katruth.info

I've spent a lot of working hours in Adobe Illustrator, but I wouldn't say professionally. I started working with CS3 in high school journalism, begged for the CS5 software for Christmas in 2010 and got busy vectorizing and laying type to my heart's content. Unpaid, for fun. Since then, I've worked my magic mostly for friends and work acquaintances, just whenever someone has an event or promotion and it comes up. Because my forays into design are so sporadic, it feels like my style and ability have stayed the pretty much the same all these years. If you don't use it, you lose it, as they say.

In high school journalism we were working with black and white and full-color newsmagazine page designs, and we were just kids so it was us finding magazine layouts we liked and straight up jacking them. Tweak a few things. I won some national awards for this. We were excited about licensing fonts from the Hoefler Frere-Jones type foundry. I imagine adults were like, wow it's cool that teenagers are using these industry standard programs pretty well! But it really is weird how these programs are still the industry standard – I could be 16 years into a career? Never thought of it that way. No, I did and at every turn I chose to freelance slash not make a big deal out of it. Because in my mind, I was borrowing, stealing, cheating, basically just pretending to be a professional graphic designer.

Anyway, for the past two or three years I've been really inspired by tales of the graphic design of old, laying out cuttings and doing pastings and using light-box desks and whatnot. I was completely taught and raised on the digital side of things so now that I'm an adult I want to get to the root of everything. The skeuomorphism of every one of these Adobe programs evaded me in my youth, because I was unaware of the original processes for design. Things just existed and were the way they were. But when I crack open an old 1970s issue of Horizon magazine and see these beautiful, interesting vibrant designs and advertisements it kind of clicks for me. I was copying copies of copies of copies.

What I'm getting at is that I long deeply for truth and knowledge. In order to be a master of an art or craft, you must understand its inception and evolution and from there, learn how to create among the things that inspire you through technique and experience. This is not at all how I see my experience with graphic design. I'm simply a part-time participant in a beautiful art form, but it's a joyful experience every time. When I do it for friends.

Making Graphics for Friends