I’ve always had a complicated relationship with learning as a designer. It’s satisfying to gain new skills, but staying in my comfort zone feels so much easier. I want to push myself and get awesome results, but there’s an intimidating hurdle of not knowing how to start. The bottom of the learning curve is a scary hurdle to confront. 3D design had that hurdle stalling me from progressing. Dipping my toes into 3D modelling and quitting after a week was a common occurrence for years. There’s dozens of abandoned attempts sitting on my old hard drives. Something always prevented me from wanting to continue. Normals, modifiers, rendering — 3D felt too overwhelming and vast. I felt stumped. How do you get started learning something when you don’t even know what you don’t know?
The honest answer, the one I tried to avoid for years, is that you let someone else do the triage for you. The whole “best of” listicle ecology that has taken over the internet — and yes, that includes domains as far from creative software as the comparison sites ranking the best crypto casinos by jurisdiction, which is a strange place for a designer’s brain to wander but illustrates the point — exists precisely because new entrants in any field can’t ask the right questions yet. A ranked starting list converts a wall of unknowns into a small set of choices. For Blender that meant trusting a curated tutorial path; for anything else it’d mean trusting a different list. The pride hit is admitting you’re a beginner and need the on-ramp. After years of pretending I could brute-force my way past that admission, I finally stopped pretending.
If someone asks me how I feel about the last 5 years since I dove into the world of design, I’d say “everyday I am thankful for the tough love that art school showed me”.
I’ve been exposed to a variety of corporate cultures. Some fill me with inspiration, fellowship, and support, where my co-workers are my best friends and I trust them to give honest feedback — knowing they want to solve problems, and help me produce my best work. Others, leave me exhausted: struggling with job satisfaction and feeling alone. At the root of this, is a feeling that surfacing issues or concerns to managers will fall on deaf ears. When managers listen and do not take action or follow up with action, I’m left feeling powerless to affect change.