Working freelance for a year was rough. I live in a town where the only bar open past 10 PM is in the lobby of a Howard Johnson's and the local version of a "wild night" involves a bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos while watching Independence Day at 3 AM. Living there for another year left me with a lot of time to observe the lives of other designers. I wanted to take a step back and see what the landscape of professional design was really like, and what I could do to become a bigger part of it. Looking back, I should have probably just went with the whole Doritos thing.
We need to turn back. We need to turn this car around and drive straight into the other direction. Stop observing and aggregating and get designing. Don't ask me what or how, because it's got to be what makes you happy. When's the last time you designed something so proud that you wanted to show it to everyone you knew? How often do you think to yourself, "that'd be too much work, I'll try that idea on another project." No, folks. Not anymore. We are down to the fucking wire now. Make your next piece your masterpiece. Pour your god damn heart into it. Forget about your smartphone or game console or whatever distraction is keeping you from being the incredible designer you can be. Get to god damn work.
I spent a year alone with my thoughts, being an unemployed, unpopular dissenter, and I will do it for the rest of my life if I have to. If this makes me a loser with no job that has to resort to stacking lumber at the Home Depot or telling soccer moms where they can find the Cheez Whiz at the supermarket, I will be. If I have to spend the rest of my god damn life as a loser because that's the price of having an honest opinion and being the type of designer I admired when I began in this line of work, I will be.
If there's only one thing you take away from me, it's this: be your-god-damn-self. I'll be right here alongside you. Maybe we'll never get featured in a roundup, speak at a conference, or come out with a book. Maybe all we'll ever get out of design is enough money to stay afloat and not the slightest bit of recognition, but we'll design how we love to design, make the things we want to make, and let no man on this earth tell us that we're wrong for doing what we love. I know that's good enough for me.
I'm Joe Lifrieri. I currently live in Central New Jersey but am looking to move to New York. I switch between a bunch of mediums so I just call myself a visual artist, but here's what I do most often: web design, illustration, print design, and HTML/CSS development. I also do some work with Wordpress.
I'm a natural skeptic that believes in simple answers and honesty. I love talented, humble people that realize there are bigger things than what we do for a living. One day I want to visit Montana, live in New York City, ride a horse, and write an eskimo love story. One day, I want to just sell all of my own art prints and shirts for a living. That'd be cool.
PUNCH.
In short, yes. I have a few styles I switch between, and one is that of cleaner, brighter… trendier *shudders* web design. I realize not every project needs a giant apeshit illustration of a girl crying out birds or something. Sometimes you just need a clean UI for a control panel or a nice presentation for a sales site. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but I realize some days you’ve just got to keep the lights on.
Just what's in the portfolio section. Spend some time looking through there. If you have something very specific in mind, let me know. I may have something buried in a morgue file somewhere that I could dig up.