Middle school social media antics helped me fall in love with design

Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023.

With New Year’s resolution brainstorming sessions fresh in mind, 2020 brings plenty of opportunities for reflection on how to improve in the months ahead. This year, I want to shake it up a little though. I also want to spend some time looking back at how far I’ve come professionally, starting with design.

My passion for design began when I was in middle school around the time of the advent of social media. To impress my adolescent friends, I took to editing the bejesus out of nearly every image I ever posted on my social media feed. Most of these images included out-of-control filters, cartoonish icons, brightly colored frames, and various typography.

By the end of my high school career, I had a full facebook album of these dreadful images (a total of 81 photos). While these little graphics are undeniably embarrassing (they are no longer public, so don’t bother looking for them!), I actually harbor a lot of gratefulness to my former-self for going through this phase.

Yikes… Would you believe these are some of the LEAST embarrassing of the album?

Looking back, I understand the way in which this period of tinkering helped shape me into the designer I am today. Like most trades, design is not something you can be good at overnight. It takes lots and lots of practice. The hours of seemingly meaningless time I spent carefully crafting these goofy graphics was actually quite useful.

Without knowing it, I was experimenting with color, typography, balance, contrast, and many more skills that are a part of my everyday life today. 

Looking at my earliest graphics, it’s clear that my eye for design and keen attention to detail was not intrinsic; rather, it came through hundreds of hours of experimentation in which I slowly realized which arrangements of pixels looked more aesthetically pleasing than others.

Here’s to another decade of design tinkering and improvement!

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.”

— Neil Gaiman