Sunny Side Up

I've recently been undertaking a number of print design projects over the last several weeks. While it's rewarding both financially and mentally, I can't help but wonder why. You see, I never took a design course in college, although there was that one desktop publishing class for a semester but that was it. Not much in it, we just had to learn how to use Photoshop and PageMaker (of which I was already somewhat familiar with) as well as Front Page (yuck). It was very basic.

Ever since I was handed that position as head of publishing in a student association in my first year (no prior experience in DTP or any sort of design by the way), somehow many people seemed to think I was a design student (when I was really a business student). I ended up buying my first Mac (Lime iMac G3 266MHz) along with PageMaker and Photoshop to help me do some actual publishing.

From then on it was brochures, posters, magazines, and business cards for the next four years and for some reason I ended up being reappointed again and again. I was the secretary for the association for a period but I was still handling the publication department. Looking back at it, I don't think I did that good of a job. I know people in there who could've done so much better at it but I kept ending up with the position year after year. I'm grateful for having been given the chance but I can't help but wonder why, I just don't think it was deserved. Maybe they did but I didn't.

Right now, I'm in one of those intersections in life. One path seems much clearer though I'm not too fussed about which one to take so it must be an easy choice right? Guess again. One promises living in a cozy and familiar place with a standard of life unmatched by most other parts of the world but with no job security while the other has a less than enviable lifestyle but with a number of promising yet challenging design jobs practically in hand. Problem is, I'm not a real designer, at least not through formal education.

I never took design seriously while holding the publishing position, I didn't even consider the backups of the work I did that important and now I'm kicking myself for not bringing them over. The backups of those files are stored in some CD somewhere in my room in Melbourne and I can't ask my brother to go through 20+ backup CD's, so if anyone, like a prospective employer for example, asks for them, I'm gonna be in quite a jam and not the bread spread kind.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 03, 2006 at 5:05 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.