Design is supposed to be FUN

Nov 24, 2024

Hey friends

Hope everyone’s doing well and gearing up for the holidays. I know I’m scrambling to finish a bunch of projects so I can relax a bit at the end of the year.

I also think, in addition to relaxing, it's super important to dedicate some time to use your graphic design skills to bring yourself a little bit of joy and just make things for you. The power of that is huge.

Remember to make things just for fun

So, one of the things that I really enjoy making just for fun as a graphic designer is playlist cover art—specifically for playlists that I use on Spotify.

I’ve honestly created a bunch over the past year, with my most recent one being this Lock-in playlist.

If you want to check that out, here it is below. Feel free to listen to it if you want to bump some cool multi-genre type stuff while you lock in and get a fun creative project done.

I was really stoked about how this one turned out. Honestly, it was fun using a very minimal type layout with some printed and scanned imagery, and also layering it with this cool gradient Obi strip inspired element.

Even though I did spell one of the song titles wrong
Sorry Have Heart
I was still stoked on how it turned out, so fuck it.

But yeah, I’ve made a bunch of these in the past, for all kinds of different genres. I’ve made ones for hardcore, electronic music (for when I really want to get that hyper-focus) and even a playlist called Cuesta, which is inspired both by my Mexican heritage and my love for new-age Corridos music.

I think stuff like this is not only fun, but important to do as a designer.

We get so wrapped up in making things for clients or employers, that sometimes we forget why we started doing this in the first place.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me, graphic design was this really cool passion I discovered while I was in high school.

I couldn't wait to start working on stuff every day when I got home from school,
every day when I got home from college,

and *almost every day when I got home from work at my shitty fast food jobs or boring office jobs

I don't think I’ll ever get that feeling back, where all I want to do is work on design.

Now that it is my main job, I’m super grateful that I get to do it every day for work. But you lose a little bit of that joy and passion when it becomes so heavily monetized and when you start to rely on it for income.

So, what I’m trying to say is, to combat that, I think we still need to make things just for the fun of it.
just for the art.

Go out and make some cool cover art, playlists, a random poster just for you to hang up in your office with your favorite quote, or whatever other cool little art ideas that you can come up with.

Shit, I even printed some of my favorite little quotes recently on sticky notes just to mess around with, and a bunch of people seemed to resonate with that too. So maybe give that a try.

Whatever you end up doing, though, it’ll be dope just in the fact that you made something fun and for yourself.

Talk soon, and much love.