Goodbye 2019… Hello 2020!

With New Year’s resolution brainstorming sessions fresh in mind, 2020 brings plenty of opportunities for reflection on how to improve in the months ahead. This year, I want to shake it up a little though. I also want to spend some time looking back at how far I’ve come professionally, starting with design.

My passion for design began when I was in middle school around the time of the advent of social media. To impress my adolescent friends, I took to editing the bejesus out of nearly every image I ever posted on my social media feed. Most of these images included out-of-control filters, cartoonish icons, brightly colored frames, and various typography.

By the end of my high school career, I had a full facebook album of these dreadful images (a total of 81 photos). While these little graphics are undeniably embarrassing (they are no longer public, so don’t bother looking for them! 😉 ), I actually harbor a lot of gratefulness to my former-self for going through this phase.

Looking back, I understand the way in which this period of tinkering helped shape me into the designer I am today. Like most trades, design is not something you can be good at overnight. It takes lots and lots of practice. The hours of seemingly meaningless time I spent carefully crafting these goofy graphics was actually quite useful.

Without knowing it, I was experimenting with color, typography, balance, contrast, and many more skills that are a part of my everyday life today. 

Looking at my earliest graphics, it’s clear that my eye for design and keen attention to detail was not intrinsic; rather, it came through hundreds of hours of experimentation in which I slowly realized which arrangements of pixels looked more aesthetically pleasing than others.

Here’s to another decade of design tinkering and improvement!