Sorochan Designs

A fun project I got to work on this autumn. Most of the time I'm doing layout project like flyers, trifolds or annual reports. But once and a while I get a request that demands a bit more creativity - in this case to produce three animal icons for an agricultural lighting company. The pig is my favourite 😄

Happy Halloween!!!
Partly inspired by the Nice Cave song Bright Horses.

The trailer for this film (White Noise) was a bit deceptive – it looked like a fun family adventure film (not a bad thing – enough to make me want to watch it) but it turned out to be far more interesting. Noah Baumbach is a director I appreciate. However, while his previous film, Marriage Story, was mostly notable for its fantastic performances and sensitivity in treating such a fraught subject as divorce, White Noise is a very different film and in some ways feels more ambitious in scope.

Film fans will enjoy the numerous nods to other films, but aside from these clever references, what was most compelling to me was how it resonated with our contemporary experiences of the pandemic, including the extreme disorientation and breakdown of consensus over basic facts, through its adaptation of an 80s postmodern novel about a train derailment. Sadly, the film has since found an even more uncannily familiar referent in the Ohio train derailment in East Palestine that pretty much exactly replicates the situation in the film. I think this film is a bit slept on. It was mentioned in a few end-of-year lists but I think it deserved a nomination for best adapted screenplay.

Also, love the poster ads for this film

I have been lucky to have worked on a number of annual reports for some wonderful non-profits. I got the sense that for some designers, long-form publications like this are considered tedious to work on. Maybe it is the years spent in academia or just my general love of books, magazines and artist catalogues, but I find these kinds of projects really interesting and enjoy the challenge of balancing readability with beauty.

This project from my student days is now up in my portfolio: https://sorochandesigns.com/projects/world-vision-annual-report/. I've shared a few of the spreads here before, but I gave it a bit of a facelift (no desire to give publicity to the original organization, the World Bank 😆) If you hear of anyone looking for an annual report or other lengthy publication - please get in touch!

At long last, I’m so excited to share the website for Sorochan Designs! ✨ Check it out: www.sorochandesigns.com ✨

This site is a showcase for my best work where both clients and employers can learn more about me and my services. At present, I have finished the detailed case studies of three projects, but I will continue building the other projects and adding their pages over the next few weeks.

I would love for you to check out the site and would especially appreciate it if you would let me know if you see any errors, from broken links to typos (note: if a project says “coming soon” it means the page is not finished being built so it is fine if the link doesn’t work in that case). I am now looking for a full-time position and so I want this website to be as clean and professional as possible for prospective employers.

Every new project is a learning process and in this case I got to cement my understanding of Adobe XD, practiced using code in combination with the Wordpress interface, and familiarized myself further with Elementor and numerous plugins. My goal was to get all the functionality of my design without any paid themes or plugins, and I succeeded in that regard 😊

Thanks again to everyone who has supported me in my new direction. I’m so glad to be working in a field that challenges me creatively. ✨

My first professional web design project 😊

Happy New Year everyone! Our celebration was quiet and lovely. Candlelight and a delicious vegan casserole. We will watch an early 60s film, Eva, staring Jeanne Moreau, until midnight brings us to 2023. Wishing for love, peace, and solidarity in the new year. ❤✨✊

This was definitely my favourite project from the GWD program. We developed the visual materials for a local festival of our choice. Taverne Tour is a pub-crawl style event where you get to see a series of 30 minute sets at small pubs in the Plateau. The genres are diverse but lean towards psychedelic, surreal, art-pop and experimental. You can see the project in more detail at my Behance portfolio, along with a few other of my favourite projects: https://www.behance.net/sorochan_designs

A poster I made as part of my Rococo Zephyr branding project. (The site launch is not real btw - the branding I produced is more advanced than the actual business but you can check out my Etsy shop if you are interested 🙃)

I wanted to center a key architectural feature of Montreal - the wrought iron spiral staircases. As you can imagine, it took a very long time in photoshop to remove the background from the detailed lines of the staircase. I then added the final details and text in Illustrator.

I was really happy to have discovered this gem of a film this week (Hunter Gatherer, 2016). A little bit Mike Leigh, a little bit Sean Baker, but most importantly a whole lot of that vaguely 70s tone that, although it focuses on a down and out protagonist, maintains a light touch and just enough humour. It avoids being too bleak, overly-dramatic/manipulative or sentimental and leaves room for the viewer to think and interpret. An intensely human film - I highly recommend. I'm really hoping the director, Josh Locy, gets the chance to make a second film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDXmW6bj2VM

This is the set of logos I am most proud of. It is for my online vintage clothing shop on Etsy. It started with the simple R and Z combination - the first letters I made from scratch rather than relying on an existing font (I really fell in love with typefaces during my courses and one of the items on my long design-related to-do list is to design my own typeface). Then I built the rest of the logo around it, playing on the zephyr imagery. I really love the creativity involved in logo design really enjoyed this project!

Happy Halloween everyone!!! I've been saving this project for this spookiest of days - a photo montage I made for Digital Photo class this spring. It is made up of six separate photos. It was inspired by Max Ernst's surrealist bird-humans and old photographs. The second is an reject from the same project that I think is very creepy. My version of an imagined folk horror film.