Guest post by Gail Sachson, MFA, SMU CAPE student & instructor
Growing up on Long Island, New York, CAPE Graphic Design instructor Alyssa Galganov’s parents bestowed a cultural feast of enrichment classes upon her: ballet lessons, painting classes, and violin instruction.
“Nothing ever stuck,” she said. But inspired by her mother and grandmother’s love of voice, learning to sing was the exception.
“I sing all the time…I sing mostly in the car, and I mostly sing Motown…Nothing calms me more than singing.” Singing, she confided, relieves stress from busy, yet enjoyable days of design projects at her full-time position as Communications, Marketing and Research Manager at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she also photographs campus ceremonies, openings, art and architecture.
Photography has been an enjoyable pastime in addition to singing for Galganov. She approaches her off-hours shoots with a smile and playful attitude, combining skill and a joy of experimentation. When she’s not photographing professors on campus, Galganov photographs animals while she hikes, visits the Dallas Zoo or drives through Fossil Rim Park, always searching for the perfect subject. Once she captures that perfect subject, she delights in playing with design tools such as Adobe Photoshop to make a cage vanish, re-arrange a background or make mountains disappear.
“Graphic Design was never something I was trained for,” although a painting teacher pointed out her facility with geometric abstraction. “I just fell into it,” said Galganov.
Though she was a psychology major at Hofstra University, her first job after college was at The Palm Beach Post where she laid out the entire newspaper and loved it. After that, she was on to Toronto where she created magazine ads, then to the Dallas Morning News where she developed a love of coding. CAPE discovered her while she was tutoring Adobe workshops online and recruited her as an instructor for the Graphic Design Certificate program because of her talents, enthusiasm and insistence on keeping up with advances in design tools and styles.
But even with the newest design software, Galganov tells her CAPE Graphic Design students that an expertly designed work is not in itself sufficient. There must be empathy. A great designer must understand their client, their client’s needs and their client’s audience. The purpose is not to satisfy the needs of the designer.
“Graphic design,” she said, “is a creative way to solve problems, to inform, to educate and to present a clear message from the client. It is art for hire.”
Speaking of art, Galganov claims she cannot draw. She says she only dabbles in painting and that she is a “copyist” and a “mimic,” yet she creates art every day with her design work and as a CAPE instructor.
Luckily for her students at SMU CAPE, “graphic designers are happy to share” and anyone can be taught to be capable and creative designers, according to Galganov.
“The ability to draw is a plus,” she says, “but there are so many, many tools now which one can play with, like AI, Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop, which make designing a teachable skill and a fun and rewarding career.”
Galganov empathizes with her students’ anxiety and eagerness to learn. She shares generously and willingly. Her lessons for great Graphic Design and a great life are:
- Never stop researching
- Practice skills devotedly
- Keep up with the times, locally and globally
- Don’t become frustrated with too many tools and options
- And SING!