Interview with World Passage’s Graphic Designer
Despite her busy schedule, Ms. Dao—the new graphic designer/layout artist of the World Passage Magazine—still took out her time to sit down for some coffee and answered a few questions for us in regards to the magazine latest issue.
Q: Good morning Ms. Dao, thank you very much for taking your time to be here.
A: Oh no it’s my pleasure.
Q: The latest issue of World Passage looks fantastic, especially the front cover. I must say the illustration of Taipei 101 is very impressive. Is doing illustration your forte?
A: As a graphic designer I have experience in all three of the leading graphic software: Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Each is best suited to certain types of graphics. Personally I just felt that Illustrator was the best choice to create a cover because it has the kind of effects I was looking for.
Q: What about Photoshop? There are many magazines that use Photoshop to make their covers.
A: Certainly Photoshop is a great tool for many types of images, especially in editing photos. But well, if you thought Illustrator is my forte then my weakness would be Photoshop. Other than that fact, it was also because I wanted something original and creative for the cover, and Photoshop just wasn’t the one.
Q: I see. Then as you design the various graphics within the magazine, which do you feel were the most successful? And which do you feel were the easiest, or most difficult to work on?
A: I am somewhat new in this graphic designing industry so everyday I’m always learning something new, whether it’s in the software itself or just techniques in general. Personally I think Illustrator is the most difficult to work with. There is no pencil tool or anything of the like in the program. There is the ‘pen’ tool, which well, doesn’t even work like a pen. To create for example the Taipei 101, or the Mt. Fuji illustration inside the magazine, the graphic designer must have patience, especially when working with the finer details, or with the repetitive patterns such as the cherry blossoms, the skyscrapers’ windows. I remember spending like two hours working on the cherry blossoms, only to discover on the Internet much later a tool called ‘symbol sprayer’ which could literally just ‘spray’ the flowers for me, instead of a bunch of copy and paste. As difficult as it was though, I have found that the resulting illustrations in the end were always satisfying, and they actually look much more amazing than what I started with. In contrast, Flash is a very-easy-to-use software once you get use to it, that also provides very successful results, especially cartoonish kind of images. I find it very useful for creating comic panels. Photoshop on the other hand, is like a different ‘species’ altogether *laugh*. But joking aside, if you know what you’re doing, the kind of photos to edit, then with luck and patience, you could still produce great results with Photoshop.
Q: Aside from being the graphic designer for World Passage, you’re also their layout artist. So what kind of software do you use for this kind of task?
A: I use Adobe InDesign. Microsoft Publisher is also an option but since I mostly design graphics using Adobe software, it’s easier to import the files into a layout-design software by Adobe. Publisher is more useful for designing print publications such as brochures or flyers. InDesign is also another program that is very easy to use, once you know the basic tools.
Q: Well thank you very much for your time Ms. Dao. I think World Passage has made the right choice in hiring you. I wish the best luck to you for all of your work in the future.
A: Thank you. It was my pleasure talking to you as well. Last but not least I want to include a small thank you message to my art teacher in high school. Mr. Hobbs, if you happen to stumble across the latest issue of World Passage, I hope you’d pick it up and see how far I’ve gone along this career. I really want to thank YOU for all that you have taught me.
