An older millennial trying to do graphic design

I was reading an article by Michael Dimock's of the Pew Research Center on Millennial and Generation Z demographics, and a line stuck out to me like a sore thumb: "Turning 38 this year, the oldest Millennials are well into adulthood, and they first entered adulthood before today's youngest adults were born." It wasn't "the turning 38" or the being "well into adulthood" parts that got me. It was the fact that I fit into the category of the oldest Millennials!  What does this mean, as I foray into the public relations program, where I am taking courses including Social Media and Digital Communication, Media Relations, and *gulp* Graphic Design? Let me tell you, it is in Graphic Design that I feel my oldest and my Millennial-ist. 

You see, as Dimock explains in the article, if we look back to to the technology timeline of progress, we see that Baby Boomers were around for the television expansion, Generation X-ers claimed the computer explosion, and we Millennials came to age during the Internet revolution. However, the generation to come after the Millennials, Generation Z (those born in 1997 and onward), is the generation born with all of the above technologies. They are the generation growing up in an "always on" technological era. 

The article also delves into naming Millennials as those who had a "slow start" in many ways, due to entering the workforce during an economic recession (Dimock). BUT, now that I am in PR, does the slow start also define my technological prowess - or should I say - lack thereof? Excuses must stop! I may be on the older side of the Millennial gen, but I am learning Graphic Design, and here is how I am doing. 

Graphic Design: Navigating InDesign

Even for a slow-starting Millennial, I felt I was progressing with learning InDesign at a snail's pace. I have heard friends/classmates discuss Canva, the user-friendly graphic design platform where you can efficiently create any design content. But InDesign seems as though it's the creme-de-la-creme of graphic design software, and therefore hoped once I got a handle on it, I'd be better off in the long term for having these skills. That said, InDesign is tricky. It really takes some playing around, some patience, and a lot of time. I will refer to InDesign's "Print" area for now, as our class has used it to make a poster and an infographic (both pictured below).

On the left-hand side inside the Print section, there is a general tool bar that includes the pointers (to select items in your creation), text box, a pen, a pencil, rectangles (to draw for placing photos and/or placeholder text), gradient, text fill and stroke, and several other tool options. Below is the revised version of a poster I made for a business of my choosing. Now, don't be fooled. This basic-looking poster took me longer than I want to divulge. I wanted to try my hand at drawing with the pen tool, so I drew the smokestack Ss. Admittedly, I didn't love the way they looked, but was trying to explore different tools. I won't divulge a grade in the hopes of avoiding other classmates reactions to their own grade, but I will share feedback. 

The feedback I received on this had to do with the fact I should have worked more on revising from the previous version. Also, I was told it would have look better if the smoke image photo took up the whole width of the poster behind the top portion of the smokestacks, which I agree with. I wanted the industrial vibe with the brick photo, which I think was achieved. The photos for this class are taken from Unsplash.com, a free photo sharing site. Again, even though this may look amateur (because it is!), it took a long time for this almost 38-year-old to figure out. However, I think my next assignment was an improvement. Full disclosure: I haven't received a grade as of yet, but you can decide for yourselves.

Even though it's not perfect, the infographic assignment just felt better than the poster assignment. Don't get me wrong, it still took me a long time to do, but I felt more in tune with InDesign, and enjoyed playing around with the eye-dropper tool to create a colour palette that worked with lake colours. Another concept I was grasping with the infographic was the colour fill vs stroke actions when making text "pop" off of the page. For instance, here, the numerical data is shown with two different combinations of fill and stroke: a dark blue stroke with either baby blue or seafoam green inside as the fill colours. Also, I set the icons that represent different data types into "bubbles" to relate to the lake them. It was fun to create the infographic and I hope I can apply these skills to my placement this year. 

As I struggle through Graphic Design, I am slowly gaining more confidence in using InDesign and just overall transferring creative ideas to a platform that isn't intuitive upon first glance. I think being an older Millennial does make me conscious of my abilities but also drives me to learn what all the young Millennials and Gen Zs do so well.