010113
As a designer, I sometimes worry about getting too comfortable in my own creative process, that I will slowly lose some measure of flexibility of mind by virtue of doing the same thing over and over again. I worry about my okay plateau.
I was at an AIGA talk several weeks ago, and I was listening to a successful graphic designer speak about how he made his way to this point in his career, and just as the insidious creep of why-aren't-you-where-he-is was starting to settle in, I had an idea. I'll just have to trick my brain out of its looming couch potato apocalypse.
A couple of years ago I did this ridiculous and useful thing: I took a self portrait every day for an entire year. (It wasn't as serious as this) It turned out to be a pretty difficult year in my life, and I found that having this one specific task that had to be done every day was grounding. And it also shook me up, just a little (sometimes a lot), every day. It made me uncomfortable, it pinned me to the wall and forced me to shift how I looked at myself (and everything else).
So I decided to give myself another specific task for this year, for the purposes of making me uncomfortable, for shaking my brain loose, for avoiding OK. It's very simple: I'm going to draw something every day this year. That's it. I may not post them every single day here, because this project is more about the exercise of it than the actual drawings I produce, but I'll post occasionally.
So here's to 2013, to being uncomfortable, to the small scary things.