Reflection 1

A common theme repeated in all of the blog post is the concept of fear. Everyone is fearful. It is a natural human emotion so it comes as no surprise. I am certainly very familiar with the feeling of fear. I have boatloads of fear entering this class. First of all, I have never designed prior to GRA 217. Prior to GRA 217 I had never even opened Photoshop; let alone heard of Illustrator, InDesign, or Lightroom. I am really bad with computers and used to think that the word “Adobe” was a synonym for “PDF.” I used to think that there were only two real fonts in the world (Times New Roman and Arial) and the rest of the font options were weird character things like Wingdings, which no actual human would be able to read. One day I woke up and decided “design is cool and I am enjoying GRA 217, so why not.” Most people do not completely reconfigure their college plan/career because they thought a class was “cool.” Everyone likes “cool” but no one lets “cool” dictate his or her decisions, unless you are I. Little did I know that a semester later I would be taking a class solely on type. When they told me that at the Advising office, I laughed. I pictured a classroom of college kids writing on big three lined paper where the letters are in dashed lines and you draw over them in pencil or pen to connect the dashes and to learn how to write letter form, like in Kindergarten. Therefore, saying I am a little inexperienced in design would be an understatement. My lack of experience is definitely one of my biggest fears. Secondly, this lack of experience causes me to doubt myself. Instead of doing some wild crazy design that I know would be awesome and cool. I hold back because no one may like it and I might fail. Many of my ideas are suppressed versions of cooler and better ideas that are floating around in my head. Thirdly, the experience of my peers is another fear. Everyone is so talented. They might not be on the level of Paula Scher or Herb Lubalin just yet, but to someone who struggled to create an intriguing yet professional resume. They look pretty darn close to getting there. From reading the past students blog post, everyone seems to end a with a common, “yolo mentality” where they are urging us to just go out and do whatever, even if we fail or are fearful. As a designer fear will destroy you, so I am pushing myself to be open to learning new things, and experimenting with crazy ideas, and not fan-girling over the work of my peers. At the end of the day we are all learning and trying to get better, and working on improving each of our individual styles.