After reading many articles and listening to hours of podcasts, I have been inspired, or maybe prompted, to document my own creative journey as it pertains to graduating college and taking that gained knowledge and applying it to actual industry based work.

To begin, I feel like education, whether it's through trade schools, colleges and universities, or specific art and design colleges, all teach you great things; the elements of design and the principles of design, and all of these rules that the creative greats used and continue to use. I truly believe that these are all important parts of design and design education. Having the skillset in order to apply them correctly or blatantly disregard them is very important, if not crucial to the success of any designer. Some universities and educators approach design education in this manner and I believe it is necessary, but I also believe that there is a client, human, part of design education that is missing. That missing part leaves a lot of future full-time creatives seeing the design world as a giant art project, instead of several problems that don’t have specific answers.

 However, when you miss the experience part of education, what you miss out on is real life clients, you miss the real world problems and dealing with actual clients who sometimes have horrible taste. So, in the next few articles or several articles, I don't even know what this is gonna end up turning into, but, what I'm hoping to do is document my thoughts and my feelings as it pertains to projects I’ve worked on, working on currently, or my educational experience and professional experience. 

I am in the beginnings of wanting to do my own thing, but currently learning with the jobs that I have. I think, when it comes to the modern design age, I think people are learning that sometimes a big name agency doesn’t always deliver the best work. However, when you can find someone who clicks with you on a personality level or on a local level, someone who just understands who you are or who your business is, that's when things really come into their own.

I listened to a podcast that included an interview with Mike Smith from Smith&Diction, as well as his wife and one of the things he talked about was that “not every project is gonna work for you and maybe you're not gonna be the best solution for every client’s project, but it's about finding the ones that you have the creative juice for”. Maybe I’m taking his statements a little out of context but, my interpretation of what he said is “The creative industry is always fluctuating. Just because it fluctuates doesn’t mean you have to be subject to it. You are in charge of your own creativity, so find those who are looking for creativity you can and want to provide.” Hopefully that’s close to what his point was. I'm trying to find what works for me as a creative and, during that process, I'm also trying to find the people whose creative needs align best with my creative outputs.