Class Projects

It’s been a pretty long year. I’ve been working in Drafting Class on a multitude of projects. Although, with it comes their hardships as well. Below is a short summary of a couple of the projects I’ve been working on in a video. Below that, I’ll include more detail writing about my main project, Vigil.

Vigil (And a few short stories.)

Initially Vigil began as a tribute to a particular artist, Virgil Abloh, but as time went on and me and Tristan began to understand our concept more, it grew. A lot of our focuses in the brand are drawn from both aspects of Virgil’s professional (Off White, Louis Vuitton) life, and his personal (Illinois, Grafitti, Etc.) life, but these concepts grew into more relatable topics to me and Tristan’s personal lives as well. Aesthetics and ideas that are less closely related to Virgil began to find their way into our designs, and as that went on Vigil became less a celebration of Virgil Abloh, but more so a celebration of the culture and way of life he helped grow.

It wasn’t easy, though.

Some part through our design process we decided that simply a trackpad on a Laptop wasn’t adequate for the detail our designs needed. After some deliberation and though, I acquired a drawing tablet. I brought it in to work on some new Designs and instantly we realized how much easier work was with the Tablet. We maybe doubled, even tripled our work load in that time. However it was short lived, as I LOST the pen for drawing with the tablet, suddenly sending us back to using a trackpad to make designs. This was a major handicap in our work, and for a while we barely did any work on Vigil and instead invested time into personal projects instead of Vigil.

After about a week of hiatus, I finally put my foot down and decided to attempt designs without the pen. Even though the designs were admittedly crude, initially, I finally managed to crank out a (sort of bad) first draft using stock images and designs we already had made when we had the pen.

But it was enough to get the ball rolling. After this design was finished, we were able to work off of it eventually leading to the completion of LOTS of designs. However, we still didn’t have anyone to put these designs into the real world. That’s where my next short story begins.

Brendan Haraguchi.

Perfect candidate for a fabricator. Silent workhorse, tech smart, knew what he was doing and what machines he needed to do it. The kind of person we needed to be able to churn out a reasonable demo before our deadline. After some discussion with Tristan and Brendan, we decided he was the perfect guy and brought him on board immediately.

Vigil Brand Goal

In essence, the main goal of Vigil has always been to turn a personal interest, (clothing, fashion) into something that we could use as a tool for learning. I’ve discovered a LOT of software through my journey with Vigil, and even more so I’ve discovered a lot about myself and my capability to work and meet deadlines. The workload for Vigil has fluctuated from time to time, but luckily my partner Tristan has always been there to put me back on track/put me on the correct path.