My first two years of undergrad as a public relations major were full of AP style and press releases. When I transferred to Iowa State for my junior and senior year, I changed to an advertising major. PR and Ad are similar enough, a lot of similar classes and marketing ideas are placed behind a lot of what I learned so the switch was easy and creative advertising quickly became my focus of study. Being a transfer student, I had to go back and take all the intro advertising courses before I could really dive into my specification ones. My senior year of college was the first time I had ever taken a course based on creativity and not on studying flashcards or memorizing formulas. I felt like a fish out of water. I had taken my fair share of art classes through high school and local programs, but beginner pottery and drawing were based on technique. I had to learn to to be creative. Which I had always assumed to be an easy thing…but for anyone who has been stuck in a creative rut before, you know it’s really tough and frustrating to force yourself to make work or ideas when you’re lacking the creative drive.

Which leads me to my first year of graduate school (just a short three months after I graduated ISU). I’m officially a grad art student!!! I have good knowledge of graphic design and I’ve worked with it for a long time, but mostly focusing on print work. As a member of the introductory Interaction Design program at CU, I’m so excited and curious to learn and create for the next 10 months or so. Being in my second week of classes I am still enamored with the topics we’re learning and everything about the program. But I feel the overwhelming sense of dread coming with relation to the start of new projects and trying to be creative. So I have decided to embark on a quest for creativity. I stumbled upon the #100day project and as a person who loves sticking to schedules and making things, I have never done something repetitively for 100 days straight. But I feel like there’s a lot for me to learn out of this and so here I am. I’m deciding what I want to do for 100 days but I’ve narrowed it down to: watercolor, doodles, lettering, or patterns. This is my attempt to become more creative by the most simple way I can think of…by literally creating something new everyday. I know my creativity and unique thinking processes have not been extinguished, but with everything else going on in my jumbled brain, it might have been lodged somewhere where I just can’t get to it at the moment. So here’s to design, odd projects, and the daily journey I am embarking on, ISO my creativity.

Cheers!