Where It All Began
A look back for those who are either wondering how I got started on the full-time freelance journey, how to take the leap themselves or maybe just curious how I ended up as a designer, here’s where my journey began.
Let’s rewind the clock to when I was leaving high school to pursue a college degree and had no real idea what I wanted to do. Entering college, I had only a slight idea of what I wanted and that idea was go to Colorado, get a 4-year degree, snowboard as much as I possibly could then design snowboard graphics for companies like Never Summer (who’s also out in Colorado; could you tell I wanted to be out West?). Well, two of those 4 things happened the way I wanted; I did in-fact end up with a 4-year degree and I did get to snowboard almost 4-5 days a week on average even with a full class load. However, what was a pleasant shift in my plan, was my school was nestled in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and I worked with the Mountain Recreation Program on several design projects & trips through school!
Point being, things didn’t go as ‘planned’ but things also turned out almost better than I could have imagined. I found a cool school in Northern VT formally know as Lyndon State College (now Northern VT University) that was 8 minutes from Burke Mountain, close to a big ol’ lake for summer time swims, had a beautiful campus, and did I mention it was only 8 minutes from a ski mountain? Yeah that part pretty much sealed the deal…that, and it had a high acceptance rate (like 96% or something) which was a plus as my GPA wasn’t the highest leaving high school.
I played soccer for Lyndon and in the first year got right to ticking off class boxes, but I was still at a loss to answer the big question ‘what do you want to do when you graduate?’. Along with snowboarding, I loved science & sports in general or being active so I thought maybe I could incorporate either of those with design as a sort of double major or something. Let me just say, after my first year, I switched majors probably 3 or 4 times. Adding things like sports management, exercise science, nutrition, mountain recreation management and photography all to my potential double major load but to no avail was I feeling any closer to the life-career debacle.
Year 1 was a treat at Lyndon but little did I know there was even more in-store for me in year 2 when I had decided to take the leap abroad on a whim. I started to realize that what I wanted was to make some friends, enjoy my time at college and learn how to become a great designer, the bonus was embarking on 6 months in NZ to explore even more! Sophomore year was a blast and the 6 months abroad was seriously life changing. I returned with a new appreciation for a lot of things and the last 2.5 years of school flew by after that.
Lyndon required an internship in order to graduate and I landed in one close to home with a small experiential marketing firm out of Manchester NH. This must be one of those ‘open doors’ that people say life throws at your sometimes because I never knew this area of design existed – let alone could be a potential direction for me to take my career! I quickly fell in love with the industry even though I was (at the time) practicing another new skill of Production Design which was creating pre-press and print ready files to send to our large-format printers in the back of house.
This internship changed the trajectory of my life and career without me even knowing it, interested in how? This story will be continued in next months blog post 🙂
Some of my work through college
These are a few pickin’s from my work through college. You can definitely see the growth as I continued to learn about design, proper layout, font choices and even attempting some illustrations for some very early day beer labels. Things get better I promise haha
