The Art and Design of James M-C

How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing your Soul - Chapter 5

This chapter put my entire experience as an intern into a new perspective for me, namely that of my boss. Since I have been at the firm, we have hired and let go a number of people, including all of the design staff aside from myself and the company’s president.

We currently have three account managers, one of whom were fired and mysteriously came back once all the work dried up. We haven’t had any real work in ages, and have been sending me in to fix problems left in designs by old staff during older projects, such as Dannon’s Celebrate Healthy Eating site where it was my job to fix errors in old files such as words on the wrong line or in the wrong language (two identical sites in English and Spanish are hard to pull off), missing images or pages (in flash sometimes), and to replace all the pictures of the old food pyramid with the new one the USDA put just out (don’t get me started on the design flaws of that little piece of work), but I digress.

Point being, according to what myself, the old designers, and the accounting staff knows, the company is in trouble, and the boss isn’t helping with his particular style of running a design firm. My dilemma being, I have a job, I get paid to do what I like, but I’m terribly afraid of losing this job before I can finish this course and then enter the real world. I just know however, that once I’m done with school I’m just going to goof off and not find a job until it becomes really dire that I do, but enough worrying about that for now. Everything in my gut and this book tells me that he’s running the company into the ground, but how do you break that kind of news to the guy who owns the company?

Other issues raised by this book made me think, if I’m not that good of a designer, who the heck is going to want to hire me, and should I even bother going into the design field? I know it’s a little late to start questioning that kind of thing now, but let’s face it; all I really have to show is what I’ve done for classes. Everything I’ve done for anything else was either ill conceived, poorly executed, or I never followed through after the idea phase. My portfolio is a dump, and contains just as much work by other people as myself.
Is there any place in the design world for a man who has amazing ideas, but no talent or ability to realize them?

Perhaps
If I can hire people better than myself at various key skills, then maybe I can pull off running a design company instead of actually going through the physical labor of creating it myself. But where would that leave me in terms of artistic fulfillment? Probably a little ahead of where else I would be, overworked and underpaid. Even the great artists of the renaissance had help on their greatest masterpieces. Perhaps I just need some experience and time.