My business covers a couple of different fields, well, as design’s just a multidisciplinary subject. Taken my hobbies into consideration the list would just grow longer. For the last few years I’ve been searching for people with the skills I need, composing, editing, illustrations… looking for chances of potential working partners. The expertises however, can be economically demanding. A professional composer could be hardly described as affordable, for example. Likewise for my skills. The difficulty I faced the most then, besides money, was that I found “The strength of one single man is just like one lonely star to the endless night sky,” I needed a group of people to work and carry on with.

Case study 1: ZDL group

One group of people somehow gave me a hint to the solution of my demands, which triggered my later thinking on this “astrology” community. We were a group of five college students, setting our paths onto different colleges across North America. We were quite acquainted since our middle school, so the five of us spend an amount of time in discord, gaming, having fun, and also, talking about our interests and hobbies. It was a coincidence that we were evenly distributed into art subjects, covering design, illustration, composing, singing… I realized this had been a prefect birthplace for my dream “community”.

The group consists of:

(Zack)Me: SVA Undergrad Senior; Graphic Designer, Design Consultant, Artist, Gamer;

Stein: Richmond University Freshman, Artist, Gamer, Japanese Language Learner, Motion Graphics/Animation lover;

William: UC Davis Sophomore; Singer, Composer, Gamer, Specializes in Chinese/English writing;

Harmony: From McGill; Pianist, Musician, Composer, Animation Lover, Transportation enthusiast; Runs a personal Music Studio;

Alfred: Majors in a certain science study; but also a Beat-boxer, composer, Music lover, Gamer, animation lover.


We had some form of “academic cooperations”, quite limited, but I took the chance of one request for a logo design. Instead of taking his pay I said, “owe me some of your work. A song or something.” This could be seen as the beginning of this group “experiment”.

It was quite a good thing for me, that throughout the next years, the group started to cooperation within it on various art projects.


Case study 2: SchwerKraft

Another non-profit coperation here, was the project Havoc I art directed. I also looke into it to reflect on how we collaborated and if everything was prefectly aligned (or not):

(Presentation from Portfolio)

Close-ups:



There were some gains, and there were troubles...

Insights:

Also, there were definitely more things I looked into. Here are some of my thinkings:


Project outcome:

I want to make a system to assist any of the (non-profit) cooperations between different personnels. As people are just like the stars shining in sky, I’m calling it the stars.


The Star- expected user-flow (preview)




The future:

As I said, I don’t think it’s not the end of this theme (it could the end of the project, but my cooperate would continue, and as my thoughts.) I would take samples from my future career, and see if there were such chance of bringing it to reality.

The end (To be continued...)