Back to School

Beyond the Page

Something a little more personal and away from the upcoming book Just One, I’m bringing you a particular text this week. As of this week, I’m officially a student again. It is as scary and wonderful as it sounds, considering today’s schooling system has little to nothing to do with the design I’d previously been a student of.

For a long time, I had wanted to take up a class more suited to my creative nature, but I had never found a module that could cover all my talents – writing, graphics, video and marketing. I spent a lot of time playing around with programs and grew to love all these fields, yet none of them I had gone to school (I have a degree in journalism, which isn’t quite the writing I do now), so it’s become tough to break into any of these fields. Marketing is perfect for me as it incorporates all these fields.

And finally, I have found what I was looking for, in form of this course, which had originally be called multimedia, because the field of study is about incorporating everything that qualifies as media – writing, graphics, video and coding. These fields combined create the phrase and such, in other to master multimedia, one has to grasp individual subfields as they are forever intertwined. In this way, a lot of my classes appear to interloop in different ways which will reflect in my grades.

It’s only been a single week and a lot of lessons are still explaining how all this will go, but honestly, I haven’t been so excited about going somewhere as much as I have about this. In the past few years; Just One has been an important part of me, but part of me still tends to fear in my own failure as I have so much to learn about marketing and how to focus on social media. In this sense, my current course is extremely important as incorporates all my talents, my creativity and teaches me not only how to manage my online life, but will hopefully allow me to work professionally in the creative field.

I was a teenager the first time I introduced myself to Photoshop. Same with video editing. Over the years of being an administrator on different roleplay message boards (for about a decade between them all), I had even coded. I’ve never built a code from scratch, but I learned to read both HTML and CSS and could spot problems, add code to existing skins depending on our message board needs (e.g., add a sidebar to a skin that doesn’t have it, including features such as character spotlight, chat, quick links etc.). There was a lot I did, and loved doing along with my graphics. Admittedly, I haven’t come near any code since I’ve retired from roleplaying.

The subject of code is fresh as I write this; the class was on the day before, and I had done my coding homework a couple of hours ago.

Drawing though! I didn’t realize drawing would be part of the course until I started listening to my teacher. As it turns out, graphics designers sketch, do mood boards and then go into Photoshop to create final products… I never realized this, as I’d never done it professionally. My experience in design was definitely more blend, edit, manipulate and add effects. Sometimes, even include gifs in a signature. You can find examples of my work in my Star Wars Roleplay article.

I’m sure there will be plenty of work ahead of me and opportunities to learn in ways I couldn’t have imagined. It’s all new and exciting right now, but I will certainly drop a few more lines about how this is going as time goes by. In the meantime, I will keep up with my social media, as this year, I’ve been working on consistency. That, too, will be a separate subject coming up in this segment.

Wherever you may live, I can only speak for Ireland when I say it’s become incredibly easy (and cheap) to pick up certain courses, and while not a three or four year study, these programs offer a lot more than what I could begin to imagine originally. This particular course is two years, but not all study both years (some go to work, others enrol to higher level education thanks to this), but even in the single year there’s so much offered and available as part of the overall experience.

So, if you’re wondering if it’s time to take that leap, to enrol to a school or complete a course, and have been doubting yourself for a while, consider this your sign. Do it today. Don’t wonder, thought question – just do it.

Thanks for reading, and make sure you like and subscribe to this blog to keep getting updates, either through MailChimp or the website itself; both will regularly send updates to your e-mails when there is a new article. And drop a line or two about what new adventures you’re starting out; I’d love to hear from you.

~Love, L.V.