I often wonder how much strategy people put into making career-oriented decisions. For most folks, it’s a matter of doing something that pays the rent or feeds the family. For others, it could be driven by obtaining power or the lucrative trappings of executive success. For me, I just wanted to be excited and passionate about what I do and what I can create.
When I was much younger, I’d always imagined I would be heavily involved in the creative world. Animator, graphic designer, painter, sketch artist. Hell, mime. Either way, the world of color, space, value, and form seemed to have a greater hold on me than the perceptively dull and dry world of investment banking, actuary, or (gasp!) programmer*.
Despite my initial prejudices against the world of math and science, I started on a path early in college that would eventually marry the world of the creative and the world of the rational. One world fit like my favorite pair of jeans, the other fit like the most comically oversized coat in my father’s closet. For most people, an art major enrolled in computer science classes seems most ridiculously incongruous. Even I thought so for the longest time, yet I continued to attempt a double major in Comp Sci and Commercial Art.
Perceptions have an interesting (and even a tad unexpected) way of changing. Things I have learned:
1. Creativity is not limited to just paint strokes on a canvas or the savvy use of Photoshop.
2. There can be a natural balance between the intensely imaginative and the analytical/logical lines of thought. In fact, the best problem solving I’ve ever seen involved incredible imagination.
3. I am passionate about design; but I live for the full creation and realization of a design idea — from concept to delivery. The best way I can describe it is this: My heart is in design; my head is in the code.
*To my developer/programmer friends: Don’t worry, I love you! I kiss you face!
Testing! Testing! Can I comment yet? I just want to say that the creative world seems to be hiding, sort of like the “real” world in the Matrix. But it’s there somewhere, and we’re going to find it in our programmer/insurance whore costumes!
You’re kissing a lot of people faces. First you kiss programmer face so as not to offend they, then you kiss me face for me birthday.
We must take our spouses and me baby to your ice cream shoppe soon (preferably at the same time). The wife likee the salted caramel.
Addmittedly, I do enjoy kissing a lot of people faces. Mostly, baby-oriented faces like the mini Smithy-Smith.
Also, shameless plug time. Best Salty Caramel ice cream in Columbus is Denise’s. Hands DOWN.