My life as a designer

I don’t want to say “I’ve always been interested in design,” because nearly nothing in my life has been that straightforward. But the truth is that I’ve loved making art and designs for as long as I can remember. I used Kid Pix on my home computer to make gaudy book covers and posters, and whenever that wasn’t available, I arranged shapes, clip art, and text in PowerPoint instead.

One day in elementary school, the teacher in charge of the school play noticed me decorating its title on the computer. She offered to print my design on the cover of the programs, and I was thrilled!

My program cover for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s… not very good, and the printing quality doesn’t help either. I never claimed to be a prodigy.

That teacher was pretty much everyone’s favorite at my school, and it’s easy to see why. Whenever I showed her what I was making, she encouraged me and legitimized my work. After that, art slowly became my favorite subject in school.

Design as an escape

Other things like chemistry, music, writing, and math all took a certain amount of energy to stay actively focused on. Math especially — I remember staying up late nights with my mom, tortured by the idea of getting even half of a calculus assignment done. But for some reason that same energy wasn’t required for visual art. It wasn’t always easy, necessarily, but it came to me easily. Whenever I got stuck or made a mistake, I didn’t feel the need to beat myself up. I just did what I needed to carry on.

A photo edit I made for the cover of my digital design portfolio in high school. It’s also a good metaphor for how free and immersed I felt while making pieces like this.

I tended to get lost in my work for design classes, zoning out to a state where nothing mattered but me and the computer screen. This wasn’t good news for my eyes — I later had to learn how to take breaks from screen time — but it felt great at the time. The repetitive parts of video editing in Multimedia weren’t boring for me like they were for my classmates. That was my time to ignore all the other stresses of the day and just focus. Nowadays I don’t feel as much of a need to escape reality, but design is still meditative for me.

Design as communication

I like that design is intentional. Every choice you make matters, even if it isn’t apparent to the audience. I also enjoy art as a form of communication and expression. I’m not always very comfortable with speaking and writing, so I like having a way to tell the world what I think that works better for me.

A page from a button-sewing manual that I made. I really enjoyed the chance to use illustrations and text together to fully explain the technique.

Unfortunately I can’t do all my talking with pictures, but design is a way to link different types of communication together. I could make a website with text and pictures and links, or a video with animation and music and speech. It’s amazing to me how we have so many ways of sharing our ideas with each other, and my favorite part of college so far has been seeing other people’s work and talking about it with them.

Why did I decide to become a designer? It just felt right. I like designing, both the process and the end result, and the people around me I care about encouraged me to keep doing it. There are many other ways my life could have gone, but I’m certainly glad to have this one.