Designers live a very unique lifestyle. It does not matter whether the designer is a print designer, interior designer, interaction designer, visual designer, web designer, or zebra saddle designer. All designers live a life of constant self-expression. I need to get back to doing so.
Considered Actions, Considered Words.
My father passed away in September of 2009 at the age of 74. His death shook me to my core. When he took ill, I was already extremely stressed out, as I had just quit my job as the lead designer/developer of a regional custom publishing agency to go back to the world of freelance design and development. I still had not (and have not) reached the point in my life where I am entirely comfortable with the path that I have chosen. For those of you who do not know, I dropped out of the University of South Alabama College of Medicine Early Acceptance Program in my third year of college due to unreconcilable ethical issues regarding patient care in the Medical profession (at least in the United States). Since that decision, I have been focused on a singular career path: web design and development.
Since 2004, I have designed slightly more than one hundred versions of websites and brought roughly three-quarters of these designs to fruition. In the first few years, my designs and execution of said designs were amateurish. They did not feel like professionally designed websites. In the last three years, however, that has been a very different story. The past few years, I have genuinely felt accomplished. I have designed hundreds of interactions, written many thousands of lines of code, had some major victories, and had some major failures. Even with the failures, though, the pieces had come together, and ability had little to do with those less than perfect projects failing.
— AristotleHappiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.
I was genuinely happy when I was living in Chicago working for a startup, attempting to start my own business, and living a life where every day and every night was a development of focus. After my father's passing, however, I could no longer focus like I wanted to and had previously. It took a significant effort to make it through the last three months of 2009, especially since I had just started one of the largest projects, both in scope and financial gain, of my career thus far. I was a mess, but I was determined to get through it, which I did—although not as smoothly as I would have hoped. Nonetheless, at the conclusion of 2009, I sat down and took inventory of my life. I knew certain things had to change.
Moving Forward, Not Strafing.
The things that needed to change were not easily identifiable, and they still have not really been enumerated and verbalized outside of my meditations. In a sense, though, it is as simple as getting back to the heart of what I enjoy the most: design. I needed to get back to the considered actions that had been making me happy. So I have.
As a group, designers of all types are generally happy people; however, designers always appear happiest driving themselves forward, even when it is most difficult. Standing still, strafing sideways, or—worse—falling back are rarely options in which anyone wants to partake. I am no different, and in an attempt to move forward, I have decided to redesign my life. Not satisfied with simply redesigning my website, I am making changes throughout all aspects of my life.
During the upcoming months, I will be returning to my writings both personal and educational, preparing for a major cross-country move to the SF Bay Area, losing the weight I gained since returning to the South, excising frivolous things from my life, and designing more than I have in the past.
As a significant part of this, I decided that my website needed to be a place of experimentation and growth, so I have redesigned it with the intention of going forward as a blogazine-style site. The layout in this post is merely a base, henceforth my Default Layout, and will likely be used on the rare occasions when the content demands to stand alone. I look forward to the challenge that this will bring, and I hope it fosters my creativity as well as sparks a fire under yours.
Please note that this site will be undergoing significant changes and updates during the month of March. RSS Feeds, commenting on articles, some fixes/updates to the Firehose feed, and other meaningful bits and pieces of the site are "Coming Soon™" as this is a just soft launch of the new redesign. Circumstances dictated that I launch the revised portfolio today.
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