Find yourself at the end of a career is a strange sensation; even stranger if you have tried to end it on previous occasions. Although it does provide some excitement that something new is about to start, it also makes me look back on my web design career with some uncertain feelings.
I started out in web design when it was still a new and largely undiscovered media. Times were exciting because everything was new and the “anything is possible” ethos ruled supreme. We created some of the most unorthodox and ugliest sites I have seen to this day but it felt like we were pushing some sort of envelope in the process. Of course this all lead for bad business. My favourite example of dotcom excess comes from working for an exceptional web design agency called APL Digital. Shortly after starting at APL, some of my left and started Boo.com.
1999-2000 was the peak of this kind of madness. I still clearly remember being in a meeting room full of people for an international conference call to find out that the good times were over. I left London some time after that and looking back on it, I probably should have left web design as well.
Following the dotcom crash I spent some time in the mountains of British Columbia, exploring my artistic side somewhat, spending time in the deep woods and just getting into a non-technical life for a bit. I returned to Vancouver after a couple of seasons of mountain life to a scene that was at the time, deeper in bravado than talent or opportunities.
Being a designer in Vancouver can be tough, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There are only a limited number of jobs within a city and the designers definitely outnumber the work. This lead for some pretty up and down times until my decision this summer.
This lead to another factor for leaving web design;”work” commissioned by friends and relatives. Often, for some strange reason they think this means free. It’s pretty hard to pay the bills on good intentions so this wasn’t a path ever encouraged by myself. The other problem is the demands that come from friends and family. Often, for me the person in question had little or no technical knowledge but expectations for some sort of holographic psychedelic light show to emerge from their flatscreen monitor.
My last job was for a community group in Burnaby BC (NIMBYs) that got a bit out of hand and although I enjoyed the pot stirring it caused, the demands put onto my personal life (in addition to the domain and hosting expenses) convinced me that this job was my last (well except for the three sites on backlog that I need to finish).
Getting laid off has been a blessing in disguise for me in many ways. For the first time ever I was actually eligible for some sort of benefits and I decided to use this opportunity for me to find out something new within myself.
To be honest most of my time unemployed has been pretty much non-career; it’s summer and there arent any jobs in BC so I enjoyed the summer mostly. It gave me the time to think about what I wanted to do and when I decided, it took me less than two weeks to change paths.
So a career that took me years to establish and kept me employed mostly for the past decade comes to an end. The work was fun but really it’s time to move on. I don’t find a lot of the elements of modern web design to be all that interesting or engaging and I hope never to work for an online gambling company again.
Life is good, but will it turn out?
I really enjoyed reading this post about ex-webdesign which lead to my ramble. If only I were as eloquent…
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