Designer Envy Sunday April 22, 2007

This past Friday I was in a irritable fucking mood. You know those days. You get home and don’t want to talk to anyone. For some reason you’re all wound up like a razor-bladed top and just waiting to unravel on someone. It was a shitty evening and I ended up taking a mid-evening nap to calm down.

The reason for the increased level of frustration was pretty ridiculous. Besides a lack of sleep, it was mainly built around something I like to call Designer Envy. (I’m sure others have called it this, but I just can’t find a decent link) I’m sure it happens in most creative industries, the art and fashion worlds come to mind, but I think it has to be pretty prevalent in the Web Design industry. It’s basically a situation where you get overwhelmed by the design skills of influential designers and just drive yourself nuts trying to out design them without the experience or the skill. It’s really self-critical and extremely irrational. When you spend a lot of time examining other designs or the portfolios of some of the more predominate designers in the industry, you’re eventually going to get overwhelmed. Not everyone can be a full on expert in every area of industry and if you don’t accept that; Designer Envy can consume you and start to demoralize your work. It’s a frustrating thing to get into and usually takes a deep breath and some rest to get out of your system. But when you’re going through it every thing you do just seems like a failure no matter what others may say.

Ironically, I wrote about this type of frustration a year ago today. And as I reread that post I kind of had to laugh at what I was bitching about, because one year later I still feel the same way. It’s funny because this designer envy is what propelled me to quit my job in the first place and now a year later I’m still susceptible to its demoralizing power.

So what’s this about … Well that little bout of Designer Envy actually produced something more than just an irritating headache and punching myself listening to Rod Stewart records. Because of my frustrations on Friday night I ended up playing some video games and forcing myself to get out of my usual head space for a few hours. By the time today rolled around (Sunday) I had designed a fourth incarnation my portfolio web site.

www.cpgturner.ca

Categories: The-Blogosphere, The-Corporation,

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