When I was younger, I worried about the implications of having a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree opposed to a Bachelor of Science might have on my career. Would I be pigeoned-holed into being a designer all my life? Were countless beatings at the hands of mindless AE’s to become par for the course? As strange as those worries seem now they were grounded in the reality of my situation. Partly a combination of time and location, my vision was impeded by colleagues, friends and bosses.
I have been in New York for nearly four years now and have grown beyond even my own ideas. Mostly thanks to my BFA because without it I would have not been able to continuously assess, adapt and adopt to every situation thrown at me.
Assess - In art school, we learned to begin all our projects by using your artistic sensibility to assess the overall picture and begin to visualize different solutions. By taking a creative top-level strategic look at our problems we began to form a different type of thought. In sharp contrast to regular schools where you learn to only focus on one solution to most problems we learned solutions are not limited only by the mind’s capacity to develop them.
Assessing current events and thinking outside the box to offer up an easy solution.(circa 2000)Adapt - Being made to constantly switch applications and learn to adapt to changing technologies at a sometimes dizzying pace readied me for this new changing economy. HTML to drawing and reading we constantly were honing skills that would help later on in adapting to different situations
This started as a sketch of the Lighthouse and evolved into a full scale rebranding.(circa 1998)
Adopt - Sometimes in the name of good design and others not so good design, we were always experimenting with new technologies and adopting it as part of our visual solutions. Being early adopters way back then made it all the easier to learn about influence and changing models of influence on the internet.
Some of my first email blast using HTML emails. (circa 2000)
Almost six years out of school and working now, I can finally say that I made the right choice pursuing my degree in Visual Communications. In the current economy, value is placed on creativity, problem-solving and being able to set oneself apart from a crowded field of normal thinkers.
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