Personal Essays#135: Final Essay

Designing My Life.

A look into my life right now half way through my 21^st year on Earth looks like this. Most days I wake up at 8am and get into the WOUB Public Media office by 9 where I am hired as an on staff designer. After work I eat lunch while I read a group of daily design blogs that I check every day to keep current on any new trends and for inspiration. My creativity continues as I go to my design class where I am studying Information Design in the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. As you can see my life is absolutely flooded with design and creativity, it is the only topic I involve myself with consistently day in and day out and I love it. However 6 years ago I didn’t care about design at all. I didn’t even know I liked it and certainly didn’t think I could do it myself. It took a blow off class, an amazing teacher and finding something inside of myself to arrive at where I am today.

My journey into design starts sophomore year of high school when I took a class called “Graphics and Communications.” My reasoning for taking this class was because it was an easy A. The topic of the class was just learning the ins and outs of Photoshop, which I had already known so I expected to breeze through this class. Which is what me and everyone else in the class did. What I did not expect was for me to find a passion designing with photoshop. I spent probably way too much time on the simple projects but I loved doing it so I didn’t mind. What I did in this class I wouldn’t call designing per say, it was like using a computer as a tool to make it do what you want. It was more so manipulating photographs and making things look cool. But I could tell that it started a small fire inside of me and all I wanted to do was to make that fire grow.

When it came time for my Junior Year I still had no idea what I wanted to do in college so I took a class called “Visual Communication I.” I knew it would be more in-depth than the other class since it was labeled as an art class and that made me both excited and nervous at the same time. On the first day I learned that I was the only person in the class that wasn’t in regular art and they obviously have all known each other for a while which made me the odd man out. Another thing that made me the odd man out was my ability to draw. This was never a problem for me before but on the first day we had to do a simple sketch of your shoe as an exercise. For everyone else in the room it was no problem but for me I might as well being drawing the shoe with shoes on my feet. It was awful and after school that day I went to the teacher to drop the class. Looking back on it I’m kind disappointed/embarrassed at myself for even thinking about dropping out once I had a small setback. However I can’t go back in time and change my story so after school that day I was in the art room about to drop the class. What I didn’t know was this conversation was going to be one of the first one-on-one conversations with someone who I now consider a mentor and a huge influence on my life. The teacher’s name is Mr. Beutsche and when I told him I have to drop the class he just laughed at me and said “How about you show me what you can do before telling me what you can’t.” Which admittedly sounds like a line from a bad Disney Channel Movie but cross my heart that is what he said to me. I hestitantly agreed to stay in the class and while I was still nervous in the classroom I got more used to it.

After a couple weeks it came time for our first project critique. For anyone who hasn’t taken an art class, a critique is basically putting your work in front of all your peers and they say what is good about it and what is bad. To put it in perspective critiques are like your math teacher grading your test in front of everyone, and your fellow student’s get to grade it too. My first critique’s comments mostly were in the “bad” category, which absolutely obliterated my confidence in this class. The project was to design a personal logo for yourself and I would show it in this blog but I don’t think I even saved it. I can’t remember specific comments but I remember one of them being something along the lines of “Visually, its boring, skillwise its sloppy and aesthetically it was pretty hard to look at.” The guy who said this would become to be one of my great friends, so no hard feelings. I remember leaving the class pissed off at myself once again for even thinking I could do this class, and now I was going to be stuck in it for a whole semester. I felt as if I was in totally over my head.

The embarrassment of the first critique pushed me forward for the next project because I was determined not to go through that experience again. The second project was to design a CD cover for a specific song and right from the start I was trying my hardest. I spent much more time than anyone else sketching out my idea due to me starting over and over trying to get results with my dismal drawing skills. When it came to designing it on the computer everything just fell into place. I think it was because I spent so much time drawing it that I had a clear image in my head, which is the point of sketching but I didn’t know that at the time. At the time of my second critique everything was different. No longer was I receiving criticism but rather praise. I think I surprised everyone in the room including my teacher and myself and what I was able to pull off. After this critiqued I left the classroom not thinking that I couldn’t do anything but rather I wanted to see what I could do next. I started pushing myself to read tutorials and anything I could find online to self teach myself design and to improve my skills.

This was the CD cover I designed for my second project.

The next couple months we did a number of projects all of which I never suffered the same fate of my first critique. Accompanied with what I was learning in and out of class I was starting to find my own aesthetic. For every designer they have their own ways of doing things and they have their own ideas of what looks good. And this carries over into their work. Right now if you should me someone’s work from my class I could tell you who made it without seeing the name attached to it. Its almost like a designer’s fingerprint. Since this was my first art class ever I was still developing my own aesthetic but I found myself doing things differently than everyone else. To me design is just problem solving for the corporate world. But for artists it is an expression of themselves through art. And this is where I differed from most of my peers. They were more interested in having no rules and making art just for art’s sake. They hated that we had specific requirements to achieve or limitations to follow to achieve a better grade. But for me I loved it since it was like solving a puzzle through design. And from this I started to develop my aesthetic, which was very structured and followed a heavy grid. In layman terms I liked what I designed to line up with everything on the page and didn’t like anything to be haphazard. Every decision I made was made to make the message I was portraying clearer which was my first priority. Things like typography, layout and color all were important to me. But for a lot of the people in my class the message was an after thought and their own expression was first, which lead to sloppy but cool looking fonts and artistic choices that lead to confusing messages. This gave me confidence for me to think of myself as a communicator instead of an artist.

Book Cover.

CD Cover.

By the end of my junior year I won gold in a scholastic art competition, won 2 citywide design competitions and most of all I won the knowledge of what I wanted to do in college. I was even in the newspaper for winning one of the competitions too. I went from being in a class full of strangers whose skills and creativity intimidated me to being in a class full of friends whose skills and creativity inspired me. Before this I was never really had an identity or stereotype but now however nerdy it sounds I could call myself one of the art kids.

Marthon Logo that won the city competition.

Newspaper Clipping. Sorry for the Quality. ("Western Hills Press" 8)

Going into my Senior year I was taking AP Studio Art which to me was still hard to believe. I never really thought I would ever take AP classes since I was never that kind of student, but now I was and it was the only one I was taking. However taking AP art meant that I couldn’t do everything the same way I did my junior year. I had to think like an artist instead of designer. This meant freethinking and not my corporate approach to things. This led to problems early on but instead of me thinking that I couldn’t do it like I would a year earlier I thought of it as something that I know which isn’t my best skill and tried to think of ways to achieve my goals. This led to me making art not be drawing but rather through collages or stencils. I don’t have any pictures of my actual art pieces but they were okay, and were a lot better than I thought they would be a year earlier. I continued to grow as an artist but like how I learned my Aesthetic junior year, I started to learn my identity senior year.

One of the few pieces I made to express emotion and not communication.

"Dead Astronaut" made my senior year.

"It's Always Sunny"

Since most of the people in my class Junior year were Seniors they graduated which led to me emerging as one of the top “art kids” and after that I found myself in some interesting situations. I should preface this by explaining a little bit more about my high school and my hometown. I went to Elder High School which is an all guys school. It is also in an area where high school football is everything. Because of this Everyone at Elder is defined by their talents. The cliques of Elder are the Football Players, The Wrestlers, The Volleyball players, the Glee Club and finally the coolest group the Art Kids. Before my senior year I didn’t fit into any of these categories and always flew under the radar. But now as I was one of the Art Kids things started changing, all of the sudden the whole grade knew who I was. One thing about my personality is that I become friends with every person I meet, I can always find something likable in any kind of character. So now that people started to know who I was I started to make a lot more friends. I went from being the kid that walked to class keeping to himself to the kid who high fiving and saying hey to everyone I saw in the halls. It was a great feeling and it made my senior year amazing. I owe it all to my talents and now it was starting to benefit me both in school and out. Now that everyone knew me I started to receive attention that I wasn’t used to.

The Art Kids

One particular story comes to mind as an example of this took place around Christmas time. I was sitting in my 5^th period Economics class when an announcement came over the intercom saying “Billy Anneken please report to the recruitment office.” The recruitment office is an office reserved for football players to go to when a college football recruit comes to school and they are taken out of class to go talk to them (remember high school football is pretty important…) so when everyone heard my name being called down the room erupted in laughter. I’d make a quip about how it was about time a college noticed my potential and left class to go down to the recruitment office. When I arrived I was greeted by the head football coach giving me an enthusiastic “Billy! Just the person I wanted to see!” which is strange because I have never interacted with him before and there wasn’t any reason why he should know me. He then goes on to explain how hes in the dog house because he was suppose to order Christmas cards for his family and he failed to do that, and then he asked me if I could design one for him. He pulled me out of class, and called me down to his office, just to make to design his family’s personal Christmas card. That’s when I knew that my identity has reached farther than I would have ever expected. The personal favors didn’t stop at the coach either. I started to design posters for the library, Marathon T-shirts for the Principles daughter and even professional brochures for the school to hand out to incoming 8^th graders. I did all of this in my free time, and since my senior year I was taking 3 art classes every day I had a lot of it.

Example of the monthly poster made for the library.

Looking back on it now I’d do anything to be able to go back to Elder even just for one week. I loved going to school because I knew that I’d be seeing friends and would have a laugh everyday. Or to go to a high school party and being able to walk in and talk to anyone or being offered a beer I mean a pop from people. I get a glimpse of what it used to be like when I go home from school now when I see people from high school but it will never be the same.

All of this, my identity, my talents and my friends were stemming from being one of the Art Kids, something that I wasn’t just two years before. But I also knew it was all ending soon since graduation was quickly approaching. This is when I started to look at colleges and I knew I needed to find a design program that wasn’t fine art heavy. I wanted a program that was like the class I took junior year which focused more on communication than art. The first colleges I looked at were Miami, UC and OSU all of which had design programs that were heavily based on traditional art. Then a local catholic community college called Mount St. Joeseph sent me a letter saying that they just started a graphic design major and they would offer me a pretty large scholarship. I toured the campus and was turned off by how small it was, and it was only 5 minutes away from my house. I still applied as a backup but I wanted to look elsewhere.

I found the School of Visual Communication at OU completely by accident. How I found it was by google searching “Visual Communication” solely because it was the name of the class I took junior year and I was floored to find out it was an actual major. I looked into the school and found it wasn’t a heavy traditional art major and focused more on communication. I went to tour the campus and I was completely sold. The only thing was to get into VisCom you had to go through a portfolio review and only 80 people out of the ~200 that apply a year get in. Even though I had achieved all these different things at Elder I still had nagging suspicion that I wasn’t good enough. I thought that maybe I was just a big fish in a little pond at Elder and compared to everyone else I wouldn’t be able to get in. I turned to Mr. Beutsche who spent weeks with me preparing my portfolio, giving me advice and telling me what to include and what not to include. To me everything I had done in school all came down to this because if I didn’t get into OU I wouldn’t know what I’d do in college.

This gave me feelings of nervousness and stress that I had never experience before. From weeks before the interview and the weeks after I was a mess, I lost my appetite and lost my sense of humor for a while since I was so worried. When it came for the day of my interview I was so nervous until I sat down in front of the professor that teach me today. When I sat down I realize that I’m proud of my work and it gave me a boost of confidence and I had a great interview. They were impressed by my use of typography and overall aesthetic saying that I was much farther along than most high schools, even the ones known for art. It took a month of second guessing myself until I got the acceptance letter saying that I was one of 80 that got in. It was a great feeling. To know that I went from not having any talent at all to have enough talent to get into this design program was great. To me I had finally made it as a designer.

After getting into VisCom I cruised through the rest of my senior year. At the end of the year like all AP classes we had AP testing and my portfolio got the highest in the class with a 4 out of 5. That was also a great feeling because I still couldn’t draw but I achieved everything in high school by finding my own ways of doing things. Two weeks before graduation Mr. Beutsche pulled me aside and thank me for all the effort and heart I put into art and told me that I was chosen for the Jim Borgman Art Award. This is an award named after the editorial cartoon artist who is well known in his field and is an alumni of Elder. The award is 500 dollars and to have your artwork hanged up in the hallway leading to the art room forever. Only one student a year is chosen and for me to be chosen I was absolutely honored. To think that maybe my kid one day will be walking through halls of Elder and seeing my work from decades before was amazing to me. I was completely honored and but he told me not to tell anyone so it would be a surprise at graduation. Including my mom. On graduation when it was announce that I won my Mom was in tears and my Dad was completely proud of me even though he never really understood my art. However I was still met by resentment from the other Art Kids. A lot of people didn’t think I deserved it because I was the first person to win the award using the computer. This hurt my feelings but I felt I earned it and so did Mr. Beutsche so I brushed it off. On the first day at Elder my Mom told me to leave my mark on the school, and little did I know that I would be doing it literally by having my artwork become a part of the building.

Picture of my Artwork hanging in Elder's halls today.

In closing this essay I am reminded of two quotes that from creative people. The first quote is from Ira Glass who is the host of the NPR program “This American Life,”

““Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.” (Ira Glass)

I love this quote because whenever I think I’m not a good designer I read this quote and I am reminded of my achievements and that I need to work through these feelings of doubt. I really relate to this quote because I wanted to quit once I thought I wasn’t good but then I realized that I have good taste and just needed to push myself. And after pushing myself I found my own aesthetic and later grew into my identity as a designer. The other quote comes from Peter Grudy who is a well-known Designer.

“The style was driven by our capabilities,’ notes Grundy. ‘As George Hardie once said when I gave a talk at Brighton, “I’ve known Peter, since college and Peter was always doing things that were based on the fact that he couldn’t draw very well.” In a way I was simplifying things to make it possible for me to be able to draw them. In the end that simplification became the thing that people

wanted. They liked the actual simplification, I can’t draw figuratively.” (John 6-13)

This quotes sticks with me because like Grundy I still can’t draw but I found ways around it that fits into my aesthetic and has made me the designer I am today.

I owe everything I have today to Mr. Beutsche and his art class and I will never forget what I learned from him and the people that I learned with. I love design and I love who I have become because of it. Even though I've learned a lot at Ohio University I still think back to what I learned at Elder from time to time.