. Then give them only the simplest amount of information followed by a URL pointing them to find out more info – empowering the consumer to take matters into their own hands.

The Pendulum

I have had various conversations recently discussing the uniqueness of my generation; how we are the paradigm shift in modern technology. We are the children of the information age, yet maybe the last generation to know what it feels like to be disconnected.

My high school experience is a good example of how the pendulum has swung. My freshmen year of high school very few families owned a computer. People who considered themselves “gamers” were considered to be socially crippled. The only ones who owned a cell phone were those who needed them for business purposes. Yet by my senior year finding a student with a cell phone was an easy task, and most families had at least one computer.

My little sister is graduating high school later this year, and the idea of the family computer was all but dead because in many cases every family member in a household owns their own computer. It is common to find multiple video game consoles in a single household, and just about every person that you run into has a cell phone attached to them. It is also common to find people that do not have a land line.