Three years ago during lunch, I sat in room 1315 as I read my older cousin’s senior column: “Expecting the Unexpected.” Through blurred eyes, I stared at the final few words on the webpage and turned off my iPad.
Now, with the same glassy eyes, typing on my newspaper laptop instead of my iPad, I am saying goodbye to the world I have designed.
During the spring semester of my freshman year, I’d eat lunch with my cousin who was the visuals editor of the school newspaper (“The Hawk Eye”.) I watched as people came to her with questions about the recently-revived physical newspaper regarding photos or graphics. Every question had an answer and every problem had a solution; there was alarmingly little she didn’t know when it came to designing, despite having never done it before.
During that time, I was the happy-go-lucky guy who didn’t take anything seriously and went through life with fancy pens and a vlog camera. Behind all of that, I was the same little kid who sat on the swings in elementary school on the first day at my new school, looking around at everyone in their groups on the playground, not knowing where I belonged.
In my time of unsure-ness, I signed up for the newspaper.
My second week on staff, I was in awe during my first print meeting. While I stared at a blank page on the software we use to create the magazine, the people I sat next to were running circles around me. I’ll never forget someone hand-drawing a honeycomb pattern with individual lines while I was struggling to create a gradient. I saw what I wanted on the page, I just didn’t know how to put it there.
Through hours of work on designs, I learned the technicalities. How to wrap text around an image using the alpha channel finally settled into my head, and I had found a groove. With every design, I was furthering someone’s story. Whether it be a feature or an opinion written by a fellow reporter, I had been trusted to provide readers a landscape that represents the words on the page.
As I learned how to tell other’s stories through design, I realized I could shape my own. Alongside that, I channeled my love for design into many different avenues. Other people got pages in the paper, I got a vision board. At the start of this school year, I traded the paint bucket tool for acrylic paint, and created a senior box ready to preserve the memories I made throughout my last year of high school. Design had reinvigorated the creative part of me I had suppressed for so long, and now that I have it back, I never want to let it go.
As I finish my 10th magazine, I can’t say I have an answer to every question or a solution to every problem. Despite that, taking a story full of words and giving it a background to lay upon that just clicks in my head. I have always wondered why I love design so much — in all of its many forms — and it wasn’t until I had to encapsulate my journey that I discovered the “why” behind it all.
No matter my age, the third grader on the swings will always be a part of me. The insecure sophomore with no idea how he fits into the world will always be a part of me. I will never be able to get rid of them, and I don’t want to, because those versions of myself brought me here. Their respective journeys led me to the newspaper room, which led me to design, which led me to feeling the most complete I have in a long time.
As I handed out the final magazine with my name in the staff contributor column, I want to thank everyone who has read it. These magazines have become the physical manifestation of my senior year. I don’t know what role design will play in my life in the future, but I know the rest of my life has been “designed by design.”
