Congratulations! You’ve graduated from Graphic Technology school and it’s time to head out into the real world and set up your business!

Well, something like that, anyway.

For the majority of the rest of the semester, you will be acting as if you were a Graphic Designer and working for a client. Whether you decide to actually pursue this type of work after (real) graduation or not, you could set yourself up for a nice little small business that could help you down the line. Regardless of whether you use it or not, it will look great on a resume.

So, step one is to think up a name for your business! If you think you might use it professionally down the line, do a quick search for any names you come up with and make sure that there isn’t already someone using that name in Canada (preferably the world.) Come up with something that describes who you are and what you do. My pal Stu who came in to talk kind of got lucky with the name “Stu Art,” which seems so obvious and simple, but it really describes the business, and it’s clever, because it’s, like, his name and stuff…

Step two is to start designing a logo for your business. Stu came up with this: which again seems pretty simple, but it’s clever and does the trick quite nicely. You want to choose colours that will convey the right feeling, so go back to what each colour means or conveys and choose wisely. You’ll have to explain why you chose the colours and the typeface(s) you did, so choose wisely.

Once you’ve got all of that, you’ll need to design an advertisement for your business that will make people aware of your services and give them some way of contacting you. It would be good though for you to use your real contact information if you’re comfortable with it, but you can use the school as your contact if you wish. Ideally, these could actually be posted and used in the real world, but at this point, they don’t have to be made public if you don’t want to. You’ll decide whether this is an advertisement for the web (perhaps a Facebook cover photo or similar ad) or for print (perhaps an ad that would go in the Yellow Pages or in a magazine or something), or whether it’ll be a poster that you could hang in a mall or grocery store or something. The size, resolution, and colour space (RGB or CMYK) will depend on which format you’ve chosen.

Starting now, you are responsible for your time. In order to run your own business, you need to manage your time and work well within a deadline. You will be marked on how productively you spend your time! Time spent on Facebook, your phone, or doing other unrelated projects WILL LOWER YOUR MARK.

If you get this done, you can either start advertising your services in order to come up with a real client, or we can discuss options for you to do something creative on your own. This will all be discussed with me, so don’t think you can just run with any idea that comes into your head!