I watched the Lynda documentary on Rick Morris for our blog this week. I decided to choose Morris because of the description. As you can expect, it caught my eye when it said he had worked on broadcast design and motion graphics for shows like Survivor and The Soprano’s DVDs. His reel was quite impressive because I had seen some of the commercials before. I’m surprised he didn’t have his Survivor work on there because it’s such a popular show.
I really enjoyed listening to what he had to say in the documentary because he was so conversational and truly loved talking about his profession. He said several things that grabbed my attention and confirmed some of my previous thoughts. I know that I don’t want to freelance. Not knowing when you’re going to receive your next paycheck or when you’ll get the next phone call asking you to do something would stress me out. I guess one aspect of that would be that once you got an offer you’d better make sure you turn out some brilliant work so someone else will see it and hire you. The pressure of not knowing when you’ll work next, while also having to provide for a family would be too much for me. I want to work for a company where I make a yearly salary and have the ability to work my way up and have more power, responsibility and make more money. I like the idea of having people work for me.
It was nice being able to relate to Morris from a design standpoint. When he said his #1 tool he liked using to design was his pen I immediately thought about our class and how it has been emphasized that our process should begin with sketches. It looked like he sketched out everything that crosses his mind. I was really impressed with his font/typography sketches. You can tell just from the sheer volume of work that he is passionate about what he’s doing. It was also reassuring that he said he then uses Photoshop and Illustrator, followed by Flash, Final Cut Pro and After Effects. I wish we had been able to spend time in boot camp or in class going over how to use After Effects because it’s such a cool program and I enjoy using it. I just wish I had more experience with it, especially because the interface is different from most of the other Adobe products.