I once knew a guy who decided to take up photography. He went out and spent about l3000 on the latest Cannon digital SLR, bought himself a lighting set and some Lightroom software for his Mac. He then began to advertise his services as a wedding photographer (as new photographers ofter do), got himself some nice looking business cards, an advert in the local paper and started touting himself to friends, family and prospective clients as the next Helmut Newton (stop me if you’ve heard this one before…)
After a while he became frustrated with a lot of the results he was getting from his camera, he complained of under/over exposed photographs and problems with the grain in his pictures. What were these things called ‘ ISO film speed’ and ‘depth of field’?
He didn’t seem to understand that to take a great photo with a digital SLR you needed to understand a lot of the basic principles of darkroom photography, knowledge that he had dismissed out of hand as irrelevant and outdated.
The point is that you can’t put the coach before the horses, if you want to be professional at what you do then you need the training and the experience. All to often we see designers who say on their CV’s that they’re fully versed in software that in reality they only have a basic grasp of.
Interviewees and employers have very different ideas of what makes a great designer, a senior designer from one studio might not survive as a junior at another, it’s down to the culture and where the bar is set at that individual design studio.
I myself have been a designer for over 15 years and there is still loads for me to learn, every so often a junior designer will stumble across a shortcut or a way of doing something that I hadn’t even considered. The important thing is not to see this as an affront to the way you do things or the experience you have, but as valuable new information that will make you better at what you do.
Psychologically speaking, we live in an ever more social world and yet our actions and reactions are still dominated by our ancestry. We are animals and as such, strongly influenced by instinct and the desire to be accepted and respected in whatever social group(s) we allow to play a part in shaping our happiness.
Sometimes however the desire for professional and social status leads us down the wrong path, we forget the value of training and doing things properly and we let our egos get in the way, In my personal experience the moment you think you’re at the ‘top of the tree’ and there’s nothing more to learn, is the moment you stop getting better at what you do.
What are your thoughts? Do you have any personal experiences that you can relate to my points above?
Matt Saunders
Designer, Eclipse Creative
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