Selling Yourself

At the start of the year, we were asked about our design philosophy, and it took me quite a while to understand this concept, never mind come up with my own design philosophy. But when we had guest speakers Norman Stevenson from Design Partners and Noel Joyce from Hax, and I saw their portfolios and the work they had done, it finally clicked in my head. I was always caught up in the literal sense of philosophy and was trying to think more like Plato then a designer. But after their talk, and Noel asked us to think about something we wished we had designed, a thousand different things came to mind. But looking at the things I had written down as options, I saw a similarity, they were all products that people enjoyed rather than something that they needed, things like toys, clothes and skateboards. This made me rethought my design philosophy to fit this idea. And since then a lot of the work I have done has been focused around this idea.

I have always been interested in creating products that people would want to interact with and chose to interact with rather than a need to use it. This idea really helped me with trying to design a portfolio that I can use to sell myself to the right places. Many projects done in our course aren't focused on this idea of enjoyment but I never felt that I enjoyed designing something in which I would not enjoy using myself and that is evident in my work. I would love to be the type of person that could just automatically get interested in something because I had to, but i simply don't work that way. This realization made it so much easier for me to understand which kind of places I would want to work in when I'm older.

Once I knew where I wanted my career to go, the idea of selling myself became so much easier. I know not to showcase projects where there was little creativity, or if it was a product that depended on function rather than the aesthetics. Noel talked about how he often designed something that affected him personally, and myself not having any sort or disability like his, it made sense to me that I would much rather design something that is a part of my life, this mainly being my hobbies. So when I'm thinking of how to sell myself in the future, I'll have to keep this is mind, to focus on the projects I enjoyed doing, because after all, if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you won't do a good job.