Looking for New Designers OVER 29
Art Directors Club has their annual ADC Young Guns competition. The rule is, you have to be UNDER 30.
Every year, Print Magazine features 20 new designers under 30.
John Bielenburg’s Project M states that it is for “young graphic designers.” Though the application says all ages can apply, don’t get your hopes up. I saw John Bielenburg speak a few years ago, and he said—complete with a graph—that an artist’s most creative age is the early 20s.
The design community has a fetish for youth. And it needs to stop.
These competitions completely ignore the many people I met when I went back to school who emerged as amazing thirtysomething designers. In 2002, after years of working crappy office jobs to support my compulsive addiction to amateur theater, I realized that my favorite part of any production was to design the poster. I decided it was time to go back to school and become a graphic designer. Sadly, I soon realized that the opportunities for design students—competitions, internships, job leads—were skewed heavily toward brand new designers in their early 20s. When I graduated, I was 31, and it was already too late for me and many of my peers.
Therefore, I’ve started this tumblog to highlight those designers and artists, the brave people who decided that their passion was too important and took the risky move of switching gears. The people who, like a 21-year-old, are yearning to share their fresh, new ideas but also have a family to raise and a mortgage to pay.
I know I sound like a curmudgeon shaking my cane at a group of kids and bellowing, “Git off mah lawn!” That’s not true. I’m excited by young designers with their doe-eyes and new approaches. My argument here is that they aren’t the only ones excited by the prospect of interrupting culture long enough to make someone think or solving a once unsolvable problem. It’s time to reward the new designers over 29, even if it’s just a link on this little website.
I’m collecting links to portfolios now and would like to start featuring them at the end of April this summer. (my wife and I just had a kid.) Send me your links either via email or Twitter. The designers must have found design (or web development or motion graphics or editing or any other visual communications endeavor) later in life. I’m also interested in the moment: what made you say, “It’s time to become a designer”?
Good wine has to age for a while before it’s perfect, before we can taste the artistry and skill that went into that bottle. Let’s raise a glass to the designers who took the time to age before sharing their ideas with us, too.
