Your social life is overrated

This planet is full of beauty and intelligence and exquisite differences wherever you look. You can find inspiration and new ideas in the most obscure places. Think back to a time when you were forced to take that 40 minute walk in the rain instead of the bus because you lost your purse and I will bet all the change in my pocket (this statement is just for effect I don't actually carry change in my pocket I have a purse so that would be silly!) that you had something awoken in you. A reminder of times when you go out in the rain on purpose because you wanted to feel the water on your face, and how it made you want to splash in the puddles and run around like you did when you were six. I'll bet you actually enjoyed it. There is after all only so wet you can get! It is always an enlightening experience when you are forced to do something seemingly with no reason and end up getting lost in the moment. Think about it, in your childhood why did you ever do anything? It was never for a reason and you never ever asked why. I mean you might have asked why is the sky blue or why is the grass green but I'll bet you never asked your friend why do you want to play on the slide. It was obvious because it was an experience. If you never had the experience before then that was all the more reason to do it. Unfortunately though in your adult life you get trained into being afraid of new experiences. Fear of course has its purposes and should not be ignored but considering how safe our world actually is now in comparison even to fifty years ago it seems strange that the level of fear in people has actually risen. We have great medicine now, and we have stringent health and safety checks for buildings, vehicles and public spaces. Everything that is likely to have a lot of people involved in or using it, is likely to have been checked so thoroughly for possible dangers that you would have to get really creative in order to harm yourself in anyway. And yet even in light of all this modern technology and insight we are afraid to let our children play in the street or to climb up onto a fence in case they slip and break an arm etc. We have actually just become hyper vigilant instead and handed over responsibility from the discretion of the individual, to a risk assessment test. The result is constant fear of the unknown and the unchecked. This is of course not entirely our own fault because have you ever tried ignoring the warnings and going ahead and doing the dangerous thing anyway? What happens is somebody immediately saves you from yourself. They scream out stop you cant go in there it's dangerous you'll hurt yourself, and come running to your aid and to drag you from harms way. Its quite distracting actually and the sudden intervention might be the very thing that causes you to harm yourself ironically enough. But I digress. The point is that the world itself is nothing to be afraid of it is more likely other people that you should be afraid of.

Now getting to the point of a social life and what purpose that serves for us. In your childhood it's to have a partner in crime, and to have people with which to share you experience with. This is important to my point so remember that sentence. The people that you choose as friends as children, are often measured by there fear (or lack of) for new experiences. What I mean by that is you subconsciously go towards people who want to try the same things as you do and who have similar levels of tolerance for them. There are nuances of course between physical, social, and intellectual experience but you get the picture. So you are not going to hang out with people who constantly do things that scare you senseless. You are going to hang back and find other people who are fearful like you and don't force you to do big scary things all the time. The same of course though works vice-versa. You are equally not going to want to hang out with people who are afraid to try new things if you are the brave one because eventually you will become resentful and feel that they are holding you back. It is this fundamental underlying motive that drives all social interaction. The sharing of experience. So of course this only becomes a problem when people are mismatched in life. Its the tyranny of the majority. By the time you get to secondary school for example you are pretty much expected to like and want to like the same the things as the majority of people do and if you are anywhere above or below this line of accepted behavior then you will be outcast and left to enjoy your experience on your own. Sometimes that is a good thing because it allows you to experience life on your terms but I will get to that point later.

We all start to learn as teenagers and probably younger than that even, that there is an accepted level of fear. Girls should be afraid of spiders, dirt, and excessive physical exertion, and boys should be afraid of crying in front of people and the wider range of emotions in general. (I obviously didn't get that memo). This is all rather general and outdated I know but the point is there is a kind of benchmark that we are being measured against all the time. I am female and to be honest am afraid of very little, I am not afraid of heights, heavy machinery, fighting, wild animals, or dirt. Unfortunately I am pretty weird about the spiders thing but then again so are my brothers! Regardless of the social cultural shift that has happened post feminism, a lot of the old stereotypes remain and people are still surprised of my fearlessness in general when they get to know me, and often put it down to some sort of unnatural disposition that I must have and be unaware of. This is fine now because I have come to terms with the fact that is the way that the world works, but it is actually very restricting because it leaves me feeling as though I have to pass for normal with regards to my hopes and fears. And there are so many people that I speak to that feel the need to pass for normal when it comes to fear or lack of for any given experience. It is a real shame because other peoples reactions are what we fear more than the actual event and how they will treat us if we reveal our true identities (Batman couldn't exist without the mask).

This is why I think that your social life is overrated. Having to check back with your peer group or in fact any near by human being that what you are doing is acceptable to the wider majority can be an almost cripplingly slow process. How is any one supposed to learn about the world or there own level of comfort within it if they have to go through this rigmarole day in day out. It is frankly ridiculous. To the loners out there this is a lesson that they learned long ago. They have already given up on the checks and balances and enjoy a whole world free from the judging eyes of the masses. It seems to me no coincidence that great genius and leaps of consciousness in the world have more often than not been born of solitude. So perhaps the key to true creativity is to be found on ones own after all.  And Now for my final trick! of tying this all in to Design.

Everything that you design is for someone other than yourself to look at and interact with. You have to do a lot of guess work in trying to get to a place where you understand the mind of the viewer. That however is just yet another layer of the people pleasing machine and another step away from experience for experiences sake. Did I mention that your happiness depends on your ability to experience things in the moment? watch this link you'll see what I mean. http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment.html but again I digress. After too long spent figuring out what it is that people like and don't like we sort of stagnate. And that is because we forget one key thing. People change there minds, and they change there minds so frequently that trying to keep up with what people do and do not like is pretty much futile. This is a battle that you will never win. Isn't it funny how the cool kids are usually the ones who don't give a crap whether or not people think what they are doing is cool or not? Not really, it is because they go with the moment and indulge in it regardless of the social consequences. It can be hard as a designer to just go with your gut and tell other people what they should and shouldn't like but all you can do is try. If you don't then you will be yesterdays news faster than you can say wait for me. You did after all get into this business most likely because somebody did something so out there and off the wall that it inspired you right? Well now it is your turn. don't bother asking your friends if what you are doing is right or not just feel it out. If it feels right to you right now then it is!

Oh and now for an apology for what has actually been an epic rant. I just had one of those days today where all of the above was running around my brain at a hundred miles and hour and I thought it best to share the juicy bits with you good people of the internet. Thanks for listening!

Internships (the pro's and con's)

First of all let me say that I have done quite a few internships myself and they can be good and they can be bad depending on your perspective. It is unfortunate that in the last ten years or so the use of interns has become a cheeky way for start ups and larger companies alike to exploit hardworking young people in their quest for gainful employment. If you take a job and call it an internship then you don't have to worry about all those tricky little things such as tax responsibilities, minimum wage, and employee rights. That is of course coming from a rather cynical stand point but still one that is worth bringing up none the less. So I feel that I might as well begin this little chat with;

The Con's

The legal definition of what actually constitutes work and therefore should be paid at least minimum wage is this: having set hours, being engaged for an extended period of time, i.e. office hours 9-5, being given a set role. Now for anyone who has taken part on an internship lately they will know that these are exactly the criteria of the roles that are being dished out in lieu of paid work, and all in exchange for experience and a bus ticket. Most of the time you wont even get lunch paid for and will end up actually out of pocket working for someone else. This to me seems a little unfair and is the kind of thing that makes you feel as though your degree was in fact worthless. Not only do you have a huge pile of debt but you are no closer to getting your foot in the door than unqualified school leavers with no experience either. This is by all accounts frustrating. The fact of the matter is that in this modern era of the globalisation and the free market etc if you want to get a good job then you have now got global competition to deal with as well. One thing that universities know is that education in such a climate is big business and therefore they will do anything to persuade us that we all need a degree, and to counter that one thing that businesses know is that universities do very little to prepare there students for the real world of work, and the graduates are therefore unlikely to be able to (excuse the terminology) "hit the ground running". The fact of the matter is you probably do need a degree to get your foot anywhere near the door of a specialised position these days. You may even need a 2:1 and a masters and on top of that, you may also need 2 to 3 years of experience to qualify you as an employable human being these days which seems a little absurd when you see the amount of "work" that takes place in your average offices but I digress.

The second problem with a lot of "internships" is that they are not even remotely what they claim to be. For example I would say that about 80 percent of the Graphic Design"internships" (and I use that term loosely, hence the quotation marks) that are advertised on Gumtree.com are actually just start ups that cannot afford to pay a private firm to design their company literature. These kinds of deals are often set around the premise of, you come to us and pay your travel upfront and we will re-imberse you (maybe), you bring your own equipment and software with you, you brand the company, design the brochure, build the website, and make everyone tea whilst your at it, 9-5 monday to friday, until your role becomes so legally tenuous that we have to let you go. In exchange you will get work experience and a reference plus a few bits for your portfolio. This actually doesn't even sound quite so bad at first glance until you look at the job descriptions of a lot of entry level roles and the fact that you will be asked to do far less and be paid around 18,000 a year for it. Its then that it starts to seem unfair. This might have more to do with Gumtree than internships in general, but I feel I have made my point about the pitfalls ahead. I believe that you do gain valuable experience, but it is mostly experience in recognising that you are being exploited.

Last of all there is the fact that the unpaid internship often goes on for far too short a period of time for any real employer to see it as proof of your experience in the field. Again this comes down to the fact that legally an unpaid internship in the UK is not supposed to go on for any longer than a month so you are still in that catch 22 position of not having had enough experience. You need realistically a solid year behind you, and the competition for the legitimate, paid, year long kind of internship is frightening! Unless you have the perfect candidate profile including the grades, which looks more like that of a political candidates resume plus the contacts to show for it also, you can pretty much forget it.

but there is hope out there for us all!

The pro's

The thing is you are going to be selling yourself on your portfolio. As much as it is wonderful to see that you are a conceptual genius that can produce ideas and campaigns to rival big brands like Coca Cola and MTV your day to day work load is not likely to be quite so exciting, so companies want to see that you can do the boring suff too. Your College portfolio will likely showcase all the shiny stuff but what you will learn very fast in the kind of internship that I mentioned before, is how your average freelance job might work out. You will get to know how to run a project from start to finish its its truest meaning and not only that but you be fully responsible for the outcome. This is going to look great in future where employers are concerned.

You will begin to see the inners workings of your average companies marketing department, from the number of employees, to the kinds of deadlines involved, and the level of responsibility that is put into the department.

Then of course there is the fact you will most likely speed up your work rate ten fold in the process (I know that I certainly did). This is something that yet again will put you in good stead with employers.

And last but not least you will also get the chance to figure out all of the non graphic design jobs that are included in being a graphic designer (nobody tells you that stuff whilst your still studying)

By the time you have finished doing a years worth of different internships for different kinds of companies (like I did if thats what you choose to do) you will be a certified pro, and probably ready to reach out into the big wide world of freelancing. Whats more you may well have gained a few great references (if you behaved yourself) and picked up some well needed office politics deflector shields! which really do need to become a real thing very soon. Obviously just like before you will need to be choosy about what goes in your portfolio still but you will also have those boring bits that prove you don't live in fairy land to the real employers, so you are most definitely gaining momentum towards your chosen career for having done one or two internships.

What kind of graphic designer will you be?

In all honesty the answer to this is one that is very hard to define. I have on several occasions thought that I had found the answer only to find out quite quickly afterwards that I did not actually know what I was talking about at all. Thats life I guess, thinking you know something only to discover that you don't. Graphic design, much like many things in life is no exception. It changes with the times like people do. Now the overall purpose of graphic design remains the same as it always has. To help advertise and communicate information in a visually stimulating way. That is not to say that it cannot be a vehicle for other things like tackling perceptions and changing the way people think about what they are doing and how they are interacting with the world around them because it does these things too.

What I want to talk about here though is less of a philisophical stand point on the nature of design and much more of a practicle guide to what you as a designer might get up to during your day. Mainly I aim to give you some helpful information that I had absolutely no clue about when I started my journey into the world of graphic design.

The profession is split up into subcategories that deal with different aspects of design (fairly obvious) and rightly so. Doctors may all be doctors but they all have their specialisms and the same applies for designers. If you are to become an expert in anything then the narrower the feild, the more accurate your expertise are likey to become. Don't take this as gospel I am sure someone will point out many things I have missed but the broad categories of graphic designers are as follows.

Web designers,
( This is largely made up of layout design for the web and is quite similar to that of brochure and magaizine design. The difference being however that the elements of interactivity in the web make the design process slightly more challenging as you have to figure out your customers behaviours as well as make the information palletable. Often web designers double as web developers (writing mark up language similar to what a programmer does) and have good technical knowledge to do with software and computers. Web pages themselves are just one part of web design though as there is a growing maret for e-marketing strategies, e-commerce, games, applications and so on.)

Digital designers,
( Digital design is rather more aimed at interactivity than static design. It can involve anything up to and including web design, interface design, application design, and animation. This particular feild tends to be one of the more challenging ones as it is user oriented and involves a good understanding of semantics and usually requires a knowledge of both static and motion design as well as an understanding of programming laguages. There is more planning and testing involved in this feild than there is actual design as the emphasis is on how things work.)

Motion graphic designers,
( motion graphic designers bring static images to life. They tend to work in film, television, and animation, and take on a very similar role to that of the digital designer. (it is more likely that all of the above would work together on a project) they would do work such as idents, movie credits and dynamic web pages as an example.)

Print designers,
( There will always be work for the print designer despite what people might be saying due to the growing dependance on technolgy. Alot of the information we consume from day to day is in printed format. The menue at a restaurant, a business card, a bill from your phone company, the instruction maual that came with your new PC etc. Any where there is paper there is a print designer involved somewhere along the way.

Packaging designers,
( This requires virtually no explanation as they do precisely what there title suggests. Every single thing that you buy comes in packaging of some kind and therefore in our modern consumer society becoming a packaging designers could well be a great way to guaruntee yourself work (if you are good of course).

Signage designers,
( The modern company has a real challenge on their hands when it comes to standing out from the crowd considering the fact that even your average joe can present themselves as a brand these days. Signage can quite literally capture an audience as well as inform on a location and help to navigate an area all at the same time. So the job entails some serious forethought. Then there are materials and costs to consider as well as environmental issues such as wether or not the sigange gives off light and disturbes the local wildlife and so on.)

Type designers,
( Although when we think of graphic design we tend to think of web design, interface design, and things like magazines what people forget is that typography does not just magically appear. Somebody dedicates there entire career to creatoing character formats, different lettering styles, entire font styles etc whilst all the while considering its legibility and tone as evry font has its own personality.)

So as you can see some of these categories blend over each other as the requirements for each job often require you to be multiskilled, but generally I think this is a fair representation of what kind of work is out there for people. Now under each one of these categories there is also a subset of roles within that. but these are the kinds of things that you will work out in your education and career for yourself so I wont go into that. What  I hope you have gathered from this is that you wont be completely up the creek without a paddle if you find that any one of these genres doesnt actually suit you. There is always another one for you to try and the likelihood is your experience with the other may actually give you a head start in your new direction.

Like I said in my previous post for those of you who read it, you need to get stuck and be brave because your calling isnt going to come and bite you in the arse. Only time will tell (I am so full of cliche's for this I apologise) but knowing what is out there for you to try in the first place should be a big help. I didnt have a clue that half of these roles existed at all when I went to college and I think I would have benefitted greatly from it at the time. You probably already have a good idea wether you are more interested in motion or static or print or digital or 3d or flat etc. So trying out things in each of these will help you to realise where your strengths lie.

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Who am I to tell you?

This is not the only blog on the web that talks about graphic design at all. Of course you know that because you stumbled across this more than likely completely by accident whilst searching for something vaguely related, that's just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, but your curiosity has lead you to read on! congratulations and hello reader. 

The answer to the question posed in the title is actually pretty obvious. I am no-one and will continue to be no-one in the world of design until someone who is deemed as "someone" tells you that I am someone too. Name dropping however is a little too easy for my liking and a little too lacking in substance, so I am writing from a place much more humble. I am, (probably just like you), starting out in the world. I am a lowly post-grad who has stumbled on through university, intern-ships and the recession over the last five years. And no I didn't always know that I wanted to be a designer or live, eat, sleep, and breathe design like you get told to while you are at art school. however a skill is a skill is a skill, and if you do something well you should never do it for free! In reality I made a logical decision based on what skills I had, and what chances I had of achieving said goals, and which ones I would most enjoy throughout my lifetime, and landed at a career in design. It did not come to me in a dream and I think it is a very small group of people that this happens for. What I will be doing here therefore, is giving you a realistic and honest account of my experiences and successes and failures so far, that you can hopefully take something from and use in your own career as a graphic designer or similar. Think of me like a pace runner in a race that is just in front and plodding on so that you don't lose momentum. 

If that doesn't sound like what you wanted to hear then don't worry! there are plenty of other blogs and articles out there that will give you the perspective of a seasoned pro. I am sure they can point you in the direction of some great advice, and I don't doubt that they will tell you things that I cant, but they have probably forgotten what is like to be you or I (just some food for thought there). So I think it is only fair that I tell you the things that I did up to this point in relation to my career as a designer. This way you can see how I ended up at this point and which career related decisions affected my journey.