I was on the phone with my mom, and I was explaining how much I enjoy graphic design. Our conversation urged me to think back to the very beginning. Were there any signs that I would end up pursuing it?
Middle school is where it all began. At least for me. Some might have blossomed a little earlier. I got my first laptop in the seventh grade, and immediately started editing pictures (going way overboard for most). But that's what all the cool kids were doing on social media, and by social media I mean... MySpace.
As much as I would like to forget the years when I staged my "perfect mirror selfie" with my side-swept hair and oversized camera, that phase opened many doors for me, and the rest of us too.
First of all, Myspace layouts were all the rage. You needed to make sure your background image was decent resolution, and repeated to fill all of the unwanted white space. Then, you needed to coordinate the background with your profile image which taught us all balance of color.
One of the biggest things that I look back on and really wish I would have learned more about at the time was HTML and CSS. Those are basically all those codes that seemed to not make any sense when you tried to piece together your layout.
For example:
(<i>Rawr</i><br>It means I love you in dinosaur</br>
would look like
Rawr
It means I love you in dinosaur
That made me cringe, can you believe we used to say that? It gets the point across nonetheless. Besides, if I have to relive 2008 for this article, then we all do. Anyway, knowing this type of coding can help you build any type of website you want, not to mention pick apart the ones already made. It's so useful.
Lastly, the Photoshop skills. I don't know how many of us actually dabbled in Photoshop during the MySpace era, but I was obsessed. I even made myself into an Avatar once.
Looking back, I could have done a lot better, but I was 13. This is where the real skills came in though. It was like a gateway to GIFs, posters, and overall web design.
The digital world is wonderful place to be. As much as MySpace turned out to be a disappointment, I have to thank it for broadening the skill-sets of us millennials in a digital age.
