Funny How You Come Back to What You Know

There’s something funny about building your own website.

You start out thinking about the obvious things — what it should look like, what you want people to see, how you want to present yourself — and somewhere along the way, you realize you’re revisiting things you learned years ago.

For me, that realization brought me all the way back to college.

I earned my degree in Visual Communication Technology at Bowling Green State University. It was a pretty broad education in visual communication. I wasn’t just learning how to make something look good on a screen. I was introduced to the different ways we communicate visually — through web, print, photography, and video.

I had a little bit of everything.

But as I moved through the program, I found myself gravitating toward two areas in particular: web and print. Those were the areas where I really enjoyed digging in, solving problems, and figuring out how all the pieces fit together.

Photography and video were part of my education too, and I’m glad they were. Having that exposure gave me a broader understanding of visual communication, even though they weren’t where I ultimately chose to specialize.

At the time, though, I think I looked at those classes differently.

You learn the fundamentals. You complete the assignments. You move on to the next project.

That’s college.

You don’t always realize which pieces are going to stick with you.

Years later, while working on my own website, I found myself coming back to those same fundamentals — but this time, I wasn’t completing an assignment for a grade.

I was the client.

And that’s a very different experience.

There wasn’t someone handing me a project brief. There wasn’t a professor telling me what needed to be changed. There wasn’t a checklist telling me when I was finished.

I had to make the decisions.

And the deeper I got into the project, the more I found myself thinking about the things I learned all those years ago.

How does this communicate?

Does this make sense?

What does someone see first?

Is this actually helping the person looking at it?

Does the design support the message, or is the design becoming the message?

Those aren’t necessarily new questions.

But I was asking them with a completely different perspective.

That’s probably my favorite part of this whole process.

The fundamentals weren’t outdated. I had just grown into them.

When you’re learning something for the first time, you’re often focused on how to do it.

As you gain experience, you start thinking more about why you’re doing it.

And that’s what building this website has given me an opportunity to do.

It has let me step back and reconnect with the foundation of my education while bringing everything I’ve learned since then along for the ride.

I’m not the same designer I was when I graduated.

Thankfully.

I’ve had years of experience, different projects, different challenges, different clients, and plenty of opportunities to figure out what works — and what definitely doesn’t.

But those early lessons are still there.

They’re just a little more seasoned now.

And maybe that’s why this website project has felt like more than simply creating a new website for myself.

It’s been a bit of a reset.

A chance to look at where I started, where I’ve gone, and what I still enjoy about the work.

It reminded me that good design doesn’t necessarily start with the newest tool, the latest trend, or the flashiest technique.

Sometimes it starts with the things you learned a long time ago.

You just have to come back to them with fresh eyes.

Funny how you come back to what you know.

And sometimes, that’s when you realize just how much you’ve learned.

One thing I’ve learned:

You never really outgrow the fundamentals. You just learn how to use them better.