Behance Scares the $#!T Out of Me
As designers, we love to show off our hours of laboriously refining every last pixel in Photoshop or Sketch. We stare at our gorgeous 27-inch iMac with retina display for 2 hours with joy and admiration for our work. We show our spouses, friends and family what we’ve just created and bask in their praise of our awesomeness. Then comes time to upload our masterpiece to Behance…
Sweat pours down our faces as we point to the upload button, unsure if our designs measure up with the rest of the community. As the mouse clicks and the circle stops spinning, we stop and think “what have I done?” Our child is now alive for all the world to see. And so it begins…
For the uninitiated, Behance is one of the largest platforms where designers can showcase their work and gain inspiration from other creatives. Not only can you discover amazing talent, you can interact with other designers and collaborate on projects all over the globe. Designers gain exposure to a world audience and Behance can launch the careers of truly amazing artists.
I like to browse the site for inspiration and stay up to date on the direction that the UI/UX community is going. With an infinite amount of talented artists and agencies posting on Behance, scrolling through the activity feed can become quite overwhelming. Periodically, I find a project that catches my attention and I think to myself “I think I can do something like that.” I begin to look through the rest of their portfolio and realize just how amazing these people are, that they can create such beautiful UI’s and art. I feel the lump getting larger in my throat as I begin to ponder, “can I really do this?”
“Fear doesn’t shut you down; it wakes you up” — Veronica Roth, Divergent
This anxiety, this fear, is what pushes me and others to rise to the occasion and grow our skillset. With each upload, we grow more and more comfortable baring our creative souls to the world, until one day we look through our activity feed, measuring our work against the “Goliath,” and realize…it wasn’t so scary after all. At last, you can bask in your awesomeness once more.
-Blessings
