Recently, I applied for and successfully got into the design team of a Penn student organization called Unearthed.
The club creates children’s educational magazines, one themed issue per semester, with exciting articles and immersive illustrations that hopefully get Philadelphia students more interested and engaged with science and learning in general. I saw on the Undergraduate Fine Arts email list that they were looking for people, and I had just been thinking about joining more student groups, so I thought why not? But now I’m a bit scared. Why do I want to do this? Why do I think I have the capability to do it?
I wanted to be on a design team for a group. I figured that if I’m majoring in Design, I should know what it is, how it looks being executed in my personal life, and whether I really enjoy it. Why I think I can do this, though, is a whole different question. Last semester, I worked with InDesign to write and create a book entirely from scratch, so I figure I must know at least a little about laying out printed matter. Plus, I’ve actually been gaining a lot of confidence in my potential for design success throughout DSGN264 thus far! I really like working with Illustrator, which is less intimidating now.
Generally, I’ve been thinking about why I want to do design at all. My art teacher in high school told me that it would be a more practical career than fine art, which was a consideration I had, or English, which was another consideration I had that feels more like a pipe dream now. I questioned why, at times, and whether I would be good at it, or whether I would like it. The Speculative Fiction reading we did a few weeks ago, as well as the Politics of Design reading, helped show me that yes, I can angle design to be as practical or conceptual or artistic as I want it to be. And yes, I can use design to make things better, to ask and answer questions. Drawing my silly little pictures for this silly little club seems like a small step towards eventually achieving something like that.
1 Comment
Rain Yan · March 21, 2022 at 10:10 pm
Hey this is pretty cool. As regarding the practicality of design and if that makes a more viable career compared to other medium of art such as fine art, personally, I think that it may be true from an industry stand-point, as that design is inherently more of an applied field that can be implemented in across all industries compared to something like fine art. However, as you have said too, design has so much more potential and flexibility than to just be a tool of application; in fact, it can be used to create anything, from abstract interpretations to fictional stories. The realm is truly endless
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