Leaving a Mark of Color

While thinking of what to talk about today, I thought what better way to start a blog about my life with design than with how it all started. And that story begins almost 4 years ago, back in my junior year of high school. It was at that time that I finally put two and two together.

Going into my junior year I began playing around with a graphics program that really got me interested in digital art and design. That program was Gimp. For those of you who do not know, Gimp is basically a free version of Adobe Photoshop and I suggest starting with that program if you cannot afford to pay for the monthly subscription Photoshop requires. I spent tons of time creating weird logos and random art at this time but never got too serious. That was until when Snapchat announced that they were allowing for user submitted geofilters that they called Community Geofilters. This gave anyone the ability to create a geofilter, or photo overlay that depends on your geographic location, and have everyone be able to access. In a roundabout way, you would be able to engrave yourself in any location upon Snapchat's approval. And what better way to ensure your popularity in high school than by making a design that could be used in an app that had around 100 million active users at the time! With that thought, I decided to create a geofilter specifically for my high school. It took many hours of YouTube videos and a lot of trial and error but I eventually came up with the final design down at the bottom of this post!

After a few weeks, I received easily one of the most exciting emails of my life. Snapchat had approved of my geofilter and it would be available the next day! Going to school that next day, people slowly started to find the custom geofilter for their school. Within the week, you would find students using it everyday and saying how cool they thought it was. Being able to see people get excited about my design was unbelievable and it gave me that drive to make bigger and better designs. So with that single decision, I ended up making three more geofilters that are still active to this day. In fact, together they have been placed on around 181,000 unique snaps and have been seen almost 6,000,000 times.

Looking back at this moment, I cannot believe how far I have come as a designer. And in some weird way, it seems my desire to be popular inadvertently pushed me towards a passion for art and an eye for design. It just really goes to show that creativity can come from absolutely anything.

For anyone interested, here are all my geofilters. So if you are in the Ohio area, feel free to go give them a try!

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Mentor High School Geofilter

Painesville Geofilter

Headlands Geofilter

Bush Hall Geofilter

- Jared

#Snapchat #Story