Marketing Me & Winter Exhibition

This is now the 5th exhibition I’ve done but for the first time it’s for PGP!¹ So, with a whole new class, what sort of project was this? What did we learn? And of course, what was the driving question.

The project is pretty much exactly what It sounds like, we would be “marketing” ourselves. The general idea being to help us develop skills that might ( theoretically ) help us find a job sometime in the future. If you look at our driving question:

How might I present my passions, strengths, and learning to the world?

you can see it’s about presenting ourselves, which makes sense in the context of an exhibition. Basically, over the next month we would work on learning techniques, and creating things that we could use to present ourself to the exhibition-goers, and maybe even future employers!

For this project, all the content and benchmarks can be broken up into 3 categories: 1:Conversation skills, 2: Making our booths, 3: Anything else that doesn’t fit into the first two categories².

Let’s start with the first bit of the driving question, the presenting itself. Most of the content in this section was based on our guest speaker Curt Schewee, consultant and owner of multiple businesses. Curt talked to us about the labour market, and what skills and traits were most desirable in employees. One point that stood out to me was that employers are less concerned about position specific skills, because those are generally expected as a baseline. Instead, he said that employers are looking for emotional intelligence, and how you fit in the workplace.Next, Curt taught us some ways to have meaningful conversations and how to form connections, something that would become especially relevant in the coming weeks. We had a few opportunities to continue to practice our conversation skills further. One such opportunity was 1 on 1 “Interviews”, as an overall assessment of our skills. For my interview, I’m happy to say that everything went well, except for one minor issue, the details of which I will definitely not disclose. ³

Now, let’s hop back to the second category. For the exhibition, we would each have a “booth” where we would be showing off our stuff. So, we needed a design with ideas for decorations, displays and all the other fun jazz. As fun as it would have been if the teachers gave us complete free reign, they still seem to have some common sense, so there was an amount of structure to the work. After a bit of deliberation, I came up with this concept for a booth design:

The central display element was a bulletin board(5) ⁴ that would serve as a visual representation of my interests, skills, and everything in between. On the table, I was planning on having my computer running sort of about-me app, and my resume, cards, and blog. Speaking of the business card and resume, both of them had been completed by this point. First was the business card, which we started by developing personal logos⁵ Some of my early attempts were close, but none of them fully matched the vibe I wanted.

The circled logo is the concept I ended up developing into my final logo, but first, where did the idea come from? My original inspiration was the typeface IBM Plex Mono, which has an f with a lower line, I thought the two lines looked kind of like an H sideways, so I based my logo on that.

With a logo set, it was time for the card. I choose a rich blue and some muted greys and started throwing stuff at the wall. For the front side I just used the logo sideways on a blue background. For the front, things were a bit more complex. When I was designing the logo, I had the idea to make it tillable, so I made sure the distances between the three horizontal bars would be able to repeat. I used this tiling to make a grid pattern to fill space on the side of the card, and then added my name, email, and a link to my blogs to wrap it up.

Although the business card was fairly easy, the resume was a different story altogether. First, the resume wasn’t technically a true resume. Rather than being a document for employers, it was designed to be something the exhibition-goers could read to get a general idea of you. This meant that we had to try to keep text limited, and make sure there were visuals to make it easy to skim. This was following the 7±2 principle⁶ Making the text itself was a bit of a challenge, but once I had to try and put it all together, I was struggling. My first few layouts were very plain, and way too information dense. I ended up spending close to a week breaking up the information, and trying to create some coherent design. Overall, I’m still not particularly proud of it, but this is what I ended up with:

Now, lets go back to the bulletin board. The plan was that it would be divided into ~4 areas, each representing a single skill or hobby. My plan was to have 2 sections dedicated to coding projects, with the remaining being split between D&D and photography. With a basic idea, I started planning everything out, collecting excerpts, code-blocks, and images that I could use on the board. Given the goal was to create a visually appealing final product, I tried to prioritize imagery over plain writing. This caused me to drop one of the coding sections, in favour of 3d modelling. Once everything was planned, I was left with 1 section dedicated to my Rust raytracer, 1 section for my D&D work, 1 section of photos, and 1 section of 3d renders.
The final assembly was close to a week of solid work. Everyday I was sorting through folders to find photos, using raytracer to render scenes, printing maps, and typing out descriptions of all the stuff. I had decided to use a typewriter for the written text, which was an arduous process⁷. I’d estimate that for every description I finished, I had to scrap 2 more because of typos. This is what the board looked like around a day or so in, and the night before the exhibition.

I ended up finishing everything just in time for the exhibition⁸ ( I really need to stop cutting projects so close ) and the big day was upon us. We had been grouped into categories based on the overall topics of our stations, and I ended up in “Technology and Innovation”, but it was still mostly an individual event.
One benefit of having most of my display be on a board was that it was very easy to set everything up, as I just had to find somewhere to stick my board, and a little table to put my laptop, resume, and typewriter.⁹ As per usual, the exhibition doors opened, and the next few hours were a blur. My corner was kind of off to the side, and as a result of that it didn’t get much traffic, still, I did see a few people, and I had some good conversations. My favourite interaction of the night was with someone who worked on engine development at EA, we talked for a good ten minutes about programming, I showed my my code, and overall, I think it made the entire exhibition worth it.
Other than that, I don’t have much to say. This project was very fun, and the board is probably one of my favourite displays I’ve made to date. I cleaned it off, and it’s now sitting above my desk as I write this, and honestly? Super cool, I would 100% recommend you get a bulletin board.

Wrapping everything up, this project seemed to pose a lot of opportunities for self-reflection and discovery. I got to think about my skills, my passions, and to some degree, my future. Exhibitions are always very hectic and stressful, but this is probably the best one yet ( Or I’m still recovering from WWI-Con ).
Anyways, that’s all for this post. I’m Finn Hofbauer, So long for now.