Good grades, good work, good intentions, do not equal to finding a job, success, and general acceptance. I'm seeing friend after friend, good designer after good designer, all falling off cliffs and bridges. They have incredible talent, awe-inspiring motivation, and insane amounts of perseverance. Yet, the bank account runs low, they run home to mom and dad, resort to drugs, and some even resort to the street. How does this happen? Is the market incredibly over-saturated? Are all the good jobs taken by older designers, or by designers who went to art schools, (as opposed to art departments within larger universities)? Must everyone who wants a job go full-bail and run to a city to find one? Do we all want to be Toys-R-Us kids?

Oh, and the designers who find jobs don't find the jobs they want resort to working the boring, talent-suppressing, jobs; doing things they weren't trained for. Everything seems so cliquish, so third-grade... Most people I know of became designers and artists because they weren't exactly the popular kids in school (usually) so they had more time and resources to hone their art skills. Let's face it, not having lots of friends as a kid, most of you ended up doing a lot of drawing and other artsy things, am I right? We also bought items because of how well-designed the packaging was. And clothing for the tags... it sounds so silly, but as designers we are sensitive to those things, just as we are sensitive to people, hurt easily, and don't deal with confrontation the best.

So, is it our fault we haven't found the jobs we want? Do we need to step outside of ourselves and seize the design market by the horns? Yes. It's hard. REALLY hard. But we can do it. Find a visual motivation that works for you, and refer to it daily. Don't give up. We can fight this, but the first step is to actually forget about our feelings for the moment. Be hard asses, friends!