BPOVIA has seen young designers set lofty goals and impossibly high standards. Some wonder if they are setting themselves up for early disappointment. BPOVIA Graphic Design Service team would like to guide you through the real entry-level designer’s life, which has got a lot of left turns.

The Dream:

You have your gallery retrospective and published your monograph. At times you jet over to Europe to have a cup of coffee with some of the most renowned designers in the world. You judge the print magazine’s regional design awards; show up on the panel at several conferences; when you are not busy tending to the garden in Provence you do lecture circuit… it is when the alarm clock rings.

Reality:

You got yourself an energy bar at the newsstand for breakfast.

You pull up to a faceless glass office-park building. Tumbling through the revolving door, you remembered once again that this is the Midwest office of Acme Inc, where you worked for three years since graduation.

Soundtracked by unavoidable gossips from Sales which is one row over, you are sitting in a cubic office lined with outdated Post-it Notes. Your latest pay stub sat on the desk. And BPOVIA knows that you don’t want to open it at all; since the last round of payoffs your $35 salary hasn’t budged.

You are fighting with the IT department to get a 19” monitor and you are working with an aging, underpowered PC. The CEO has the latest desktop with 21” flat screen because he is CEO and nobody is allowed to have a bigger monitor than him.

He might need it for Minesweeper, you suspected.

Superstar, or Super Career?

To tell you the truth, BPOVIA believes that design superstardom is a very rare case. It is nothing more than the exceptions to the rules, discontinuity and a flashy attraction to of the media’s attention to novelty.

This focus on a selected, lucky few distorts the everyday truth of most designers’ work. We do things in a lengthy apprenticeship, lifelong learning, a craft tradition and becoming a mentor to all of the others are all par for the course. What we do is more related to a craft or profession. This implies to no instance rewards, nevertheless.

BPOVIA wants you to rest assured that you can earn a very good living by attending craft over time. If you are skilled, having good management skill and an ounce of vision, hardworking, you can even achieve a level of wealth. You are most likely not being rocketed into a six-figure salary until before you are well into your forties. The work will often times be repetitive, unglamorous and obscure. But you still have to do it and do it well.

You would be wise to heed the words of Michael Bierut: “Do good design every chance you get, and surround yourself with people – bosses, coworkers, clients – who feel the same way you do.” If you define success as in broader terms like a long-time career, this should be helping.