Welcome To The Club!
Welcome to the Ponderers Branding Club blog! Before I get started, let me introduce myself. My name is Brian Vliet and I'm a Graphic Designer based in Richmond, Virginia, and have been working professionally since 2012. I obtained my B.S. in Creative Advertising from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2019 and have currently been employed with Guns.com since May 2020 as their Graphic Designer and Email Marketing Coordinator. A few months prior to joining GDC, I started Ponderers Branding Club, or PBC, in February 2020 as a side business while I searched for full-time work. After all that happened since the beginning of the pandemic, I realized how lucky I was to find my current job and i can safely say I made the right decision to find stable employment while I took my time to build PBC.
Fast forward to today, though, and things are going relatively well. I am advancing my skills and knowledge with GDC, I started my journey towards obtaining my Masters degree with MICA in their Business of Art and Design program, and I am working on trying to build a blog and podcast based off my love for design and sports. As great as all that is, I have to admit it's hard work and can be extremely time consuming. I sacrifice a lot of my time with friends, family, and my fiancée in order to accomplish those goals. But I truly believe if you want to achieve great things, you have to be ready to make some of those tough decisions for yourself and hope they understand and support your endeavors. After all, I want to become the best designer I can be. To do so I must never stop learning and getting better at my craft.
Now that I have given an overview of myself, it's time to get down to business. You're probably wondering, why are you writing a blog? Why do you want to start a podcast along with running a small design studio, studying for your Masters, and working full-time? My answer is, why not? Besides the Chris Creamer Sports Logo Community's forum and YouTube channel, and Uni Watch's podcast, it's largely an untapped area of discussion and I really want to build a community around design in sports and its impact on pop culture. It's also a significant reason why I am a Graphic Designer today. But that's a blog post for another day.