Friday Fives: INDUSTRY's Gavin Rear

Most Fridays we give #highfives to a different designer from our extended family of PNCA students, faculty, alumni, and guest lecturers. 🙌🏾🙌🏻🙌🏽 This week, we're doubling the fun with two conversations, with communication and brand designers from the independent, global creative consultancy INDUSTRY. First up today is video-editor-turned-graphic-designer Gavin Rear. We asked him five questions, and are posting five images.

Gavin is a video-editor-turned-graphic designer. His practice involves a heavy focus on typography and making things move on the screen, sometimes at the same time. His passions when not looking at the screen are riding bikes (and trying not to crash them), taking photos (and trying not to ruin the roll of film), and plucking on a guitar that he still needs to return to his friend.

Along with his colleague Brooklynne Worthington, Gavin joined us on 9/29/21 for our Design Lecture Series, a student-powered conversation with visiting guests, current PNCA Design students, faculty, and friends, presented in collaboration with FISK. (See recording at the end of this Q+A!)

Graphic Design department head Kristin Rogers Brown spoke with Gavin in September, 2021.

(Motion design and typography, above. Art Direction: Marina Zertuche, Co-Designers: Christina Mancilla & Sofia Villarreal.

Q: What or who inspires you?

A: Non-designer people, or people who are just 100% themselves, no matter what. Sometimes I envy people’s unclouded creative perspective; their ideas just come out and they’re not afraid to speak it.

Q: What do you do to get “unstuck?”

A: I hit walls all the time. Sometimes it helps me to shock the system by changing my process somehow: working backwards, taking something away or adding something new. Mainly, trying to feel like I’m doing it for the first time again.

Q: What advice would you give your former self?

A: Trust yourself. In my lived creative experience, working for globally recognized companies comes with expectations and responsibilities that can make you hit the ground running from the start to the end of a project. The growing pains become evidence proving you CAN step up to creative challenges. 

As the saying goes, “no guts, no glory,” but you have what it takes to do amazing things and you’ve had it with you all along. 

Q: Is there anything you wish you had known just starting out, that you know now?

A: What you show in your portfolio is what you’ll get hired for, or asked to make. A friend told me this right before I graduated and I didn’t believe it at first. It felt scary yet powerful to have some more control over the things I want to be working on than I thought. This advice also felt like a testament to the idea that you should make the work you love, and the right people will see it.

Q: What is your favorite trick for “keeping it all together”?(staying organized, managing your time)

A: Making lists and checking them off! It helps me focus on what’s in front of me and what I’m actually working on. It’s easy get overwhelmed thinking about a task and all its intricacies. Putting it down somewhere makes it feel achievable. 

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Hear more from Gavin in conversation with students and faculty in our Design Lecture Series (recorded, below). Talks are in person for PNCA students, staff, and faculty, and also open to the public streaming FREE with registration (we'll send you a link). Co-hosted by PNCA Graphic Design and FISK. See more from Gavin on his website, on instagram at @gaavv, or through INDUSTRY @industrypdx. 

Follow along with our #fridayfives on instagram @pncadesign.