I Think I Was Always Meant to Become a Graphic Designer

Fun fact: this website used to actually be a blog for my graphic design journey. Yes, back around 2010, when I was realizing I wanted to get a job as a designer after graduating college, I built my portfolio website from scratch using HTML and CSS. (This is not that website.)

I read article after article about building a good portfolio website and many people claimed that having an active blog was a great way to show your work and also boost your SEO. Sweet! But I wasn’t (and still am not) capable of building a working blog from the ground up. So I came to WordPress. I gave myself small projects to make and showcase, then wrote blogs about each of them.

As my career progressed, the need for the blog lessened (in part due to my design work being blocked behind NDA and different privacy protocols). So, the blog turned into a catchall blog for me as a person. I did health and fitness posts as well as cosplay builds, my first being my Making My Blake Belladonna Cosplay post.

But did I always know I would become a designer? Nope! I didn’t even know it was a feasible career option until sophomore year of college. But were the signs that it’d be right up my alley always there? Yup!

Junior High: NSYNC, Microsoft Word, and a Dream

Back in the glorious year of 2000, I was introduced to a little boy band named NSYNC. My closest friends became obsessed and I, too, joined the craze. As a junior high student with zero money for official merch, I had one thing at my disposal: my parents’ computer, and with it Microsoft Word and The Internet.

Having dabbled in MS Paint since I was able to hold a mouse, I knew my way around manipulating images on the computer. But why Microsoft Word, Ash? Why use that to create?

It’s simple: because Word automatically makes the canvas paper size, which meant I could print whatever I wanted and slap it on the front cover of my binder. Genius!

So, I copied and pasted images of the 5 NSYNC members into Word docs, learned to make them all “float” so I could put them exactly where I wanted them, and made myself custom binder covers. I was living large. This was my first foray into graphic design. (It’s just too bad that I don’t have any photographic evidence of this. I really wish I could see what those photo collages looked like.)

High School: Linkin Park, Photoshop, and Angst-Driven Hand Lettering

I went to high school at a prestigious college preparatory school which required each student to purchase a school-sanctioned laptop. (Yes, I know; I live a very privileged life. Thanks, mom and dad!) Freshmen year, deep in my Linkin Park phase, I went back to Ol’ Reliable MS Paint to create wallpapers for myself.

Then, sophomore year: salvation! In the form of a—totally legitimate and in no way bootleg—copy of Adobe Photoshop. If MS Paint was chopping down a tree with a hand saw, Photoshop was a gas-powered chain saw! Oh, the things I could do! What amazing tools and features (that I, to this day, continue to learn).

But that wasn’t all. Having never been much of a drawer or illustrator, I was not much of a doodler in school. What I did like doing, however, was taking my favorite Linkin Park lyrics and drawing them into a notebook.

I would typically start by writing the words out in all caps before drawing rectangles around each line and curve before filling them in. So not quite the stereotypical block letters, more akin to graffiti style really. I experimented a lot with sizes, shapes, and arrangement of the letters.

I most notably did this during biology class and have no recollection why. (Perhaps the teacher didn’t allow us to take notes on our computers? A mystery.) I did it so often that a classmate in a seat behind me noticed and said she liked watching me work on it throughout the class. She was always curious which lyric I would do. Little did I know that this interest in letters and typography within hand lettering as well as layout, grid, and hierarchy within wallpaper design could actually lend itself to a job.

College: A Part-Time Job and The Entirety of the Adobe Creative Suite

Freshman year of college, I made a lot of great friends (some of which I still remain in contact with after all these years!). One of those friends got a new copy of Photoshop, which meant my new laptop could continue to be a haven for custom wallpapers, profile pics, and the like.

It was around this time that I learned about vector art and tried my hand at it. To say I did it “wrong” would be quite the understatement given the fact I created my shapes by using the polygonal lasso tool and filling it in with color rather than using the pen tool for true vectors. (True vectors are created using math—which the pen tool allows for—and therefore can be scaled to any size. My method meant that it could only ever be that original size or risk becoming blurry or jagged when resizing.) After being told on DeviantArt that I was “doing it wrong,” I learned of the existence of Adobe Illustrator. But I was a broke college student and no one had it. So, I stuck to Photoshop.

That is until, thanks to another friend who had landed a part-time job with our university, I learned that there were students getting paid to essentially design things in the Adobe suite. Amazing! I could get paid to create things 12 hours/week alongside my studies. I applied and wasn’t accepted, but I was given a job nearby at one of the computer labs. The job was simple: check students in and out of the lab and also check that the printers were working correctly. But my friend’s boss gave me a few things to work on to test me and I did well enough to be “promoted” to the designer role.

From there, I learned Illustrator and dipped my toes in web design. I never looked at websites the same, having never given them much thought before that moment. My student colleagues had such vastly different styles and I was surrounded by talented and skilled peers that I could learn from. This was my first “real” job and I attribute it to my success today.

Fast Forward: A Dozen Years After College Graduation

I’m happy for all the little things that led me here. I look back on all my tiny creative projects with fondness as I was making art for things I loved. (Not mentioned: all the different anime-themed wallpapers I also made in high school.) Each new skill I learned, each new tool I used, led me here.

I’m happily employed as a Senior Multimedia Designer for a company I have been with for six years now, blowing the record for my longest stay at a single company by a long shot. My job has allowed me to attend a number of virtual (and one in-person) design conferences to help reignite the design spark I had back in 2011. (Burn out is a hell of a drug.) I don’t feel so much like an imposter calling myself a designer anymore.

Over the years, I’ve done it so much that I can’t turn that side of my brain off. Bad kerning or leading on a billboard. Runts, widows, or orphans in social media posts. I feel very much like George Clooney in Ocean’s Twelve.

“I can’t turn my brain off. It’s me; I go into some place and all I can see are the angles.”

Daniel Ocean, Ocean’s Twelve

Does it get annoying sometimes? Sure. But it also means I notice and appreciate really good design when I see it in the wild. And being able to look at the world through that lens is a wonderful thing because design is everywhere.

But What Does Any of That Have to Do with Cosplay?

It has nothing and everything to do with cosplay. If graphic design is manipulating pixels on a screen to make a finished product, cosplay is manipulating fabric and foam and other materials to make a costume. The eye that I cultivated as a designer so easily lends itself to cosplay. By learning how to break down graphic design pieces into smaller parts, I’ve learned how to look at character designs in the same way. But instead of looking at font families, color choices, and grid, I’m looking at fabric textures, hairstyles, and shapes on a prop.

Not only that, but if you look at any number of my cosplay builds, you’ll see me using Adobe Illustrator to recreate props to use as blueprints or designs to use for embroidery. I’m constantly using graphic design to make pieces for cosplays, convention appearances, or the like. Even something as simple as making an Instagram story look more legible utilizes graphic design. It showed me the value of solid branding to the point that I actually have a style guide for my Ashweez Cosplay brand, with selected fonts, colors, and different logo styles.

Like I said, graphic design is everywhere. You’re surrounded by it daily without even knowing it. And learning to do it yourself so you can showcase whatever it is you want to showcase in an efficient, elegant way is super valuable.

Intro to Graphic Design Panel?

All that said and if you’ve made it this far, would you be interested in me hosting a panel—either virtual and/or in-person—on what I’ve learned? While I have no formal education in graphic design, I have about 14 years of professional experience as well as the countless years that I mentioned in the blog post above.

Graphic design, writing, and cosplay. Those have been my bread and butter since I was tiny. It’s just funny how all those things come back as an adult.