As long as your work reflects you, it will resonate with others

I made a lot of things yesterday. I made like 3 layouts for Instagram/ Behance/ my portfolio when I finally decide to upload everything. I felt so productive yesterday. However, I ended up staying up until like 2am. I stopped working at 12am, but for some odd reason, I just couldn’t sleep. So much was going on. I made the layouts, I updated my portfolio, got a date, posted on instagram and it did pretty well. However, I’m suffering from some acid reflux right now. Maybe because I’m stressed? I’m not sure.

I think I finally know what I want to post. The thing though is that it has to be about me. That's something that James Victore talked about today while I was listening to his talks while in the shower. As long as your work reflects you, it will resonate with others. All my past work kind of had me in it because I shot the photo or made the design. But people don’t care about people that they don’t know. They care about you and why you care about that person or why you are posting it. You have to be in it.

For me as an introvert, it’s kind of a weird flex. But it’s not. It’s just posting about myself which is what facebook is and what all these social media platforms are about. However, whatever I post needs to be able to disrupt. It has to give value. As a designer, it’s about giving an experience to someone that they haven’t experienced before. Wow, I’m sound like a UX designer/ researcher. Looks like all those years of researching for sociology is paying off a bit. Huh, it’s funny that my degree is in sociology, but I’m a designer.

Below, I decided to copy/ take inspiration from several posts that I pinned from instagram and archived on pinterest. These are for a small digital zine that I’ll be posting online in a little bit after I have all three made and mocked up so that I can use it for a portfolio.

The concept behind it is, “what happens when you’re sober at a party and have a camera?” Or rather, “what happens when you just have a camera.” For the longest time I’ve believed that I needed to be a part of a collective to make one of these things. That I needed permission to make it. The permission that I have to make this is my own and also by the fact that I bought the Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud a long time ago and can make whatever I want. I don’t need permission. I don’t care if it’s bad or if it’s good. As long as I think it’s good and as long as I made something, then it’s a success. And with this theme of this blog, success is the compounding of small significant steps that lead up to a big thing - I just don’t know what that thing is.