When people talk about graphics design these days and make it look easy, I only wonder how it wasn’t easy for me. I don’t know if it was the state of my mind at that time or because I am naturally a slow learner. I mean when I think about it, I haven’t been one to have a very smooth learning process all my life. I remember how long it took me to learn web design, I would say I am still learning and I just seem to learn best under pressure. For me under pressure, it is about getting the job done so the faster I learn it, the faster I can finish. But the time in my life when I decided I wanted to be a really good graphics designer, I tried and failed woefully.
When I said I tried and failed it wasn’t because I did not learn to design but because I only learned to design after I decided to take digital marketing very seriously. All the while I was free for two years. It never came easy for me, and when I decided to forget about it, I just started having the eyes for good design. I was always disappointing my boss then, no matter how he tried to pass his unique knowledge to me, I just never seemed to get it right. I would stay all night practicing, theoretically I was very sound, but practically the output was very poor.
One major thing was that in all that time I had not opened my design eye. It took almost two years before it opened, I did not know the difference between a bad and a good design practically. No matter how much I looked it did not just click in my head and for the first time in my life I felt dumb. The day my design eye finally opened I made one of the best designs the company had in a long time, everyone was shocked, myself included. But then that victory was short-lived after I had a fall out with my boss that made me live before I could advance my skills. I went into digital marketing afterwards and I would say I have become better at design, but still can not call myself a pro, compared to my boss. So yeah I failed.
