Towson University’s Outreach Blog

Sharyn

I enjoyed reading about Clay and Jeremy’s early career influences and I was reminded of experiences I had during high school that set me on my path to become a graphic designer. Although my story is a bit geeky, I’m thrilled to share it. When I was a high school sophomore, a good friend who was a year above me was on the yearbook staff. I was so envious because it sounded like such a fun way to spend class time…picking out photos, making typographic choices about headlines and body copy and some writing.

She and I took our excitement for page layout to a whole new level. During the “Blizzard of ‘96” I managed to get snowed in at her house and we came up with the idea to design the cover of a magazine. We went as far as to create a bizarre name for our magazine that was the combination of our two last names.

We cut out letters from magazines, some old favorites like Seventeen and Teen, of fonts that we really liked, to create the logo for our magazine. And then we found the perfect cover image for our magazine. In the end, we managed to make it look like a real magazine cover. Over the next few months, we created a few of these covers with headlines that usually revolved around what was interesting in our life at the time.

The next year I joined the yearbook staff and as I expected, I completely fell in love with “real” page layout using a computer. My senior year I was asked to be the yearbook editor and at some point during this time frame, I knew that this was what I wanted to pursue.

I feel fortunate that I have had a passion for what I do every day for a long time. I’m inspired every time I open a magazine and quite often go back to my sophomore year thinking about my early inspiration and am thankful for those bursts of creatively that shaped my experiences today.

My Senior Yearbook Class

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Students, Training, TU Faculty & Staff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.