Oh, The Busy...

I've been crazy busy in my neck of the woods for the past couple of weeks, logging in the overtime trying to get a couple of projects approved before a client jets off on holiday, then going home and doing my freelance design thing for a couple of more hours - hence the relative sparsity of new articles up here on this ol' blog 'a' mine (for the benefit of the 2 or 3 people who check it on any regular sort of basis!)

The unfortunate and fortunate thing about choosing a life in design is that you carry your passion with you all the time, not many designers turn off at five o'clock that I know of anyway, most try to find some hobby outside of it or it will just consume you 24/7. I know I find myself when driving home checking out the kerning for a headline on an advert on the back of a bus, or noticing a new identity on a building on my route. I'm informed by my partner that 99.9% of the population who aren't graphic designers don't do this, and for her part, she works long hours, in a very stressful position as a Human Resources Director, but at the end of the day, she's not looking for the validity of possible compensation claims on the latest episode of 'Big Brother', meanwhile I'm driving her crazy flicking between the music channels on Foxtel to try and catch the fantastic graphics on the latest Gnarls Barkly filmclip.

So I sometimes envy the ability of people able to separate their home-lives from their work-lives, especially when you're in the middle of a busy workload - I guess the advantage that a designer has at the end of the day is that the product of their work efforts are somewhat more tangible. We have a portfolio of work, a gallery - evidence of our daily struggles whether that be a brochure, a website, an advert, whatever - it's there, we can say I did that, whether you're proud of the work or not, it's a lot more than a lot of professions can say at the end of their working day.

So yeah, busy, but slowly easing off to just a mild form of insanity.