Bay Area Baby

rickylinn:

4. BEING A DESIGNER IS LAME

I love what I do. I’d never do anything else. I mean, I kind of want to open a restaurant. But I have a sneaking suspicion I just want to design and brand it, then I’d realize I didn’t actually want to run a restaurant at all. Anyway, what I mean is despite what you see on Twitter, Dribbble, blogs, magazines like Print, CA and HOW, this life is not glamorous. There is no such thing as a design rockstar. And shame on the person who coined that phrase anyway. There are however people we mistake for design rockstars. They get a lot of exposure, they get articles written about them, and they get blogged about. Then what happens? They get flooded with new work inquiries. Cool, but then they spend more time sorting through emails than they do designing the things they’re passionate about that got them where they are in the first place. They get ripped off. A lot. Then they reply to emails of people telling them how they’ve been ripped off. And commenting on blogs about being ripped off. And write articles about being ripped off. They get egos, and then the same people who blogged about them, turn on them and say they’re not a purist anymore. And the worst part is you never get to turn it off. Designers know no such thing as “5 o’clock” as it is understood in the big-people-job-real-world. Your head will always be spinning at all times and you’ll be thinking about your clients and your projects and your friends’ projects and whether they’re getting better work than you. You have to be very intentional and try your best (sometimes with no success) to shut it all off just to pay attention to things like family, church, and friends — or you’ll go crazy. When you learn that balance, then you’re doing something right. I’m still working on that one.