So how did I come to fall into design? It was the career advisors job to find you a work experience placement. In my innocent youth, I entered the cupboard in which she had set up shop and was invited to sit down and the conversation proceeded thus:
Advisor: So what are you really interested in? What are your favourite subjects?
Young Me: My favourite lesson is Art and I enjoy drawing, painting and all forms of artistic endeavour.
Advisor: Do you like reading?
Young Me: Yes.
Advisor: Luton Central Library. Turn up 8:30 on Monday morning.
The contents of this meeting have not been adjusted for the purposes of this post in any way. The notion that, because I like reading I would clearly relish the opportunity to place hundreds of objects filled with words back onto shelves in alphabetical order. That’s not just a stretch but more of a torn ligament. Presumably if I had said I liked animals they would have sent me to an abattoir reasoning that “If you love cows, surely you’d like to chainsaw one’s face off...”
It was much the same when my meeting to discern what my actual career should be took place. The advisors’ disinterested expression spoke of her desperation of informing the fifty previous children that, actually, they can’t be footballers, astronauts, film stars or Saturday night game show hosts. No, their piss poor GCSE’s meant it was always going to be the late night service station for these people, serving bags of coal and firelighters through a letter box cut in bullet proof glass. I’m sorry kid but your qualifications offer you the chance of doing precisely fuck all.
Go in there and say you like drawing as a start point for planning your career and, while they will assume that you can’t even spell ‘delicatessen’, that is probably where they will want to send you in the hope you might lose a hand to the bacon slicer or mince your foot enabling a life of disability benefit. With ‘art’ as a start point, it’s deli-counter mutilation or graphic design as far as they are concerned.
The really annoying thing is that it can be argued my careers advisor actually got it right. I like what I do. I am glad I do it. It has provided me with constant employment for the last ten years. I’m going to assume it was a fluke. Either way, I accidentally became a designer as a commercially viable alternative to becoming an artist.
As to why no-one is impressed when you tell them you are a designer? Because someone like you designed a colourful monkey that makes their children want that horrible cereal that turns the milk chocolatey. Because someone like you designed an advert that told them Kia make exceptional cars. Because they think being a designer means you sit on your arse and draw boxes all day while being pretentious about it. Which of course is nonsense. Mostly.
