What does it mean to have a voice?
At design school, a recurring project was the creation of an Identity: we had to capture what defined us and translate it into designish: fonts, illustrations, photos, etc. It was a recurring yearly project, and every time I struggled with it.
How could I define myself as a distinct, clear thing when I didn’t knew who or what I was, exactly? This was especially true at a place where I was beginning to discover myself at a vocational level. I barely knew if I actually enjoyed making this design stuff and here I had to translate my persona into a graphic thing.
Nowadays, it hasn’t become easier. My degree says I’m a Communication Designer, which is a good thing to be since it means fuck-all. Communication Design is a term created when the schools figured out that Graphic Designer was starting to become too antiquated and Designer was just too broad of a term, so, voilà: Communication Designer. I design Communication, apparently.
Fine.
But what am I, as a creative person? Am I a guy who makes a couple of illustrations, designs some posters on my free time and make graphic interfaces at my day job? Is that it? Oh, and sometimes I make shitty websites. Where is my own voice in this? Where do I come in as a creator? How would my Identity look like if I had to re-do those same projects today, as a professional (read: paid) designer.
Vocation, identity, voice. These are hard questions to ask ourselves: Is the title we put on our business cards what truly define ourselves? And is the thing we though we wanted to be at the time we applied to a school the thing we want to do as a profession? How do we know that what we are paid to do at the moment is what will make us a happy human being? How do we know that we wouldn’t be happier, like Petter Gibbons from Office Space, doing construction work with our next-door neighbor?
It’s a fucked up thing to do to a kid, if you think about it: ask him, at the age of 15, what he wants to do for a living. I chose Arts. I don’t regret it, but I do wonder, maybe there’s a whole part of the Arts thing that I haven’t tried and, who knows, maybe I would be happier doing it. How do you know?
