Battle On

Before I got into doing graphic design I tried asking around what it was like. After all, graphic design is a blanket term that could apply to any number of tasks involving visuals. Despite the ambiguity, a lot of the answers I got included "repetitive" and "thankless" in their descriptions. Now that I've been doing it for about a year in various forms, I can see what those people were talking about.

Repetition comes from having to modify the same project over and over again. Sometimes it's because of the disconnect between what a supervisor has in mind and what the artist ends up making. Sometimes it's simply to be able to choose from multiple versions of a design.

The thankless part comes from supervisors not fully understanding the process of creating the visuals. Some are unaware of a task's difficulty level. Others know about the difficulty and just want something despite how long it would realistically take to accomplish.

Another neccessity is to be working towards a clear objective. In graphic design it's important because of the repetive tasks of re-editing past and present projects. What's the point of reworking a composition if you don't even know what it's supposed to be accomplishing?

Now that I think about it, much of what I just mentioned could be applied to many other jobs. What's really worrying me is that I'm becoming more focused on very specific aspects such as measuring units, angles and fonts... and liking it. There's nothing wrong with taking pleasure in these things, in fact I know some people that do *cough* Dianne *cough*. I just feel this is somehow affecting my creativity. If I were to use an analogy, I'd say I'm used to being a Photoshop person and now I'm increasingly becoming an Illustrator/InDesign person. The point being is that I don't want to end up like this:



I guess what's preventing that from happening is the source material I get to play around with. If you want a mere taste, just check out these sites here, here, here, here and here. Seriously, I can just stare at some of the artwork I have in front of me and get inspired to create something new and original. The competive nature that's been driving me all my life gets a boost of motivation. Unfortunately, working two jobs limits the amount of time I have for creative endeavors. That's probably why I'm getting my creative kicks from character creation modes in video games, like I mentioned in a previous post. Going back to my Adobe analogy, there's no reason why Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign should be mutually exclusive. Just look at how the Adobe Creative Suite series has improved compatibility between those programs. Where I work, I have access to use every single Adobe program. The possibilities are endless and completely up to me. There are worse things I could be complaining about.