#WinningWednesday: A Designer’s Tale of Success
Featured Image: Pexels/Pixabay
Once upon a time, there was a boy named Adam from Romania who loved comic books, drawing, sports and how the human body worked. As he grew up, he realized he had to either follow his heart or his mind.
To follow his heart, meant spending long hours copying comic book figures, developing creative fight scenes for his characters, and having no audience for his artistic and passionate endeavors.
On the other hand, following his head meant studying science, in particular biology, and exploring the human body’s kinesthetic working. It would be a financially lucrative endeavor with plenty of people benefitting from his work.
It was a difficult decision. For years he toiled to figure out what he really wanted out of his life. Then one day while he was skiing and gliding on the hard packed snow, thinking of the same old tale about his life, career and what he wanted to do with his future, he slipped and bumped his head on a big fat boulder. For a few minutes, he laid there unconscious. His friends rushed to him and tried to wake him up from his stupor. After a long while he gained consciousness, and ….
How do you want this story to end? Choose one and read on.
Ending 1
… realized his life was really messed up. He has to listen to what his mind has pointed out all along. He’s got a natural gift of understanding how the human body works. A career in kinesthetic therapy is really the direction he needs to pursue.
And he does.
He enrolls in the University of Babes-Bolyai where he studies the concept of kinesiotherapy, which in layman’s term means the study of rehabilitation and exercises to improve movements, muscles, and organs in the body. He’s successful in this pursuit.
After a few years, he completes his master’s degree in kinesiotherapy and continues with a specialization in the area of sports kinesiotherapy. In this field, he gets to treat famous sportsmen.
In fact, he’s become quite popular among the sports community that he started to get invitation to every party that the rich and famous stars are invited to.
Okay, who are we kidding? This is not the real ending. We want to know the real Adam. Read here.
Ending 2
… and found himself at his computer. He’s been messing around with a few photos of his friends and discovered the tool Adobe Photoshop a real gem. He had worked till 3 AM and fell asleep on his desktop. His head hit the keyboard, and now his drool is causing a malfunction in the keyboard and it’s giving out weird noises. Tooooon toon twee-e-e-e-e-e-ee-ee—e-e-e-e-eeeee. Aah, that’s what been buzzing in his head and waking him up. Bzzzzz…. That’s not a good sound! His PC conks out, and he knows in his guts, it’s dead.
He’d promised the guys that he would make their ice-hockey team look superb with his newly acquired talent. They are pinning their hopes on him to sell their team’s talent to the sports agent Jerry McGuire, whom they’d met yesterday.
He’d promised he would make them superstars to be casted among the super leagues. He’d dreamed of becoming famous himself, fly first class, and travel across the globe for sports meet.
And now he’s screwed. Back to pizza delivery. No more fame.
Okay, okay, this is still not the real story about Adam.
Ending 3
…. and he realized he’d been a fool to listen to all the logical people in his life. He should’ve listened to the most irrationally logical person in his life – his heart. Yes, he considers it a person, his alter ego, with whom he has lengthy debates, and loses all the time. This time too he should have gone with the “flow” and listened to his heart because that’s where his passion is.
He’s sick and tired of being a pizza delivery boy. He doesn’t want to be a kinesiotherapist either. He wants to immerse himself in creative art. The other day when he’d experimented with a design site ZillionDesigns by participating in a contest, he’d really enjoyed designing the graphic, and he’d won!
Now that he’d gotten a taste of crowdsourcing graphic design work, there’s no turning back. He loves the site’s friendly user interface, the customer support, and most importantly, the competition; he’s competing among design companies and extremely talented super designers who’ve years of experience and knowledge. Talking of being among the design league!
When he gets star rating and awesome feedback from clients, he feels elated. He can’t think of any other career path that would be more gratifying. Look at some of the work’s he’s done; he’d never thought he could use his sketching skills and touch the sky in terms of creativity.
No, he will listen to his heart and pursue his passion this time. And why not? After all, working on ZillionDesigns has made him realize he could turn inspiration from his surroundings into something out of this world, like turning a French curves (special rulers) into a minion character from sketch to graphic design.
From other graphic designers, he’s come to know that this field has its up and downs. Some clients will value quality and creative work like the client who’s got his raster logo vectorized the other day, while others would just pick a redundant copied graphic passed on as original work by some designer. But then which field doesn’t have its load of #$#@#$?
Every project will be a challenge, a learning curve, and all he has to do is embrace it. He just has to be smart about choosing projects that will give him direction, inspiration and allow him to take lead in the design process.
And that, my friend, is Adam’s real life story. To live by his passion and the single rule: “If it isn’t good enough for you to use it in your portfolio, then the job is not finished yet!”
The End
