Going further than Design — My Story
In Estonian we have a saying “heal lapsel mitu nime”, meaning “a good child has many names”. This saying always hits my mind if I am applying for a job, or just generally thinking back into my multiple career paths. I have been a Children’s Book Designer in Publishing, a Graphic Designer and Artworker in Merchandise and Novelty, a Web and Brand Designer in a Startup, an App Designer, a Junior Art Director in an Ad Agency. And, for almost a year now, I have also been a Freelance Designer slash (micro) Entrepreneur.
However, this year as an ‘entrepreneur’ has enlightened me. I have indeed been more unstable in my career choices as maybe my other course mates from university. Although, I no longer look at my journey in these different fields as indecisiveness or inability to find where I belong. I connect the dots. I enjoyed working in all of these different fields and I haven’t quit because I did not like the people, the job, the money — I have quit because I have become bored. Why?
I realise, in all of these fields, there has always been one mutual target, and this is going to sound cliché but, I have wanted to make a difference. In apps and websites I always concentrated a lot on the usability and the customer — what triggers the user, how do they interact with the system. But that was not the job. I needed to design, not think about the usability, but the colours, the graphics, the logos, the ‘beauty’.
In Publishing I always thought about the children, or the parents — what will they gain, what will they learn, how will this book affect their minds, their future lives. We worked with educational books for pre-schoolers in the biggest publishing house in the world. It is quite a frustrating job for a multidisciplinary restless business-lead creative like myself, as the whole process is made into line-work. There are people who specialise in creating PDF-s(!). There are image researchers, who do the dirty work of finding the right images from the World Wide Web for you. There is a designer for the jacket, there is a designer for separate pages of the book, you almost never get to design the book yourself from cover to cover. As you can already tell, I was not happy with this kind of line work and demanded more. Luckily I had the most amazing Publishing and Art Directors, and they understood my urge for being helpful, innovative, multidisciplinary, for doing more, and they let me create my own book, my own storyline, my own illustrations, my own designs. I chose to create a book about Emma, a girl who wanted a scooter but did not have any money to buy it. So she started understanding how money works, how you can do what you love (not only things you hate) for money, how good work translates into money and the importance of not going crazy over it — in the end Emma becomes a dog walker and instead of buying a scooter for herself, she spends all the money to make the dogs happy.
In merchandise and artworking, there was not much room for this kind of thinking, but that was my first design job, so I thought it was normal.
It was in Advertising, working in a Creative Agency, that I finally realised I shouldn’t suppress this feeling of wanting to do more than just design, or more than I have been told to do. I wanted to interfere more with the customer, the client, the brand than just doing what I’m told or what the customer wants. And I guess being an Entrepreneur has induced this side of me even more, since it gives me the freedom to do whatever I want.
So what has happened in the last year? All in all — I have evolved. Like a Pokemon, but slower, I am in the process of transitioning from a Designer and a command-taker, into a Design Consultant and command-giver. I am no longer scared of asking the right questions and going against my clients wishes, as long as I am thinking about the brand and the market, and using my expertise to help the product/business become more efficient. I am not just making things pretty anymore. I am making them useful.
But I am still learning. And in this blog I will document my learning and evolving process. You can see my Pokemon transition live. Just subscribe.
