Hello my name is Sam, I am 18 years old and am fascinated by design, especially in the digital space.

For as long as I can remember design has always intrigued me; whether that be identifying fonts on packaging, commenting and critiquing logos and brands or actually creating designs.

My design passion started from a young age when I was at primary school and would design posters to demonstrate my knowledge of a particular topic. The posters would be meticulously planned to ensure that the end result looked ‘right’. My eye can tell just by looking at something if it looks ‘right’ and I can pick up millimetre differences of spacings; sometimes that works to my advantage, but as you can imagine it can make everything take twice as long. The amount of time everything took led me to discover digital design!

I started to dabble in Microsoft PowerPoint and Publisher, and quickly picked up the ropes. Being able to move and alter my designs without having to start the whole poster creation process again was the biggest selling point for me. There was no cutting, sticking or writing too, it could all be done on the computer. When I was younger my fine motor skills were pretty poor so not having to write or cut was a lifesaver. I went from never using PowerPoint to creating 20 to 30 slide presentations explaining many of topics ranging from Ancient Greece, World War 2 and Mexico to just name a few. My PowerPoints became somewhat ‘legendary’ and my teachers would continue to use the presentations even after I had left the class. I also started creating personalised greetings cards in Publisher and that’s when I fully caught the graphic design bug!

The greetings cards I created at the time were somewhat basic and I used an online Word Art generator to create the designs and then I would modify them in Publisher; maybe adding a different element to a design or changing the background. Even though the cards weren’t completely hand designed, I still came up with the design concept and colours that looked best together. Occasionally I would create photo cards with a selection of photographs that were special to the recipient which were all carefully placed and organised to make the card look ‘right’. The cards were a hit with the recipients and that’s what encouraged me to keep improving my design skills.

However, my whole perspective on design was about to change! I was introduced to Adobe Photoshop in my Computer Science class. That blew my mind. A piece of software which was powerful enough to bring every idea that I could possibly have into reality on the computer. I loved the way it functioned with layers, effects, object removal and many other fascinating functions. It was like a souped up version of Publisher. As soon as I started using it I knew that it could (and would) take my designs to the next level.

Unfortunately in my second year of secondary school I became really poorly with my mental health and was completely burnt out. Life was a massive challenge and I couldn’t see a way forward. I ended up leaving my school and being educated at home via Hospital Education. During this time I was also was diagnosed with autism. That explained a lot and was probably one of the reasons my passion for design has never faded. Always sitting there in the background.

As I wasn’t attending school I couldn’t access Photoshop. My parents needed a bit of persuasion but I eventually subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud and had access to all the different Adobe apps. More than I even knew I needed.

I spent many hours learning the basic Photoshop functions and made some pretty interesting designs. My biggest area of design interest was around the railways (my other lifelong passion) which was how I nurtured my Photoshop skills. I loved finding ways of bringing the railways and design together.

My view on graphic design was about to change again! I discovered Adobe Illustrator. It felt like the missing piece of the puzzle. I could create extremely high quality illustrations on a computer. I never thought that would be possible.

The fact that I have never been very good at drawing on paper always felt restrictive and demoralising. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the ideas it was my hand couldn’t do what I wanted it do. Now that I found Illustrator I could put some of the most complex designs into reality. Having the undo button was a life changer too and not having to fully commit to anything until I was happy.

The time I spent in Illustrator grew massively and I became more and more confident in the program. Soon I was creating hyper realistic drawings and I could do my ideas justice. The amount of designs I created also sky rocketed, with logos, posters, social media graphics amongst many other things. The amount of greetings cards I was creating also increased and soon had a large back catalogue of past designs.

My final string to my bow for now kind of loops back to where I started in the physical craft space. I was shown some greeting cards, where instead of just printing the design onto card you ‘layer’ it with multiple layers of coloured card and designs. I never was a fan of the more physical craft side, but thought I would give it a go. As soon I started layering I could see a new dimension being added to my cards. Instead of a very two dimensional design I added a whole new third dimension to it. I never looked back after that and find the whole process very satisfying. It was also so lovely seeing something go from just being on a screen, to print, to carefully constructing it and finally to a very grateful recipient.

Ending this section with a little aside about another part of my life away from design:

As I mentioned earlier, I am autistic and suffer from high levels of anxiety which makes life a lot trickier; however, being autistic does bring a whole new skill set which is the reason I take so much pride in my work. As a positive consequence of this another part of my life is devoted to mental health activism and trying to improve the experience of mental health services for others. I have done this in many ways to, which include: writing blogs where I am open about my mental health, taking part and helping to host a daily Twitter chat (#NotAloneTalk) to help people feel less lonely and working with the NHS to help improve services for others.

That’s where I am now and hopefully this ramble explains my story and a bit about my design background.