How to be a Happy Designer
Posted 01 Mar 2010 - No Comments - leave yours now!
Design is one of those jobs that you should care about if you want to be good at it. The general impression is that if you are a designer you must be doing pretty well for yourself, this may be the case for some, but on the whole it’s a difficult industry. Especially if you are starting out.
Long hours, constant rejection and limited jobs in a competitive market are just a few of the pitfalls that we all battle against. The biggest obstacle can sometimes be that most people don’t properly understand what a designer does.
Some jobs you simply must love to be able to tolerate. I know people that have very tough jobs with stupidly long hours and meagre pay. Despite this they seem to love what they do. For example my brother is a chef, it’s a very unsociable sort of job with awkward hours, the pay isn’t great and it’s hard graft but he loves doing what he does. I won’t lie to you there are times where he questions weather it’s worth it, but he sticks with it because, to him, there is something special about what he does.
This is the first step, you have to figure out what you want to get out of your job and your life.
In one of my earlier blog posts I asked you, what is the best thing about your job? This gave me a little insight into what is important to people in their work.
Personally I cited my sense of achievement when I see a design progress from my thoughts to sketches and it’s eventual use. For others it was the simple exchange of ideas, how they never stop learning and simply earning a living doing something they enjoy.
The key to being a happy designer is to work to a set of personal principles that make you believe in. It might be that the work itself is enough, the act of creating probably gives us all a buzz, but can that sustain you over a career that might span a lifetime?
Your work must conform to how you live your life, in a way your work must be an extension of what you think, for it to make you happy.
Perhaps you have very strong ethics. Do you believe in a certain charity? If so you might find that doing the odd pro bono job for a charity balances out all of the other work you do that might have less meaning to you.
Maybe you are in the design business simply to earn as much money as you can. If this is the case good luck to you, but I believe you are in the wrong business for that! Not only is doing a job just for the money bad for design it’s bad for the soul. You’ll never get the best out of yourself by scrupulously watching the bottom line.
Obviously money makes the world go around and we’ve all got to eat, but you need to get a balance. Like I said above, if you do one job out of ten that you believe in for whatever reason it makes the other nine more bearable, and you get to put dinner on the table.
We all want to work on interesting projects with interesting clients but it’s not always possible. Sometimes the most interesting client can be yourself. It’s always worth keeping a small set of personal projects on the go as a balancing measure. I find it a lot easier to grind out a run of the mill job if I have something I care about passionately to look forward to.
The main thing is to have an aim that you can work towards. It might be that you want to get yourself into a position where you can work for yourself. Maybe you want fame and fortune, perhaps you want to make a difference in whatever way you can.
The point being if you want to be a happy designer, or in fact a happy person you need to find those small immeasurably important things in your life that can cross over into you work that make the rest of your job that much better.
What do you do to keep you sane? Is your job getting to you and you find that you need some sort of outlet to make it all worth it? Are you a happy designer, and why is this the case?
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Ken Reynolds is a graphic designer, illustrator and blogger. Contact me if you'd like to work with me, ask any questions or just say hello.
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I'm a freelance graphic designer living and working in Suffolk.
I've been using Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign & Quark Xpress since 1999 but I've been using pens, pencils, paper and most importantly my imagination for a lot longer. I'm always looking for new clients to work with and interesting projects to work on.
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