Through the Spectacles

I remember one night, sitting in front of my laptop, staring at a blank screen while the city outside my window slept. My mind was buzzing with ideas, but my body felt completely drained. I had three deadlines the next day, and a client was messaging me for the fourth revision of a poster I thought was already perfect. “That’s when I realized I was burnt out.” Creative burnout is that overwhelming mix of stress, frustration, and sometimes desperation we feel when trying to finish a project—whether it’s a design, a written piece, a song, a choreography, or a stage play. Unlike ordinary fatigue, which a good night’s sleep or a meal with friends can fix, burnout digs deeper. It affects your motivation, confidence, and sometimes mental health. Many of your friends in the creative field—freelancers, designers, artists, and educators—have probably experienced it. And while we can’t always fix it for them, just being there matters. Most creatives say their work is their passion, and ...

  Have you ever imagined owning your own business? Or dreamed of finally being your own boss? For many creatives, that dream stays exactly where it starts—in our heads. I was one of those dreamers, and in 2022, that dream became real when I launched my freelance design studio, Grafiko Commercial Art Services , or simply Grafiko . At first, everything felt surreal. What used to be just an idea during my college days suddenly became a legally registered business. I processed the paperwork, paid the fees, and eventually landed my first clients. It was exciting, fulfilling, and honestly a little intimidating. But as the initial excitement faded, the real work began. One of the biggest realities I faced was how different freelancing is from how it’s often portrayed. Movies and social media make creative work look glamorous—designers are shown as effortlessly cool, mysterious, and somehow always inspired. In real life, that image doesn’t help you survive, let alone succeed. Clients don...

This journal is all about the Filipino identity of graphic design, especially in contemporary times. Graphic design has been in our global landscape since the advent of modern advertising and creative movements to support businesses and other sectors. The Philippines has always been into graphic design, we can experience it in our daily lives, we see designs, signages in the jeepneys, sari-sari stores, old cinemas, and even in our sorbetes cart. This paper aims to determine the Filipino identity of graphic design and how it affects our culture, people, and the creative industry as a whole. The methodology of gathering data will be based on the available resources online and other academic journals in the same spectrum of study. What is Graphic Design? Graphic design is a craft where professionals create visual content to communicate messages. By applying visual hierarchy and page layout techniques, designers use typography and pictures to meet users’ specific needs and focus on ...

Graphic design is a very interesting topic for me because of its impact in my personal and professional life. This is my practice and my main discipline in the creative industry and I am glad that there is a topic for it, and it helped me quite a lot because of the new learnings from the reading. I would like to start with the gist of the reading edited by Helen Armstrong entitled: Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field. In this book, Armstrong compiled and edited the most important documents in line with the theories and concepts encircling the field and discipline of graphic design in a scholarly and academic manner. The book discussed the timeline of the development of graphic design, cited key personalities that contributed to the development and movements of the field, and gave some examples of the important design era. It has been said in the book that during the early 1900s, the avant-garde in graphic design emerges. The designers of the old world turned their backs on ...