thank you, Crayola: part 2
Now that you have the background of my first big design break, I’m going to go into a little more detail of my route to the design field. This isn’t something I always knew I was going to pursue as a career. Sure, I loved being creative and expressing myself through drawings and art, but it was never something I thought I would be nearly good enough to be competitive in.
In 2007, I took on my first freelance design project. Calling this a freelance design project is a big stretch, but I was so excited to do this at age 9. For my sister’s violin recitals, her teacher contracted me to design the recital programs. At the time, I was so proud of this project. I drew every one of the violin students, some even caricature-style. Where I got these ideas from, I really couldn’t tell you. I remember sketching these drawings in pencil, then going over them in Sharpie so they could be cut and glued onto a mock program, which my mom would photocopy probably 100 programs. It was a whole ordeal. But I was so proud to see my drawings displayed on the programs on recital day. And I did this for probably three years.
From then on, I didn’t really try to pursue anything else seriously. In middle school, I took a lot of interior design classes, where we would mock-up different bedrooms and draw out our dream houses. This was all really fun to me, and I loved being creative in this space. But still, this was just a hobby. I never thought I could be good enough to take on designing full time - everything I designed was out of fun.
It wasn’t until high school that I started consistently engaging in activities that fueled my creative mind. Freshman year, I joined Enloe Student Council and Yearbook. I know, just your typical high school extracurriculars. But it was through these organizations that I was really able to exercise my creativity and build upon my passion for design. My senior year in student council, I was the VP of Public Relations. One of my main accomplishments was starting the Instagram account, where I would make graphics to send announcements out to the student body. Yes, they were made on Canva, but I was still so excited to be able to create graphics that were informative and appealing - something that people would actually stop and pay attention to. I also designed the t-shirt and social media/flyer graphics for our annual Charity Ball, a philanthropy event to raise money for a local non-profit organization.
Through yearbook, I gained my first exposure to Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I learned how to create page layouts and treatments, and also found my love for photography. Seeing my illustrations and work published in a product that was distributed to the entire student body was really great, but still, I convinced myself that although I was good at this stuff, I wouldn’t be successful pursuing something like it in college. It was way too competitive of a field, and I wouldn’t even stand close to succeeding next to talented designers who had been doing this their entire life.
When college applications started, I always submitted my intended major as “undecided.” I thought maybe I could dabble in math and sciences, since that’s what my sister pursued and what my parents wanted me to do. I thought maybe mass communications could be a good option - it wasn’t exactly design, but it was in the same field as design. And would probably be a safer bet. While I knew what I would ultimately be happy doing was something in the design realm, it was intimidating and I was afraid it wouldn’t be everything I imagined it to be. But, as I mentioned in my earlier blog posts, after my first semester at NC State, I realized I wanted to pursue a future design career in the journalism industry, and even though I knew it would be a tough industry to succeed in, it was worth a shot. I finally realized that college was only 4 years, and I couldn’t waste my time studying something someone else wanted me to do. Or something that I wasn’t passionate about.
Flash forward to UNC, I took the typical introductory journalism core classes. I loved my introduction to digital storytelling class, because we were able to create websites and infographics on Adobe Illustrator and Wordpress. I was finally in my element. Learning to code in HTML and CSS was stressful, but worth the effort. I was finally doing something that didn’t feel like work - while it took up a lot of time, I loved learning new tools on these programs and being able to implement my creative work into projects. I had to take 18 credits every semester I was at UNC (until my senior year) in order to catch up, but it was totally worth it. I took classes in writing and reporting, public relations campaigns, advertising and public relations research, and a lot of design classes.
To wrap it up, yes - this was a long and complicated story about how I found my niche. But I couldn’t be more grateful for the ups and downs that have brought me to this point. If I’ve made such drastic changes in only four years of my life, I can’t wait to see where the next four years bring me.