The fashion world has always been something very interesting for me. That’s why in 2005 I started to study fashion design in Santiago, Chile at DUOC UC.
In this learning process I could meet three of my designers friends involves in my project. The study was pretty good, I really liked the design process of clothes, but if you don’t like to sew, you’re done! I preferred to spent time in my computer designing clothes or posters than consuming time in the sewing machine. That’s why in the middle of my second semester I decided to quit.

Very bad semester…

My family felt very up set and disappointed with me. I was twenty years old and I still had vocational crisis!. They try to persuade me with finish the semester and have at least one year of study. But when you know it, you know. It was just a waste of time, and the creativity it wasn’t my best friend during that last semester.
Finally in 2006 I tried luck studying something very similar with the computer graphic course that I took in the other career. The name is Digital Graphic Production; I have doubts with this career, especially because it is two-year career only. Maybe for Canadian, two years is time enough for a career, but in Chile the polytechnics careers don’t have a good reputation.

Polytechnics Institution in Chile

Chilean people think that a five years career is the only option. Personally I think that only exist a few careers that deserve to study for five years, but for university’s and institutions make all careers last five years is a big business. And they just don’t career if they have to teach irrelevant and obsolete content.

At the end I just did it, and it was pretty good as you can notice. Now I have a scholarship and all that “suffering” that I had is almost in the past. And I don’t regret of study a two years career. Mostly because I think that as a human beings and professionals you never finish to learn regardless of how much time you career last.

Today I want to talk a little about my project. I’m very glad with all the knowledge that BCIT has given to me this Term One. How to develop a web site from the content, how to write in a web format, and the information architecture of all a web site is something very that impress to me, because I have no idea what is going on inside a real web project.

Meet the clients

Now all that information allows me to create a good quality project for my thesis in Santiago, Chile. Of course that when I come back to Chile I’ll have to change all the language and the design part too probably. However I think I have almost the 50 percent of my project done here, which make me really happy.

In Chile I will finally meet all the designer of my web site. I only meet three of the six designers. So in 4 months more I going to present my project formally, try to understand their perspective, and the way they want this web site is going to be direct it, in the design and content part. Because is a little hard try to make a project like that without to know the client closely.

In the content part, I have talked with two journalists friend by Messenger, and they are willing to write in the web site. Write about news and culture articles.

This week also I present part of my thesis to my thesis advisor, one of my professors in my career. He likes my idea and thinks that the opportunity of know all the things that I’m learning here can improve the education in my institute too. I think so too. This is a unique opportunity for me, but I want to be a unique opportunity for the institution where I learned all that I know, so I’ll be very enthusiast to give all the knowledge and experience that this trip and scholarship has given me.

Last Saturday I was bored at home, thinking, I was trying to decide between stressing out with work or, simply, just doing nothing. I decided to do nothing, and when I say nothing I mean watching a movie and forgetting a little about my life.

The movie that I chose allow me to talk in my blog this time, is one of the biggest representation of fashion on TV during the last ten years. This series and now movie represents every woman not just for its good writing script, also for this: Fashion, do you know what movie I’m talking about? Ok, is Sex and the City.
The TV show and movie filmed in New York City is my dream come truth. Is all what I want to be: A successful and independent woman (and extremely good looking) and maybe that’s why this show is so famous, who doesn’t want to be like that?

Fashion Icons

In the movie you can see all what happen throughout of three years, all the adventures of this women and in spite of what fairy tales says, the happy endings it doesn’t exist.
Well, but not all is tragic in the story! We also have one of the most important things in the TV show: Glamour. The movie sometimes looks as an excuse to show several fashion icons: Christian Dior, Christian Lacroix, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta and why don’t say it: Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte.

The firsts forty-five minutes of the story are just too happy, and it turned a little boring for all the attention putting in Carrie. I know that Sara Jessica Parker is one of the producers of the movie, but she can also be one of the worst histories in the film, at least for me. However, the movie didn’t disappoint me, it has the essence of the TV show, and of course I could do not think in the final exams for a while.

Graphic Design is nowaday one of the most overloaded careers in the Market, together with Journalism and Law. And according with the law of supply and demand is also one of the worst paid, to be exact: if I’m looking for a job as a Graphic Designer, some company’s can offer me the same salary of a young boy to work in Macdonald’s. However more and more people are continuing choose this career, without thinking in strategies of how to be an outstanding designer.

Anyone can have a graphic design software package like Adobe’s Creative Suite 3. It includes InDesign, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver:

Currently this career is overloaded for the clients, they see so many designer in the market, that because of this they think that they can pay anything to them. Sometimes not even thing in hire a real designer. Why should they do it? Anyone can work in Photoshop, In design, Dreamweaver or Illustrator or looking for (search) in the web about design and so on.
How can we change this outlook?

I think that, as designer we should focus basically is business management or marketing. Or for example if you’re going to build a web site do it smartly: using architecture information knowledge. Simple things that can make our work something good, a good quality product.

Not everything is that bad

They are not too many, but al least they are good organized. Here I have some of the web page that I could find about graphic design, it’s development and improvement in Chile:

• Diseño Emergente

This web page has the idea of a design network, all kind of people related with the graphic design world: From students, illustrators, web masters and so on. This is a very complete web site. You can also see works of the registered users, ranking and several comment (a very good feedback, from designer to designer).
Also news related with design events and seminary where you can go along Chile and some Latin-Americans countries as Argentina.

• Digilicious

This entertaining web site is basically made it of several posts with different subjects, from 3D, current events, interviews, illustrations and so on.

• Inconciente Colectivo

Is very similar to the other one, it works as a blog where several designer post, very professional and complete. Is continually updating. Something very special about it is that you can send your own news and playing as a journalist of this web.

Following the mood of my last post, it seems funny to show celebrities without Photoshop and make .Without doubt the change is significant, and at least we still can have the hope that nobody can’t escape from bad days.

Revlon, Lancome, L’oreal, Garnier, Dior, Nivea and so on…

No matter how much tonne of creams for: Face, hands, body and soon on I buy to look spectacular, even this rich celebrities can’t keep a gorgeous body without the help of kilos of make up in their faces and the final retouch that Photosho do it.

We already know the true

I think that like the media build ups about the beauty, they also show us the real true of this celebrities, we have the two sides, but as a human being , for our vanity , and our wish to reach the perfection we always are going to prefer lying us.

When created this blog I always thought that I would going to talk about the glamour world of the fashion design, nevertheless not all in this world is spark. There are a lot of problems, passing from the runway to advertising. These specific fields make us think and wonder about our appearance continuously.

From the past to Now

The standard of what is beautiful is exaggerate, too flawless, and a good way to confirm this is to compare the picture of a celebrity from 10 years ago to now, you can not see a difference, biologically speaking.

In the runway the standards for weight are trying to regulate for the fashion designer, but let faced, we are seeing anorexic models all the time, and it seem like this it is not going to change.

An important campaign

In spite of this distressing scenario that I had give you, the media is also promoting a very good campaign in Italy that has shaken to Italian and the world, it has shocking images of a French model named Isabelle Caro, an anorexian woman and the horrifying extremes of the disease.

Photoshop: a double-edged sword

Another very interesting campaign that exists in Internet is the Dove campaign Pro-natural Beauty. (at the bottom). For me, as a designer ,this is something that I’m doing all the time, even my teachers always says to us “try this images it looks like a $1.500 images”, so maybe my score in the class in going to be very good, considering that I make a pretty girl look Beautiful, even in my owns photos, is very tempting to erase my pimples, but, where is the limit? I think the limit has been exceeded, Demi Moore cannot look like that at 46 years old, and I shouldn’t be concern about my wrinkles at 24 years old, and I’m not proud, but I’m.

This time I have looking for web pages that it have a similar purpose, it has been a little hard to find something like I want to create it and compare it. However i think that i found sites with really good ideas.
Here it is some sites with a similar orientation:

http://www.fashiondesigngroup.com/index.htmlFashion
Design Group 100% canadian made.

This is the first site that I found looking for fashion designer group what it talk a little bad about the scene. This site has a very “ninethy” look, the design is not only old-fashioned but very ugly site.

http://www.nikkimaria.blogspot.com/
Fashion Frenzy

Here we have a very interesting blog that mix fashion and comment about fashion designers and celebrities.It has good pictures, videos and right comment. I can notice that the comments and the information is not a copy paste from others web site , which is always welcome.
The only thing that I didn’t like it was the music…well…at least you can pause.

http://www.fashionindustrynetwork.com/
Fashion Industry Network

This was one of my favorites web pages. How the name say this is a network fashion designers network that includes among other things good help to develop a career as a designer and have the opportunity to share your work with others designers. The site included: a fashion job search, forum, photos and videos. My favorite is in the main page when you can read articles written for the designers.

Totally recommended.

By the moment I have sent my proposal to seven Fashion Designer Friends. And one of my friends have explain in person part my proposal too. She told me that there are around seven designer interested. Today I sent them some questions that I would like each designer to answer bout what their clients want

For now I would like to show a work that I did with two of my designer friends. The work consisted in make a Portfolio in Adobe Flash for them.

I made e a concept , inspired by their services, products, and personal style.

The following images are part of the prototype that I made for them in the past. All the graphics were made in Adobe Photoshop and animated in Adobe Flash.

I submitted my proposal to the organizers of the event (New Trends Fair). Earlier today I finally had news! He just said “no thanks”, I felt very disappointed , why did they say no? is my idea not good enough? I don’t think so…
I have a lot of fashion designer friends , and I can do a very similar project with them. I want to pursue this idea even if I work with a different group because I believe it is very important for the fashion scene in Santiago to have this kind of coverage.

So my project has only just begun!
The first thing I did was email all my fashion designer friends. Now I have to wait for their response.

That’s all for now.

The decision has not been made yet, but my idea is to design a web site for a fashion event to be realized in Santiago, Chile and also a corporate identity for it, ( branding development)

Its name is New Trends Fair .This once a year event gathers around twenty Fashion
Designers, who market and sell their own clothes, accessories, shoes and so on.

Although this event happens every twelve months, I think that with the right orientation to my project I can make it an ongoing event.

Updating its web site every three weeks with news and articles will be one of its objectives. The overall purpose will be to keep it alive and in the minds of its targeted audience during scheduled events , by creating interesting news and originals ways of showcasing the work of affiliated designer( their portfolios).

Also I would like to showcase other events happening in Santiago, linked to the arts and culture scene.