Graphic Passion // A Designers view by me [Matthew Needle]

Folding a fresh crisp piece of paper, The smell of drying ink, The sense of pride and joy when you have completed a project that both you and the client are pleased with… These are attributes found in someone who obviously has a passion for Graphic Design.
How would I know that, well these are just a few of the things I feel whilst taking on a project, as well as the excitement of where the design is going to end up. What will it look like, How well will it be received and most importantly will it lead to me getting to do more of what I love to do, everyday for the rest of my life.
At time of writing I am still in the very beginning of my design life, still in education [University] and having practiced design for only 4 years. I am learning and picking up new skills and nuggets of inspiration and information everyday, which I hope to continue doing for the rest of my life.
I am designing all the time pushing the boundaries of my work, experimenting with the style and form working to make a name for myself and create some beautiful and informative pieces of design and illustration along the way.

I have found blogging to be quite a useful tool since I began it back in September, useful for networking with other like minded people and finding new inspirations that I may not have discovered elsewhere. Its also a good way of self promoting by uploading your own work for others to view, comment on and give you some useful tips and feedback.
The only drawbacks with blogging are that there are so many blogs online out there, how will anyone ever find mine.

Well that’s where self-promotion comes in another thing that I have been toying around with as of late, this is something that I feel is very important, not just to me but every designer, Knowing how to promote yourself and your work correctly. I Think designing for others is probably easier than designing for yourself in some cases.
I am just getting to the stage in my graphic learning path where I need to thing about going out into the big wild world and attracting attention to my work which means I need to be creating beautiful, useful and meaningful pieces which draw people in, and via blogging and researching I have discovered how others in my position and those who’ve been there did it..

When I leave university in a year and a half’s time I don’t want to get stuck working in a copy shop or any old job, I want to look further a field than my home town as well, (I’m talking world wide).
As travelling is something I’m very keen to do and within reason I don’t mind where I end up working whether it’s Cardiff or Canada, that’s why for my latest uni project [the magazine] I decided to look into places around the world where I want to go and focused on them as my topic; this is another time I found that the blogging came in useful as I searched through a few to find some interesting facts and travel stories about the various places.

All in all the next few years are hopefully going to be quite an exciting time for me and hopefully if I get to where I’m going, I can look back at my learning experience with fondness and high regard as well as for useful hints and information that I may need to brush up on.