The first official graphic design position I was hired for ended up being something of a disaster. About a year before I had decided I wanted to pursue graphic design as a profession, after having wandered down quite a few other roads I was unsatisfied with.
I had quit my job as a massage therapist in order to drive for Uber (which ended up being a huge mistake, but that is an entirely different story), and was beginning to question what I really wanted from a career. I landed on graphic design because I wanted to do something creative, that required problem solving, would pay me a living wage, and would allow me to continue to learn as I evolved. To prepare myself for this new endeavor, I enrolled in two continuing education classes over the summer of 2016, Intro to Photoshop and Digital Tools for Visual Arts, hoping to learn the basics, find an entry level job, and learn everything else I would need as I worked.
Immediately after completing these classes, I managed to land an unpaid internship with Street Sense Media, the District’s local homeless newspaper (similar to Real Change in Seattle). It was liberating and allowed me to have fun and work with the tools I had learned over the summer, but I was no closer to finding paid, permanent work.
After interning at Street Sense, I was offered a low paying job as part of the marketing team for a mortgage lender in Maryland. I was initially very excited about the position because part of the company’s marketing campaign involved working with video, a skill I was passionate about and was hoping to develop further.
There were a number of factors that ended up making the resulting experience unpleasant for me. My supervisor was often exacting in their vision or completely absent, the commute was long and a nightmare, and I, although eager, was not an experienced videographer or graphic designer. I didn’t have a firm grasp of the design process and no one at the company was going to teach it to me. It wasn’t until years and many, many tutorials later that I finally began to learn some of the skills that make for a great designer.
Though this first job was a failure, it did lead to some positive experiences. For example, I end up teaching myself to use After Effects, which is a tool I still use and love to this day.