So I've been doing graphic design work for the past few years... Skills I acquired by teaching myself. Though I think the ability to just "create" was with me since the day I was born...
I used to dismantle toys, watches as a kid... Trying to fix them back. Of course some had to suffer entirely (a small price to pay for the skill I was slowly honing) . Others got lucky and I was able to put them back together without breaking a sweat... Not sure how it all started but I might attribute the innate sense of wonder to growing up seeing my brother do the same. Fast forward to the present day... I kept the "skills" which have made me earn a decent buck or two doing mobilephone/PC repairs...
Back to the topic at hand... Maybe lemme first explain why I digressed... I was trying to show how I ended up actually venturing towards graphic design... My brief history with tech/tech tools made me always wonder how some of the developed software worked. The actual time I designed my first poster was after a friend of mine helped me come up with a poster for this event I was organising. After seeing the cool poster he came up with I thought to myself how I too could easily pool off the same thing. My first program to use was GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Not sure how I stumbled upon it at first but part of what contributed to that was the fact that the best known tool then i.e. Photoshop wasn't free and I think at the time I wasn't eager to crack it as most of my fellow students at the time did. GIMP is as powerful if not more than Photoshop. I can't say I'm a GIMP expert but I've also made a decent buck out of it.
I nowadays use Inkscape a lot because of the SVG format which is recomended for churning media such as outdoor posters and the like. I've been doing this for a while, I've managed to do some logos, posters, banners, business cards and so on... So as I was working for a clinet, I recently got wind that I might have been replaced by an in-house designer. Not sure what caused the sudden shift but I suspect its because the client foresees an increase in the workload... and the fact that I only do this on the side probably doesn't help with my some times poor turnaround time.
I can't say that to some extent I felt that I wasn't creative enough. Being self taught I really don't have a place to go and refer to some design principles and what not in a bid to be at one with the muses... So I ended up coming up with a new strategy. Not sure yet of how effective it will be. Only time will tell... As a graphic designer, you end up creating dozens of files for the same project. There's actually a meme that jokes about that... So I thought to my self... Why don't I borrow an idea from that as I endeavor to "get creative" again... I made a conscious decision to no longer save the tings I design henceforth... This is a bit risky since I won't be able to edit the files I churn e.g. as PNG/JPG and frankly speaking trying to do so won't be part of what I envisioned this challenge to be...
Do you know of a better way? Do you think my technique will work? Lemme know in the comments :-)
