Design as a Career?
Out of context: Reply #11
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- jagara0
re: Do you have any thing you wished someone told you BEFORE entering design school?
• It's not always a super interesting and creative job. You spend a lot less time actually designing stuff, than you'd expect. A lot of time is spent communicating w/ assholes.
• You never ever know if you're going to work 8 or 19 hours a day. And because it's "creative" and vaguely artistic, there is some sort of unspoken agreement that you must be "passionate" about your work (work 70 hours a week without complaining). For most designers, it's just a job. It pays the bills. But in this business, admitting to that is something you do only if you want to get fired. You must (pretend to) be PASSIONATE about that shitty website/identity/logo whatever. Imagine if plumbers were required to feel passion about fixing drains and installing toilets. They're not.
• You get to see your beautiful, well-crafted & tasteful designs ripped apart and reassembled with comic sans fonts and drop shadows by boardroom bores with no sense of design or aestetics. A tip: vent your true creativity away from work. And treat work as, well, work.
But the above is only 45% of the time. Sometimes it's rewarding and interesting work :)