Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Kerning is kool.


I blame my growing obsession with Typography on my OBU Graphic Design professor David Bieloh. Before I walked into that class I thought that fonts like Papyrus, Comic Sans and Bleeding Cowboy were perfectly okay fonts to use, that text distortion was somewhat cool and the word "kern" was some hick trying to say "corn". 

Wrong, wrong, wrong....How terribly wrong I was.

When people ask me what I do and I respond with " I'm a Graphic Designer", I more times then not get a funny look from the other person. That is typically when I hold up the Starbucks cup that’s in my hand and point to the pretty pictures and go, "That's Graphic Design." Then it suddenly clicks with them. What is so crazy is that they actually still haven’t even scratched the surface of understanding the meaning of design. 

I mean, heck, I still don’t get it.

Honestly, when I graduated from OBU last Spring I wasn’t setting my sights on finding a design job anywhere in the Plano/Dallas area. "It isn't my cup of tea anymore" is what I would tell my other design friends. I actually had no clue what I wanted to do and the only thing I cared about after graduation was preparing myself for the Miss Arkansas stage.

Whelp, I know this may come to a shock to a lot of girls but contrary to what I thought myself.... there actually is life after pageants. And life requires you to find a job.

A couple months and several interviews later I found myself sitting in a cubical working for an insurance company. Basically, I was in a major learning curve. I didn’t even know what an insurance policy was but I was determined to make the best of it and soak up every bit of information I could.

After a couple months of pulling myself up by my bootstraps- I hit a wall. I found myself longing to create something. That was the moment that I realized that Graphic Design was indeed my cup of tea.

Long story short I got transferred over to the marketing side of the company by the Grace of God and now I get to let my odd growing obsession with Typography grow and flourish everyday at work and even on outside projects as well! 


Although learning how to sit in a chair for 8 hours a day and stare at a computer was tough- Im slowly getting the hang of it. I feel extremely blessed to be where I am right now. Not many today get to say that they actually love doing what their doing. 




1 comment:

  1. Bethany, I am very proud of you. And I appreciate the kind words. It's great to hear you are in the design area and are enjoying it. That's awesome. Long live Papyrus. ;)

    David

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