Joana Tavares, MA graphic design student
Joana is a Portuguese graphic designer and art director with a soft spot for social goodness. She is currently studying for an MA in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.
I managed to scrape right past the dream-crushing, soul-sucking creative industry I always read about – which is a privilege, but also a fate more accessible than ever. All we need to do is scroll far enough to reach the people we want to surround ourselves with, so why wouldn’t we?
For this corner of the community (or internet, for the sake of my argument), identity and connection hold as much value as output. Take this: sometimes I’m scrolling and find myself thinking “I could never come up with something like that!”. And I’m right! I couldn’t. Our work is rooted in our lived experiences; not as a trend any more, but as the norm. I didn’t come up with it because it doesn’t belong to me, and that’s a liberating thought for an over-achiever.
Scrolling, however, becomes overwhelming often. What we share is inherently creative and bleeds into online personas, with designers becoming niche online content creators and the rest of us left to wonder when our portfolios stopped being enough. It’s a conundrum, really – when did comparison become competition? Is my sense of joyfulness from a second ago performative? And if not, why am I feeling so behind?
Choosing to believe in a progressive creative industry for everyone is not sustainable if I’m naive (I got rent to pay!) – so, for now, I’ll allow myself these doubts and apply that thinking to how I navigate it: with softness, but strategically. Online and offline. The rest will follow. And I’ll stop the doomscrolling.