Erik Akers

About

Who?

Hi there, I’m Erik Akers. I hold a degree in graphic design from Kansas State Uni­ver­sity. I got started into design work just over 10 years ago. Dur­ing my years as a designer I’ve worked in many dif­fer­ent areas of the indus­try as pro­duc­tion artist, web designer, stu­dio artist and art direc­tor. I have worked in numer­ous design medi­ums includ­ing web, print, pack­ag­ing & mul­ti­me­dia design.

I spe­cial­ize in the areas of logos, cor­po­rate iden­tity & brand­ing, web sites, and pieces to go along with sup­port­ing those iden­ti­ties and brand­ing systems.

What?

I bought this domain for the pur­pose of using it as an on-line port­fo­lio, which it was for a few years.

I decided to redesign the site and make it a place to find infor­ma­tion for any­one inter­ested in design work. When I was decid­ing what to do with the site I came across many blogs and sites about how design is done and tuto­ri­als on how to do a design effect. It didn’t appear the world really needed another site deal­ing with that. So, dur­ing din­ner with a mar­ket­ing friend of mine, we brain­stormed the idea of cre­at­ing a site about the impor­tance of design. Graphic design is sig­nif­i­cant because it  is the first impres­sion a prod­uct, per­son, com­pany, team or any­thing else, makes on the world. And, as we all know, there is only one first impression.

Why?

The rea­son is quite sim­ple. I want to raise the aware­ness of design­ers every­where, because I think that more times than not, great design is deval­ued. Any­one you talk to seems to have a friend or some­one in the fam­ily that’s a designer and that per­son can han­dle what­ever design needs they may have. I find that a very impor­tant ques­tion is never asked, “Are they any good?” In this day and age is very easy for any one to buy a pro­gram that lets some­one design lit­er­ally any­thing, from web sites to print col­lat­eral. So why, if the ques­tion is asked, does it seem like it’s talk­ing down to a per­son? It’s really not. It’s sim­ply ques­tion­ing if they are good enough to pro­duce pro­fes­sional design work. Because every­one knows some­one who can design, that per­son sel­dom knows what to charge for their work. This can ulti­mately lead to a major mis­un­der­stand­ing when talk­ing with a cre­ative agency about what ser­vices they offer.

If only one thing comes out of this site I want it to be this…design is find­ing a designer that under­stands your needs, wants and goals. It is find­ing a designer and let­ting them take your goals and turn it into some­thing that is uniquely yours. The out­ward appear­ance is just as crit­i­cal as every­thing else.