When all your friends are designers too.

The unavoidable part of becoming a designer or a politician or bricklayer even, is that your peer group will eventually be made up mostly of other designers, bricklayers, or politicians. Why am I insinuating that's a bad thing you might ask? Well I would have thought the answer obvious, but that doesn't make for a very good read!

Politicians are probably the best example of this line of argument because this is something that the majority of people have witnessed with their own eyes. Politicians on the whole, get accused of the same thing over and over again, and it is that of being self interested and out of touch with the people that they actually govern. They are purely in the business of making the country a better place for themselves and others like them. That is of course the generalized public opinion and not everybody shares this view but maybe there is some truth in it. Maybe the politicians have become so accustomed to the interests of their party and the company of other politicians that they have no idea what the people are really like. This happens in a number of instances when you think about it.  It has done throughout history. for instance in revolutions and civil wars across the globe. Stereotyping after all is not entirely fictional, or indeed fixed. The generalization must to true to an extent of most people within the named group, that's how it works. The problem is that the job is so all consuming. It is more than just a job that you do for money, it is a role within society that affects people and there livelihoods and it carries with it responsibility, and expected behavior, and so forth, it just so happens that it carries a pay check. What most people fail to notice is that all jobs are like this. Your Job isn't just a job, it is far more than that.

I think a great interlude to this line of thought would be for you to check out this site which elaborates on my point in a wonderful way. http://workisnotajob.com/en/about.

Now coming back to what you do, it is going to affect affect quite a few things in your life and not only that but it is going to affect things for your close and even quite distantly connected peer group. You might be thinking don't be silly, I can see how a politicians decisions are affecting the wider population, but how is me designing holiday cards for "Clinton Cards" going to make a difference to anything. I feel this one is best illustrated with a little story.

Lets say for example you are in fact a freelance graphic designer. This allows you to work from home or from your clients office and at your own pace within reason. It also allows you to charge whatever rates you feel are appropriate, and generally avoid the day in day out monotony of the nine to five. Overall you are happy with your choice to do this but it does have its down sides. Some of your clients are not very nice people and they don't understand or respect what it is that you do. They call you up at all hours of the day expecting you to be fine with this because you are a freelancer, and they try to get away with not paying you wherever possible. Not only this but you often have periods without any work and you are in charge of supplying, maintaining, and updating, the very expensive equipment and software that is required to be a graphic designer. These are all things that affect you personally.

Now of course these things do have a bit of a knock on effect and bleed into your personal life. For example, your boyfriend/ girlfriend often complains that you don't spend the weekend with them as often as they would like because your projects sometimes run over and the deadline is the most important to you than quality time with your partner. You know all about computers and a little bit about programming and markup languages because its part of your job so naturally sometimes you just cant switch off and end up talking about these subjects to your friends. They know nothing about what you are talking about and have no interest in listening to it either, as it has no effect on there situation and subsequently avoid you when that's what you are talking about. In there eyes you are becoming more and more boring and they would like there less geeky friend back. On a more positive front though it also means that you can help with otherwise technical and daunting tasks that your friends may not be able to handle on there own so most people, (your mum especially) now assume that you are there own personal technician and treat you accordingly. Great news for a number of people in your immediate circle and perhaps a few friends of theirs that could sling you some work.

Now you can see where I am going with this but the last one is the more important aspect, and it is how you have affected the company, the employees, and the consumers, of the products via your actual work. Now lets not forget what you do as a graphic designer. You are a conveyor of visual information and a maker a visual reality that may or may not exist for someone other than yourself. In essence, you sell things to people using pictures and words. So where does all this affectation come in? I'm glad you asked! Lets say the Job you just did was a set of labels for a new cosmetic range that wanted to draw in a new younger audience as the company weren't meeting there profit target by only appealing to the over 25's. So you made some funky fresh design touting young faces Photoshopped to look as though they were wearing the cosmetics themselves and beaming with confidence about it. You have just given the company a much need facelift and they have therefore made a huge 23% increase in sales as a result of the new packaging, allowing them to take on more staff and produce more products. This has indirectly created jobs for some lucky people who were looking for work but it has also increased the workload of the lab staff who were already overworked. Because its such a specialist role the company could not afford to hire more lab technicians and just decided that the current staff members could handle it. A young girl who normally doesn't wear makeup passes this new product in the shops and has heard that its all the rage and growing in popularity among her friends so she asks her mother to buy it for her. Her mother who is against makeup refuses and this indirectly contributes to mean comments from those who do wear the product. I could go on but I feel that I may have got my point across with this one.

This story is of course all fictional and purely fabricated to make a point but the point is in how this chain forms from what you do. Your work has a myriad of unexpected chain reactions regardless of what it is you actually think you do, so it is important to remain rounded and aware of the wider audience and affectee's. This is why I think that it is bad to have only friends who are graphic designers. It blinkers your thinking into a mold of the political, ideological, and social, conscious of the design world. It just so happens that graphic designers and other creators can be quite progressive, but even though this is true it becomes easy to forget that there is a whole world out there who know nothing of what you do or why you do it. These people are still very much a part of your world. And there voice and point of view is still just as valid as anyone else's. The minute you stop listening to those voices you become the out of touch politician, and honestly nobody likes that person. So by all means have friends who are designers and do cool designery type stuff with them. We all need people with whom we share a passion because it gives us someone to bounce off of and spark creativity. Just try and make sure that you have a life outside of the design world with people that have nothing to do with it. You know what they say after all, "Variety is the spice of life".

Why enter Design Competitions?

I used to be pretty against entering design competitions because I thought them to be pointless activities for people with far too much time on there hands. I mean come on who has even a spare day in the week when they are trying to juggle there education, family life, social life, relationships, maybe a part time job and some form of other extra curricular activity? There simply isn't enough time in the day! Not only that but lets face it your probably not going to win, and there may even be an upfront cost to entering the competition in the first place. Exactly how I am benefitting from being in this competition I have no idea. But these thoughts are all past tense now due to a number of occurrences in my life that changed my mind. I am going to start with the golf ball in the jar example because this is what got the ball rolling on my new found vision of competitions in the first place. So what the hell am I talking about with this golf ball thing?

Maybe you have heard of this and maybe you haven't but there is a basic philosophy lesson that gets taught in most degree courses the world over and it is called the jar of life. A friend of mine sent me a link to this in an email about a year ago and it has stayed with me ever since so I suggest you give it a watch and see what you think about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJQ8RK6lnuU If you check the link you can view the lesson in action. The basic premise (assuming you didn't click the link yet or cannot view it for whatever reason) is that if you fill a glass jar with golf balls it appears to be full until you then add some small pebbles which will fill in the gaps between the golf balls. It then looks like its full once more but of course it isn't because there is still yet more space to put in sand or some other fine grain and the jar will once again appear to be full, except for the fact that amazingly enough there is still more space in the jar even with the previous items inside, and that can be any form of liquid that will fill the remaining space in the jar. So the golf balls which are the largest items in the jar, are there to represent the more important aspects of your life like family, friends, and personal growth. The pebbles would represent secondary importance like a home, job, car etc. the things that help to sustain the previous items and so on and so on. If you were to put the same items in the jar in a different order then they would not fit no matter how hard you try to make them. The point being that as long as you focus on the important things first you will always be able to fit the other stuff around it. Its about priorities in a nutshell. So anyway why I have told you this will become clear with the further examples  I hope so please read on.

I ran into an old friend of mine about six months after that whom I had studied with a few years ago at college. We weren't on the same course but we were friends and we used to smoke on breaks and chat, you get the drift. We had the usual catch up chat of how are you what have you been up to bla bla bla, and she told me a very intriguing story about a competition she had been involved in. She was a performing arts student at the time and a friend of hers was doing film, and it was this friend that was entering the competition and needed an actress to play homeless girl in her film entry. Now my friend agreed to this and on the day of the filming got chatting to one of the people running the competition and it just so happened that she knew of someone who was looking for an intern in a theatre. Not as an actress but as a set design assistant and basically she managed to talk her way into it because she was quite artsy as well. Now that internship turned into a job and that job got her chatting to someone else who needed someone to do some acting work for them and long story short she is now at the BRIT school and doing well for herself. So even though she herself did not enter this competition her involvement lead to various other opportunities opening up and due to her open mindedness at the time it actually panned out perfectly.

Now my final example as to why I have changed my mind is because whilst studying myself last year I was forced to take part in a competition that was run by the RSA. This is a fairly common one to do if you are on a graphic design degree and holds you in high esteem for the future if you do well on it! you can look it up here http://www.thersa.org/sda I actually did not do well on it at all and got absolutely no accolades from it whatsoever but what it did for me was force me to think about the process of my designing in a whole new way and one that got me to be much more creative and in fact collaborative then I was naturally used to. It basically turned me into an expert mingler which has in turn landed me various opportunities since having taken part in the competition. So yes you are correct in thinking that I am taking a rather philosophical stand point on wether or not you should do a design competition or two in your journey to becoming a designer but why not. If it is more persuasive than listing the pros and cons then I feel I will have succeeded.

The lessons I learned much like the jar of golf balls trick had to come in that particular order or I do not think I would be writing this down now at all, e.g. had I not seen that video I would not have compared it to my friends experience thus committing her tale to my memory banks, and had she not told me that story I may not have viewed my failed attempt at the RSA competition in the way that I did. It was a necessary part of my development not only as a designer but as a person because you can apply these principles to virtually anything in your life and probably see positive results. It is all a question of perspective. So instead of looking like I used to at all the reasons of why it was a terrible idea and what it would costs my current life to get involved in something new and different like a competition, I decided that I was going to take the opposite tack and see it as in investment. This would be an investment of experience and an opportunity to learn. and maybe get a new perspective or friend or client or contact or whatever. I could only find out what it was whilst doing it. This is why I recommend you getting involved in design competitions.

I have recently taken it upon myself to enter a competition of sorts which I would previously thought to be a waste of my time based on this new outlook of mine. I am not entering alone so it is a chance to collaborate and because it is based in film it will allow me the chance to get to know some more industry bods like film makers, photographers, directors and such. So even if it doesn't go anywhere I will have gained some valuable experience and something great for my portfolio which is really why im doing it in the first place. Winning isn't really the end goal. Don't get me wrong if we do win that will be great because it will come with all kinds of other perks and benefits that I cannot possibly account for at this current stage in time but you get the picture. All I can say is that I think it will be of great benefit to you and your career if you get involved in some competitions but don't forget to choose wisely because getting involved in any old competition willy nilly will get you know where. Try hard to assess if the competition does have any benefits that are relevant to you right now rather than completely disconnected.