At one point in my life, I used to draw and design stuff a lot. I ended up going to college (or Uni for my overseas bredren and sistren) and studying it there. Got my degree it in and all that. Even started a lil t-shirt brand back in college (which I'm low-key about to kick back up RIGHT NOW). But doing graphic design circa 2010 was kinda rough. We were still going through that economic crash and for some reason or another, it was hard to get people to pay you to design graphics. So, as they say in Corpo World, I 'pivoted.'

I had of course dabbled in web design and realized there was a lot more demand for that at the time, so I fired up Dreamweaver and got to work. But then I quickly got frustrated with Dremweaver and realized I might as well just learn how to freaking code cause that's all it was doing. I mean, I had done a little html and css back in the day. I know you're thinking MySpace, and yeah I was on there heavy but my coding skills go back before that. I was on Anglefire cooking up websites for my anime art wayyy before that. And at some point in Highschool, I learned Ti-BASIC (a kinda sorta full blown programming language) just because I thought it would be cool to make a video game on my calculator. Not gonna lie, the game kinda sucked and never even got finished, but I learned how to do a lil sumn sumn. So yeah, I kinda put the graphic design down and went full steam with the coding and got into "front end web development". I somehow kept going deeper and deeper into the coding stuff though and eventually started doing front and back end. Pretty much all of it.

Now, this isn't the trajectory I originally wanted to go in. I'll be honest, I really didn't want a 'desk job' and always felt like music, art, and design was my passion and calling. But let's be real. How many of us want that? I still feel like it's possible for me, even if it happens when I'm like 90 years old. But in the meantime, I gotta eat and have a place to live. Trust me. I did the whole starving artist thing. Now, I always had an amazing support system. Great family and friends so I can't compare my situation from people who actually had to live on the street or anything, but it got rough at times. ROUGH. So finding coding and being able to actually pay bills and buy the stuff I needed to create music and art was amazing. I even got the chance to move to Los Angeles for a tech job at a startup during like 2016-2018 which was just like the golden ages for a lotta stuff in recent history. Summer 2016 in LA. Ahh good times, fr fr.

I've had a great run with coding. And I'm lucky enough to be still getting paid to do it, although I probably still would even if I weren't getting paid cause it has become another creative outlet. Like this website btw, noone paid me (╥﹏╥). But coding has demanded so much of my mental capacity through the years. There's so much other stuff in the creative realm I've wanted to do but just didn't make time for. But something's in the air. Something is changing and I've been getting back to the things I loved first. I'm so sorry I ever abandonded you but there are seasons in life, and I had to move accordingly.

So, getting back into design, illustration, and all that stuff now is pretty interesting. I know so much more than I did when I was younger. You'd think that makes things easier, and in some senses it does. But having so many options does introduce the decision fatigue and analysis paralysis. But I'm gonna work through it. Those are honestly good problems to have.

The biggest difference I see now is that there are so many 'defined' aesthetics. Back in the day, that didn't really exist. Now, you see something and it's like.. 'Oh, that's Frutiger Aero, or Vaporwave, or Gen X Soft Club, or whatever. And streetwear isn't the same anymore either. I don't even know what happened to that, but I think it just got Hypebeasted out. Like all the way out. It used to be about 'do you know about this?' but now I guess everyone can know about everything, so it's just like 'do you have enough money?' That's wack. And from a tech perspective, every brand's site is just a faceless Shopify store. Not gonna lie, some of the stuff in some of those shops looks cool, but it kinda feels like... 'If I wear this shirt, what am I representing? Is this just a big company or some rich kid masquerading as a small brand so I feel like I got something special?' Idk, man. Maybe I'm over-thinking it, but I'd rather over-think it than under-think it.

But yeah, anyway. Lets see if I can bring anything worthwhile to the table. I do a mild amount of complaining, yes. But that's only because I know how much better things can be. Lets hope I can put my money where my mouth is (fingers are?). Keyboard warrior type shit.