A Post Having Nothing Whatsoever to Do With Boys

Sometimes I feel bad having this blog in which I primarily do nothing more than pontificate on whatever relationship I am in at the present moment. From an outside perspective I have no doubt that I look utterly shallow and needy. Therefore, I am going to let you all in on a fascinating experience I had this morning at my job at consulting company x. I should note here that I have no problem with you all knowing what I do for a living or where I work, but I dread the idea of my coworkers Googling something relating to what we do here and having them stumble across me ranting like a moron about getting drunk and hooking up. Wouldn't help my professional image, you know?

Anyway, using the vaguest possible terms, let's just say that I was pulled into a meeting in which we discussed developing graphics to accompany some text I had written for a certain collateral piece. At first I wasn't particularly into the meeting, but I did appreciate the excuse to leave my desk for a while. About, I don't know, ten minutes or so into the meeting I was struck by the revelation that I totally dig talking about graphic design. Now, I have known for a while that I like art. I grew up going to museums, have been a photographer since about the age of seven when I first discovered by mom's Olympus OM-1, minored in art history in college, etc etc. But it has never once seemed like a practical thing to weave into my professional life. Ostensibly, I am a communications professional. This primarily means that I write stuff. Were I working at a higher level here at company x, I'd be charged with crafting an overall message for our pieces, but normally that stuff falls to people with more experience than me. Most of the time, they just say..."We need some words to convey this, kid..." and then I go work my magic. Because of this I haven't ever really cared about graphics because it just hasn't been my problem to deal with. But today...I actually had the opportunity to think about the interplay of words and art, and how they can complement one another and work together to create a cohesive message.

Now I'm sure those of you out there who do advanced messaging for a living are rolling your eyes at how utterly dense I've been this whole time. But if you're always marginalized from the larger process, you can see why it might not be that obvious. Anyway. All of this is to say that I am utterly smitten with the whole concept of visual and verbal communication. And even better, after the light bulb went off, I had all these wickedly good ideas for the kinds of images we should use to convey the message we were trying to develop, and how are text could be amended to better complement said images.

In other words, I discovered something new that I am good at, and because of it, I actually had fun at work today.

Go figure.