Art has played a significant role in my life since I was young. It had begun with simple pencil drawings and acrylic paintings, expanding into scratchboard, oil painting, and ink drawings. It had always been a hobby of mine and not something I really saw as a future career. When I first started college, I was majoring in engineering, as I had gone to a technical high school where my “major” was Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) and I really wanted to do something with architecture drawings. During the spring my freshman year, Covid had hit, and I had also moved from Maryland to North Carolina. Due to struggles with combinations of certain classes and online learning, I had opted to change my major. Switching to Digital Design, I was still unsure of what I had wanted to do but was certain I wanted to work with computers, and I loved the art aspect that was brought into it. Eventually I transferrer to Cape Fear Community College in Summer 2021 so that I was no longer twelve hours from home and their art programs had been more specialized than the university I was attending.
This is where I head a whole new revelation of the various concentrations within the fine arts and was introduced more in depth with graphic design. An assigned project to create a whole magazine layout including a portrait made completely of one type face is what cemented my decision that graphic design is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Now I have had the opportunity to combine my passions of art and working with technology to create something great. I have discovered a newfound love and appreciation for typography. Being able to home in on the minute specs of characters has expanded my imagination completely when it comes to negative space. Having been told “I like what I don’t see” by my professor from CFCC is something that runs through my mind constantly when working on designs, especially since I enjoy some more minimalist and simple approaches to designs. Having made such a drastic change in my educational path has shown light on what I’m best at how much I truly love the field.
