The joy of work
So we’ve reached the final chapter in the ‘it doesn’t go away’ series of prints. This print relates to work or rather my rather colourful and eclectic career. I always joke that I have a corporate strain of ADHD because I’ve chopped and changed so much over the years. A TedX talk informed me that there’s a name for people like me: multipotentialite. I wrote a blog post about that a few years ago which you can read here and you can also see the talk. Needless to say, I’ve had a few pivots since writing that piece back in 2016.
So in no particular order here is just a flavour of some of the jobs I’ve had over the years: failed academic (thank god), lecturer, survey designer, statistician, qualitative research analyst, depth interviewer, head of research, marketing manager, online marketing manager, marketing and communications manager, advertising account manager, spin doctor, spokesperson, speech writer, copywriter/wordsmith, content writer and designer, marketing mentor, tech founder/flounder, UX designer, web designer, web mentor, self-taught data scientist, co-founder social history archive, greeting card publisher, playwright, essayist, and blogger. We mustn’t forget those early jobs from school and college: sausage maker, cleaner, swim instructor, bad waitress, very grumpy barmaid, KP/veg prep, and a brief stint as a sandwich board outside the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.
How to capture all of that in one print?
So I was thinking about how so many people’s sense of identity is tied to their work then how about making an ID card using motifs from the various careers and industries I’ve worked in. Here’s an annotated image of the plate I came up with and a reel of its production and outputs in the print room.
It doesn’t look much now but I have a cunning plan about how to frame it.
Here’s a short reel of me trimming the prints then I got them laminated and added lanyards to make them into giant ID cards. I hope you like them.