Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved creative projects – art, crafts, illustration, just making stuff in general. I didn’t go down that path in my education/career initially for numerous reasons that seemed important at the time but silly now, and because of that, I’ve always felt like there was something missing. Work takes up so much time and space in life, and I found that I just wasn’t happy spending that time not making, not engaging in creative work. So I ended up on a long and bumpy road that finally led back here to Seattle Central Creative Academy. I picked up some skills and experience along the way, and I’m hoping to find a way to mash it all up and move forward as a designer whose work is richer because of that life experience.
Prior to this year, I had taken a couple of classes in landscape architecture that included some pretty intensive scholarly reading and theory about design. While it was not particularly graphic design-focused, two ideas that I found really compelling from that experience were:
- Experiences can be designed to help people develop a deep connection to a place that acknowledges the complexity of the history and the present, and having that connection to place can make a huge difference in how we experience, interact with, and care for our environment.
- We often talk about design being for the purpose of advertising a product or solving a problem, but design has capabilities beyond just problem-solving. At its best, design is a tool for us to lasso our imaginations and really dream of possibilities in the world. Some of the best design thinking might be imagining the world that we’d like to live in and creating pathways that make that world a little more possible, a little more real.
I’m hoping that these two concepts can stay in my consciousness and become a foundation in my design practice in some way even though I’ll probably be working with branding or advertising or some of those more overtly problem-solving-centered areas of design most of the time.
Now that I’ve completed two (three?) quarters here in the design program, I’m not sure that I’ve 100% determined exactly where I want to go in design yet, but I have some ideas that feel like they’re beginning to take shape. I’m really interested in accessibility in design, and it’s important to me that my work reflect representation and inclusion for all sorts of people. I’d love to explore design work that has more materiality to it because that physical connection is really satisfying. I’ve begun to discover that I really appreciate lovely type, and as I move forward in the program, I’d love to experiment more with creating work with interesting typefaces and using type to speak in particular voices within my work. This year, I also learned that experiential design is a sub-field of that exists within or adjacent to graphic design, and there’s so much work in that realm that’s so interesting and inspiring. For now, I want to see if I can get a little experience in that direction because I think that working on memorable events or special environments would be incredibly fun, meaningful, and exciting. I’ve realized that it’s an area that integrates some of my past experience (like museum education, technical illustration, data management, and interfacing with a really wide diversity of people) quite well with design. It’s is one path to using graphic design to deepen connections between people and places and improve quality of life, and it integrates many aspects of that materiality that I find so satisfying. However, even though I’m most interested in experiential design right now, there are so many areas of design that I think I’d be happy exploring and that I could really dive into, learn a ton, and make work that I’m proud of, and I’m starting to really look forward to some of the deep dives that might be possible with second year classes and special projects.