When I was in high school, one of my teachers told the entire class that we’d have four careers within our lifetime. Clearly, there was a sign that things were shifting in the economy. Private companies weren’t employing workers for 20 to 30 years, unlike some of our parents (I’m a GenYer). I got a taste of that right out of college when I thought I was going to be one of those starving journalists living in New York and trying to make it to TNR … or something like that.
I remember sitting down across one of the editors for The San Diego Business Journal, while he praised my writing, telling me that if I kept it up, I could one day (translation: 10 years) be an editor at SDBJ and earn good living at $50,000-plus. Wait, what? WHAT?!? Like… 50K a year??? Holy shitballs! That suuuuuuucks! Enter: Print Design.
Great print designers can walk along a street, look at the typography of the stores’ branding and recall the names of the fonts. I’ve always admired those people. They make beautiful illustrations that flow like water cascading a waterfall. Just brilliant. Me? Eh. Print design’s nice but, really, those file sizes can get ginormous and make my MBP crawl. Enter: Web Design.
Some time after my gig as a print designer, I entered the Wonderful World of Web Design. Awesomesauce. Filesizes are minimal and the ecosystem never slows down. In fact, it speeds up, which means YOU need to speed up and keep up. It’s a challenge that I love. But over the years, that space has evolved, as well. Along came UI/UX/HCI/(insert other trendy acronyms), and I started to wonder where I fell in. I did some developing. Was I a developer? I worked on quite a bit of user interface design. Was I a user-interface designer? Tragedy ensued. After some pints and good thoughts, I went back… WAY back.
I’ve always worked on content. All these years, the content has always been at the forefront of determining how something should work, look like, etc., and even sound like. If you were to ask me now what I do, I’d say I’m a Content Creator who can market, design, develop, write and edit. That took a solid two years to discover, but it was definitely worth the identity crisis.