About Me

Hello, I’m Connor Shea. I am a Rhode Island based graphic designer. You can find some examples of my work here on my website. I am a New England Tech graduate, but started my journey in the design world before attending college. I thought it would be a good idea to share how I got into this field by telling my story below. That way, you can see some examples of the dedication, growth, and hard work that went into finding my path towards design.

Online Promotions

Motion Graphics

Printed Promotions

How I got into Graphic Design

A couple years before apply to NEIT, I got into graphic design… by accident.

I was a manager at a liquor store and took my job very seriously. I spent all day trying to improve the store I worked for. I was always up to learn new things and take on new roles.

Online Promotions

The biggest role I ever took on was product photography. The store I worked for hired a small company to build a website. The company would ask us for photographs of the new products we brought in since many products didn’t have images online yet. I took on the task of photographing the products, which soon turned into me downloading photoshop to resize and mask out the products for a cleaner appearance online.

Within a couple months, I was working directly with the company and had my own WordPress log-in. I used all the time in between unloading deliveries in our warehouse to work on product photography and learn more about photoshop/WordPress.

Unfortunately, since my time leaving that job, it appears that the website I helped work on has been taken down.

narragansett fest marzen lager

Eventually, I upgraded my personal equipment. I was shooting all the product photography with what I had, an iPhone 6. This gave all of the shots a noticeable ‘bulge’ effect due to the iPhone lens.

Upon purchasing my DSLR, I began playing around with our Instagram more. I wanted our uploads to feel more professional in quality. So, I began using everything I could find laying around the store to create more interesting photographs.

A big goal for me during this period was to have the Instagram of the brand being promoted ‘like’ the image. Posts with interactions between the brands and our Instagram helped me feel like a growing graphic designer (before I even understood that that was my goal).

Motion Graphics

Eventually, I got curious about animating some quick promotions for our social media. Below is a supercut of the few humorous adverts I made. These were either posted as stories on social media or as individual posts themselves.

I only created this one gif but always really like it.

It’s meant to replicate late 90’s early 2000’s graphics

as I find them to have a nostalgic spookiness.

The zombie is a real life sized prop.

His name is Dead Ed.

pumpkin king zombie gif

Printed Promotions

One of the final things I started to get into while working at the liquor store was printed media. The coolest things about the liquor industry, to me, is all of the promotional gear that brands create. However, it became very clear to me that not all brands are able to promote their products as much as the larger industry leaders. Popular items like door handle promotions are usually sought after by dominating brands like Budweiser or such.

While that is acceptable in most cases, our store had a large craft beer selection with over 10 doors. It didn’t make sense to me to promote large brands on doors that didn’t contain those products. So, I began designing my own using craft beer brands that were becoming more and more popular at the time. This led to a lot of experimenting with our office printer to get the sizing right and my trusty junk drawer full of different materials/glue sticks.