Missed out on a very informative guest speaker - Meg Kerr

Last Friday, we had Meg Kerr come into our web design course at Sheridan. Unfortunately I had a wedding to go to back in Toronto, so I was unable to attend this informative session. Luckily one of my classmates, Ashley, was nice enough to inform me on some notes and also update me a bit about Meg.

Meg is a Social Media Integration Marketer at Mosaic. She started working there in 2006 and became full time in 2007. She achieved an undergraduate degree at Western University for Media Information and Technology and also attended Fanshawe College for Broadcast Journalism.

She currently works at Mosaic, which is an Experiential Marketing Agency. It's had over 20 years of success in it's field and has over 1000's of consumer events every year at retail locations, community events, or other targeted locations.

To find out more about Mosaic, their website address is http://www.mosaicxm.com

Guest Speaker: Jay Schacher, Senior Designer at Henderson Bas

Today was the first week we had a guest speaker come into our class for a presentation about themselves and their work.

• Jay is currently three months into his new job at Henderson Bas
• He is the Senior Designer for HB and hopes to become an Art Director within these 5 years.
• He was a graduate at York University for Fine Arts and Media in 2005, and also took the Web Design program and graduated in 2006.
• Jay tells us that there are around 80 employees at Henderson Bas.

• In the creative department @ HB, there are 4 Jr Designers, 3 Sr. Designers, 3 Art Directors, 1 Creative Director and Creative Associate Director.
• Henderson Bas is an Interactive Designer Agency that specializes with online ads, mobile, and print.
• Jay's job requires him to report to art directors, creative director and the final sign off goes to the account manager before presenting to the clients.
• Some of his current projects include the website for LG Shine Plus (website for the new Android phones), LG Get Connected Website. 
• He mentioned that HB likes to have their photography done by themselves.
• He's also done an online ad for Mercedes Benz about the new C Class car.
• At HB, the design process starts with brainstorming, sketching concept, presentation to the client, designing the actual chosen concept, building the design, and then revision.
• Jay advises us to always cherish our student work. It's only then we are free to design what we like instead of what the client likes.
• He believes that we should always stay close with our school mates, network a lot, and always be a team player, not a hero.
• his portfolio address is www.jayshack.com

Some of the stuff on Jay's website portfolio:

• The Jamiesons website was the very first piece of work he did when he first entered the industry. He worked extremely hard on it because it was important to impress people. 
• When Jay was hired by Henderson Bas, it was through networking with another friend of his.
• His advice us is to always visit design shops as much as possible, focus on typography, be more social and work really really hard!
• He says that the interactive agency industry is very good here in Toronto because it is the third's biggest interactive media city in all of North America. It has great opportunities for us.

Because Jay had come from a fine arts program, he worked hard in the Sheridan web design program to build up his design skills and interactive media skills. This is something that has inspired me, and has motivated me to work hard in order to achieve my goals!

Week 1 - First week of class

First week of class is almost done! Yay to that. I can finally sleep in tomorrow. A little nervous to present my portfolio later on. Hope all goes well.