“I am an AI designer.”
When I was in high school and college, I devoured printed graphic design materials.
They were album covers from labels like Factory Records, posters for artists like Bjork, and magazines like Ray Gun, Emigre, and Japanese publications such as Idea. I admired star graphic designers and design studios like David Carson, Peter Saville, tomato, and the Attik. In design competitions, annual reports made regular appearances. As I couldn’t yet afford expensive design books, I used to spend hours in the university library and the art section of bookstores.
I thought I would follow the path of becoming a graphic designer in the traditional sense.
While I was in college, the Internet, or the World Wide Web, almost overnight, became a thing that people got obsessed about, much like AI today. After graduating, I moved to NYC, where the web industry was rapidly growing. “Web design” suddenly became an option for designers, at least as a career entry point for me.
“Tell the landlord you are a web designer, not a graphic designer.”
That was the piece of advice I got when I was looking for an apartment. That’s how much the Internet economy was starting to boom. I borrowed money from my parents to last for a few months and lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with my twin brother in a sketchy neighborhood in Brooklyn. We only got the apartment not because I was a web designer (I wasn’t as I didn’t have a job) but because the Albanian landlord took pity on us two young Japanese guys trying to make it in NYC.
Every week, I would look up job listings in a magazine called Silicon Alley Reporter and started applying for numerous design jobs and roles.
The combination of being fresh out of school, new to the City, and with no connection was a hurdle to begin with. Add “need H1-B visa” to that mix, no employer was willing to take a chance on a designer with no experience. I made ends meet by taking on random freelance web design gigs, like designing and coding web articles for $150/piece. I could barely get by.