Not an Artist? Being Handy May be Enough.
At the heart of this site is the goal of inspiration for the Do-It-Yourselfer. Right off the bat, one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about helping you complete your design project is that you must have a can do attitude.
I’ve always been the kind of person that will Find-A-Way regardless of the circumstances. I may not have the right tools for the job, but when I get through you’ll never know. Growing up in a household where we didn’t always have much, my brother and I learned to make do with what we had. We couldn’t get the real G.I. Joe action figures, so we settled for the cheap molded plastic army men and had just as much fun using our creativity to build forts and little vehicles for them. Dad couldn’t afford to buy us new bikes, but we watched him collect spare parts from here and there and build us bikes that worked just as good as our friends new ones. Plus, we had the pleasure of spending that quality time with our father. This fostered the creative spirit that has pushed me along my life’s path. Now when I’m confronted with a problem, I instinctively look for ways to solve it by using what ever is available. For instance, once I used a scanner to capture a picture of a 3 dimensional object because I didn’t have a camera. I guess this is why I like the phrase, “by any means necessary”.
This is the attitude you must adopt, if you don’t already possess it, when taking on a design project you don’t have a natural aptitude for. Even thou you may have come to this site looking for help with your project, you need to have a can-do spirit to see it through to completion. You may say, what’s the big deal, why can’t you just show me how to create a newsletter? Well, with some subjects it takes a little more than to watch a video tutorial and think you have it. Some graphic design projects can be tedious, overly glamorized and even mundane. It takes persistence to go from the honeymoon stage of conceptualizing a logo, to the trench work of making sure that logo will reproduce consistently on a t-shirt, poster, or the side of a van.
I remember reading a article where some guy didn’t even realize that comic books and scratch’n'stiff stickers actually took teams of people to produce. He just assumed that there was a machine somewhere that just spit them out on demand. I’ve worked with people who believed graphic design work isn’t really work at all. From the outside looking in graphic design can fool you into thinking it’s all fun and games. Don’t get me wrong, getting paid to use your creativity can be very rewarding, but you need to go into a project knowing it’s work and it has set processes and rules that should be observed.
Let me stop right here and reassure you that you can do this. This site is dedicated to showing you the way. You don’t have to be a talented artist to design great business cards, brochures or websites, but you do need determination. Be practical and don’t bite off more than you can chew. You’re not going to build a social network site like Myspace with little to no coding skills. Start off with a blog. Have you started a new company and found you can’t afford to pay a designer to create your logo? Keep it simple and experiment with the clip art that came with your word processing program. You can always upgrade to a better logo once your business takes off.
The most important thing to remember is to stay positive. Look at the glass as half full and ask yourself, what would MacGyver do in this situation.:) Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next post.
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