Every school year is similar—the nervous and excited confusion in my students’ eyes reminds me of when I started my typographic journey. I tell them how bad my work used to be, but it is not until I show them the proof that they realize the truth in my words.
It might be considered a gimmick, except that I lived it: days of agony and mental confusion, endless sketches (sometimes in the hundreds), mornings of critique that, instead of feeling like a lifesaver, felt more like a heavy object keeping me down and even more confused.
The bitter joy of beginning, I called it. I had come back to school to do something. Graphic design was a remote idea. My neighbor was a commercial artist, but outside of that, the words “graphic design” were pretty unknown to me.
My itch for the arts started early. So did my penchant for filling notebook after notebook with drawings and even novels. I wish I had them today. Only their memory remains between so many moves and my mom’s cleaning sprees. I drew. If I was bored, I drew. If I was sad, I drew. If I was passing the time, I drew. The ping pong tables at my house and my aunt’s house were more like huge spaces to draw. Comments about my talent would always follow, but back then, being an artist was the realm of bohemians, and my dad would have none of it.
But, when I said I wanted to be an architect, ah! That was different. There was a tangible option for me. The problem? There was only one school of architecture. Admission was a separate process from university admission and was very competitive. To say that I was intimidated is an understatement.
Nonetheless, I took the admission exam. When the results came, I did the math, and 13 points kept me from the minimum required to enter. I was crushed, lost, and confused. And a decade-long journey to find my place ensued.
I craved and missed art making after working as a junior high school teacher for nearly five years. A relocation to Ames, Iowa, a visit to ISU, a conversation with an admission advisor, a poster on the wall, and I enrolled to get a second bachelor’s degree, but this time in graphic design. At least initially—my art education portfolio did not have the breadth of work needed to be accepted into the MFA in Graphic Design program.
Nothing prepared me for my first graphic design class. Typefaces, fonts, letters, compositions, abstractions … What do you mean when you say not to stretch the letters?? I felt like a fish out of water. Approximately ten years older than my classmates, with no computer knowledge and unmentionable names for the computer, my desire to study graphic design soon vanished.
Coming to critique to present a body of work that, by my current standard, was nothing outside of deplorable, and receiving comments that signaled the death of my graphic design career left me hopeless. But I wanted to fight. I wanted to understand, even if I left the program. So, I pestered my professors. I was relentless.
There was so much I did not know or understand. But, there was so much I already knew and understood. My process was second to none. I researched, researched, and researched. I sketched and sketched some more. The gap between the sketches and the computer was vast. My typographic skills were clunky, but while I worked on those, I banked on the skills I had: reading, writing, and sketching. Concepts and reasoning came easily to me; execution would take me much longer.
Some of my students are like I was: eager but confused or lost. Some are eager but unwilling to put in the work day and day out. Some students have a more or less stronger foundation than others in the class, and thus, a chip on their shoulder. Every one of my students reminds me of who I was when I came back to school at different stages. And yet, the work I have seen since I started teaching typography has been better than what I presented that one October morning in 1994.
I keep the process binders because they remind me that the path to mastery does not end. Each mastery of a skill is nothing but a semicolon, a colon, or an ampersand in the long sentences that come thereafter. That process is nothing but beautiful. It is one thing when someone tells you they were bad at something. It is quite another when they come out with the images and show you. I do not edit that out of my life. It is a sweet reminder that growth is always attainable.
Alma Hoffmann is a freelance designer, design educator, author of Sketching as Design Thinking, and editor at Smashing Magazine. This is an edited version of a post originally published on Temperamental amusing shenanigans, Alma’s Substack dedicated to design, life, and everything in between.
Imagery © 2024, Alma Hoffmann.