Class project makes grade for Marblehead arts festival

MARBLEHEAD – She found Marblehead when looking for a place to live while studying graphic design. A year later, a class project has turned into the logo for the 50th anniversary of her adopted hometown’s signature annual event, the Marblehead Festival of the Arts.”Winning was like, what? Really?” Maria Ramirez said. “If you think of how you start doing this, it was a project for class, and it grew into me.”Ramirez, 41, is living with her children in Marblehead for a year while she takes a graphic design certificate program at Salem State University. She said she found Marblehead while looking at places to live in the area, and immediately fell in love with the town when she arrived last summer. One of the first things the family did was visit the Festival of Arts.”It was kind of a rainy Festival of Arts last year,” Ramirez said. “They cancelled the fireworks.”But she and her kids loved the exhibit at “the house in the middle” (the Old Town House) and an activity in a local park.So when Ramirez’ professor assigned the class to design a logo for the 50th year of the arts festival, Ramirez said she felt a special connection to the assignment.”It was always more personal for me as opposed to other students because I live in Marblehead and had been to the festival and wanted to do a good job,” Ramirez said.She admitted she wasn’t so sure about her work. She had always done art, but she didn’t have an artistic background. She originally studied economics in Chile, and most of her career has been spent in the airline business. Most recently, she and her husband have started a company designing software for small airlines.”At work, we were starting to do projects for the web, and somebody had to step out and do design,” Ramirez explained, “and that was me.”She decided to take a year for a graphic design course. And her class assignment will now be emblazoned on stationary, T-shirts, posters and in Marblehead history.”I wanted it to be simple, I didn’t want it to be a lighthouse, which everybody does,” Ramirez said of her design. “I think at the end, the clouds did it for me. It’s very suggestive of painting and music at the same time. I like the effect of having the three colors, because you have this negative space…and sailing is so Marblehead, I think the sailboat is self-explanatory.”One of the logo contest judges, Gene Arnould, owner of Arnould Gallery and Framery, agreed with that assessment.”I see a lot of art, and think it has a painterly quality to it: the swirl of cloud and swirl of waves,” Arnould said. “It leaves that sort of question mark as to are they really waves?”Ramirez said the contest was very affirming for a budding artist.”I haven’t been designing professionally for my whole life….you have no idea how your things are,” Ramirez said. “If you’re a good student like I am, the teacher says your stuff is good, but you never really know.”For her second Festival of Arts, Ramirez will be hoping for warm, sunny weather ? to better see her work.”I’m looking forward to running into people wearing the T-shirts,” she said. “I will be like ?whee!'”