Angie Clever

I think I’m attacking this problem the wrong way. I get a lot of junk mail in my inbox everyday. Buy OEM, get ViAgRa (you have to wonder if the complete misuse of the capitalization sells), advertisements for this and that. Of all this junk mail, I opened a piece about www.stylecareers.com, and much to the detriment of my own self-worth, I went out to the site.

Stylecareers.com is the monster.com of the fashion industry, posting mostly big-wig jobs for various apparel, fabric, and accessories companies that even joe-smoe down the street would recognize. They just opened a new site, StylePortfolios.com that offers fashion designers a place to put there portfolio online for potential employers.

I spent some time flipping through the pages. Pages and pages, thousands and thousands of resumes. Lots of drawings and designs catwalk photos, studio work. Good, great, bad, mediocre. The thing that really hits me is that I can do that, I really can do that. And to boot I’m good at it. And I’m just bizarre enough that what I do shines.

The past few months, well really the past year, have been hard for me. I said before when I was writing Being Who You Aren’t, it’s easy to get so caught up in the expectations and what you think you need to do to survive that you let go of who you really are and the things that you want.

I am an excellent illustrator, web designer, graphic designer, and game designer. I think I often undervalue my work, particularly with a couple of strikes of bad luck last year. I’m learning to take it with a grain of salt though. Nobody will ever know how fabulous I can be if I disappear into corporate obscurity to make a buck, and just let the things I am passionate about slide.

I had a long conversation with my mother about what I “Want” to do. Not what I want to do tomorrow, but on a bigger scale. What I really want out of life if nothings holding me back form it. The best answer I could think of on the spot was “Build Stuff”.

I like to “Build Stuff”. I like to do creative things, to tackle and solve problems from abnormal angles. I like art. I like the idea of being bizarre, and being rewarded for being bizarre. I don’t like neutral colors. I like things that are fuzzy. I like locking myself in my room, with no place to be tomorrow and no migraines over my mortgage or anything else, and simply drawing. I like to build, to create, to make new.

I many respects, that’s how I’ve gotten to where I am. I center around two things which seem different but at their core are really not. I like fashion and I like games. These two are forms are both modern and artistic. They also incorporate idea of history, of costuming, of people. They both try to capture the essence of people and relate to them in a whole different way. Fashion and games prey on the same consumers, the consumer that wants the a fantasy. The consumer that doesn’t have the artistic ability, the freedom to travel and see the world, the money and time to fulfill their deepest desires.

Fashion and games are a translation of experience. Through our artistic vision, we enable other people to see the world in a different way.