Cheesiness Alert

What's this? A new blog post? Well, I'm really sorry I didn't post for the past few days; I just started an internship in New York City, which means I leave the house at 7:30AM and don't get back until 7 at night three days a week. It's exhausting but I love it, which is what this blog post is about. I'm warning you, it might get cheesy, so back away now if you don't want to read that sort of thing.

When I opened up Photoshop for the first time 6 years ago and began posting in the blending forum I've mentioned before, I wasn't expecting it to become my career. I was just bored and liked the people who were posting there. So, like a true nerdfighter, I had to get involved. Obviously I wasn't very good at the beginning, but over 4 years of using Photoshop almost every day, I began to pick up on what was good design and what wasn't. I liked the people who were posting and I liked the community, though looking back at it, we were probably very annoying to everyone else on the forum. But it gave me something to do, and it gave me a goal to try to achieve: to become the best blender there. I don't know if I was actually the best, but by the time I stopped posting there two years ago I was certainly better than most of the other people. I had achieved my goal of becoming well-known within the community. Of course, that's when I started getting bored with the forum. I had recently done RISD's pre-college summer program, which showed me that there was a lot more to graphic design than just making computer wallpapers. I decided that I wanted to go to college for graphic design, mostly because I wasn't really that interested in anything else. I got into RISD somehow (looking back at it, my portfolio was horrible), and now I'm learning so much about technical things in design that you can't learn just from experimenting.

Fast foward to this summer. One of my first assignments at my internship was to design some e-cards. These were basically 800x600 graphics that had a short message and the URL put with whatever I could design to show the holiday creatively. And as I was designing them, I realized that these graphics aren't far off from the kind of graphics I was making back in that forum four years ago. Of course they're much better designed than the stuff I was making back then, but the techniques were all the same. And it was just so rewarding that what I had worked so hard on during high school as a way to not be bored could turn into a valuable skill that I can someday make a living off of.

I guess what I'm trying to say through all this rambling is that I love graphic design. And I want to give my 14-year-old self a hug for deciding to stick with it.

That's all for now. I'll try to post more artwork tomorrow.