Chapter XII The Video Game
This is an old old post I dug out, it shows how hard I was trying to cope with my own impostor syndrome, It's weird going back on it and read it but here it is.
Ever since we start school we hold ourselves as all high and mighty, we pose ourselves with the self-esteem of a rockstar, the designer by nature is pretentious and all knowing, we stand on a thin line between gods and artist, we can do it all and rule the world, and live under the impression that we the problem-solvers for every single potential client, in fact we all know a couple of “rockstar” designers, you know them or at least heard of them, that designer who’s living the life, doing the work for the big brands changing the world one illustration at the time. And we all look up to them, we attend to their conferences and sit through hours of them talking about their work, we are there watching them on Facebook and Behance and dribble and twitter and even their Instagram feeds, we consume their design as much as we consume coke or cigarettes and there’s nothing wrong with that right? it’s all in the interest of building our design baggage, of filling our minds with images and recalling them for future work right?.
Them, the Jessica Hische’s, the McBess’es, the Ollervides, they are the top of the pop’s, the rolling stones and every once in a while a young gun comes up and becomes our Justin Bieber the young guy that could. We think of them as supermen, superheroes that must come from out of this world or hold a super secret spider-sense that makes them super, when in fact, they are all just Link ( as in the Legend of Zelda’s Link ).
Enter the video game superhero complex, we’ve all played video games ( ok maybe not all of us but I’m pretty sure you can all relate to what I’m about to say ), most of us have a school background altho there are rare cases of self-taught or empirical designers but we all start just the same, we all get some degree of knowledge, we go to school and get all these tools and weapons to use out there on the big and very real world of pro design, we come out as a level 99 player with a power stat of over nine thousand ready to face our first job, our first freelance, our first agency contract and the big, evil and scary client kicks our ass, magically all our super powers and experience points get back to 0 and realize we are not good enough… yet.
We are back at square one with our wooden shield and our wooden stick trying to beat that two stories high scary beast of a project, sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed, but every single time we get experience points… and so, we keep going, we keep working and get our metal sword, or growth mushroom and keep going and getting better, project’s come and go and our experience keeps building, sure every once in a while we will run into a door we cant open or face a demon we cant beat yet but we’ll take that continue and keep building, we will look back at our wooden shield and stick, our past jobs and be shamed by our early work, we quickly take out of our portfolio that one website we did first, we bury in our hard drives those illustrations that don’t live up to what we see in Dribbble ( also that’s what you should be using them, for work ethic inspiration, as a goal not as copy and paste thing ) and that’s a good thing because every single design, sketch and project you did back at school or that one first job you had that now looks ridiculous and that now you shamefully label as your mediocre attempt at solving a issue it’s experience points for this video game, a statement that you are getting better as a designer and a step on that endless quest for perfection.
Congratulations, you are now a level 45 Link, you are ever so close now to gathering the triforce and becoming all-powerful, you are now a better designer… insert coin and keep playing.