I’ve always said that following your passions will lead you to interesting places! As my luck would have it, following my passion for automobiles has led me to the stage at the 2021 LA Auto Show as the recipient of the Hispanic Motor Press Foundation Scholarship Award!
The Hispanic Motor Press Foundation Scholarship is a scholarship dedicated to supporting young Hispanics pursuing a career in journalism focusing on the vehicle and transportation industries, with emphasis on the technology of the motor vehicle.
I applied to this scholarship because even though I’m not technically studying journalism, I am a transportation design student who does automotive journalism on the side as a hobby. This blog is the perfect example of that! Well, I’m happy to say that I was picked as the winner and I was presented with the award on stage at the LA Auto Show!
Of course, this wasn’t the only highlight of my day. This was the first time I had ever been to the LA Auto Show! So naturally my shutterbug instincts took over and I was snapping away at every interesting display or concept car I crossed while hunting down designers and other industry insiders to talk and network with!
So, please enjoy these photos from the 2021 LA Auto Show! Also I wanted to give a very special thanks to the following individuals!:
It’s been a wild last couple of months. Aside from not posting as often as I should around the end of 2019, there’s been a lot of things happening and frankly, I’ve just been too busy or lazy to post something. But I’m still here, and Corkscrewd is still fully operational! But, this new year is going to be notable for some interesting decisions I’ve made. I’m calling this my “Vision 2020” for Corkscrewd. But first, I’m going to share some important news:
I’ve decided to go back to college!
In one of my last posts, I talked about my desire to go back to college. To summarize, I felt that I was kind of at a dead-end in my life and I wasn’t satisfied with how things were going. To add some background, I was tired of barely making any money as a freelance photographer and having to deal with cheapskates and flakes. I’m not afraid to admit I was in a dark place mentally, so that’s why it sounded like I was venting. Essentially, I was.
Then I realized, if I wanted to make a change, I needed to do something drastic. I have contacts at the Academy of Art University thanks to my friends and some freelancing gigs for the School of Industrial Design. I live not too far from San Francisco, and the college offers online classes as well. Why not enroll? So I did! I’m starting class in a few weeks as a student in the Transportation Design Program! I’m realizing my dream of designing cars for a living!
What is Vision 2020?
This doesn’t mean that I’ve completely given up on my blog. I see an interesting opportunity moving forward into the rest of 2020. This blog was created for sharing my love for automobiles and showcasing my photography skills. I can still do that, but now there will be a new facet to this website as a car design blog! Think about it: I’ve got tons of reference material thanks to 3+ years of photographing cars! Additionally, the contacts I’ve made because of this blog would certainly help me in my future career as an industrial designer. On top of that, there’s now an opportunity for readers to get an in-depth look at the processes of car design, from concept ideation to modeling and everything in between. And, I’ll stand out a little more against other designers!
That being said, I’m going to be making a few changes to the blog:
The Store
Since I decided to update my blog last year to a business plan and start trying to sell my photos, I’ve made exactly $0 on the store. I’ve tried microblogging and boosting my posts on Instagram and Facebook, but to this day I have not made a sale. So, I’ve decided to put the store itself on the back burner while I focus on other things. Maybe I can revisit it from time to time and upload some new content. Would anyone be interested in buying my drawings?
Actual, regular updates
At the beginning of last year, I tried to post more frequently. At my peak, I was managing at least one article a day with multiple pictures and at least 500 words. The issue was not only was it a lot of work but sometimes I felt like I was grasping at straws trying to find something to write about. Instead, I’ll post when I feel like I have something that I would absolutely love to share. Now that I’m a design student, I’ll be sharing a lot of my discoveries along the way.
Quality > Quantity of Photos
One of my biggest concerns is the number of photos I publish. I want to keep taking pictures of my adventures, but I always felt like I uploaded way too many photos. Sometimes they’ll be multiple shots of the same car going around Laguna Seca! Instead, I’m going to strive for striking, quality photos like this one:
I think this is my favorite shot of 2019!
I think that if I focused more on delivering shots like the one above, my blog would feel a little less chaotic and more focused on delivering quality content.
The website design itself
Someone said my website kind of looked like a creamsicle, and now I can’t unsee it. I still want to keep the Gulf-inspired colors, but I might just change the layout into something more contemporary. Maybe I could ape the design of The Old Motorist?
Now that Vision 2020 is laid out, all I have to do is execute. But, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to my supporters for being such wonderful people. Corkscrewd wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for you, and I hope that this new journey would bring you more awesome car-culture content!
Do you ever get the feeling that you made the wrong decision?
Way back in 2009 I got my Associate of Arts degree from my local Community College. I studied design and computer graphics, thinking I wanted to be an industrial designer or something along those lines. But, tuition for some of the better-known design colleges was out of my budget. I mean, we’re talking about $100k+ Bachelor’s Programs. For a family that had two sons planning on going to college, it was hard to justify. I decided to rethink what I wanted to do and take a look at some of the more affordable options in the DC Metro area.
That’s when I found the game design program at the University of Baltimore. I went in, made some really cool stuff, and then I graduated with honors and a really cool thesis project specializing in Augmented Reality Technology! A year after I graduated, I joined a startup in my field when most of my colleagues were still working at Starbucks! And I did it all debt-free! I was on top of the world!
Me and a team of some other really bright people came up with a concept for an Augmented Reality First Person Shooter years before this technology became mainstream! I was really proud of the work we did.
5 years later, I’m broke, I’m constantly working for scraps, and I’m pretty much homeless. I banked on that “revolutionary start-up” being the catalyst for my success in Silicon Valley, but that ended up not happening. Instead, the start-up failed right around the time I got my first apartment, and interviewing with companies doing similar things was next to impossible because my degree didn’t say “Stanford” on it. I was unemployed for two years messing around with a camera and teaching myself photography because it was the skill I had to fall back on, next to graphic design and website building.
Of course, taking photos is one thing, but getting anyone to buy anything is a completely different ball game. Likes and shares don’t pay my bills! And now here I am, writing in my own personal echo chamber pining for the time where I was sitting in my algebra class doodling cars in my notebook, saying “I’m going to be the next Syd Mead!”
These designs were projects I took on at the start-up, hoping to give our product engineer some ideas. Some of my designs even made it into shipped products! I miss doing this.
I could feel it in my bones. That desire to draw and design and create always drove me. I never felt I was alive unless I was creating something from nothing but a pencil and paper. I feel like I was meant to be a designer, and got distracted along the way.
So, now I have a decision to make. Do I try and make things work with what I have now, hoping for something to happen? Or, do I take out a hundred thousand dollar loan and see if I can make my dreams come true, without a safety net? I’m afraid of reaching another dead end, but I feel like I’m at a dead end now.
I never stopped designing!
No one ever gets ahead without taking a risk. And, I’ll need to take a really, really big risk if I’m going to change the way things are going.
