Moi ... in something much larger than a nutshell

I don't know about any of you, but I always find it monumentally difficult to write about myself in these cases; however, I'm being asked to do so, and do so I shall.

So who am I? Well, I'm Philippe. Aged 31. I'm a dual national of France and Canada, though I live in a small-ish city on the Canadian Atlantic coast called Halifax, in the province of Nova Scotia. That's right, Halifax. Canada is full of British (and French, for that matter) place names: Halifax, London, Surrey, Cornwall, to name a few. Common folklore dictates that English settlers named villages, towns and cities in honour of the motherland. I personally think it's because they were unimaginative and couldn't think of anything better (trust me, London, Canada looks NOTHING like London, England). It also leads to some confusion, really. Remember those British tourists who thought they were flying to Sydney, Australia only to end up in Sydney, Nova Scotia (which no one in their right mind would willingly end up in, I don't think)? There you go.

But enough about Canada and its quirks, apparently you're here to read about me. In life, I'm an international graphic designer extraordinaire ! Well, okay; maybe not so extraordinaire, but I am a graphic designer. And does having one client in the US and one in Amsterdam really count as being international? Maybe not. Okay, well I'm just a graphic designer, then, and a mighty beleaguered one, at that. 'Why so?', you ask. Well, it's a bit of a story in itself:

I decided (actually, my abysmal secondary school grades left me no choice) to skip the whole uni/art school thing and hit the job market straight away. That lead to the usual suspects in young adulthood sub-employment: low-paid retail work in various shops, sweatshop phone monkeying in call centres and the like. The 'big break' came seven years ago when I happened upon an advert calling for a media reseacher in a local media monitoring shop in the town where I lived at the time. I was between call centre jobs, and the list of requirements for the job in question was rather vague so I decided to apply for the Hell of it, and got the job the same day. Make no mistake though, I certainly didn't get the post out because I was supremely qualified for it (in fact, the only criterion I met was my fluency in both French and English); I got the job because the consultancy was desperate. So was I, for work, as it happened, so we got on well in that sense. The job itself was pretty mindless: it entailed sending newspaper cuttings and broadcast media transcripts of interest to clients who apparently needed to know what was being said about them in the media. I quickly discovered that the days there weren't uniformally busy at all (save the occasional media crisis where a client's supposed emergency suddenly became ours). I was largely unsupervised and had a newish computer for the day (a Pentium 166MMX ... wooo !), and designing had been what I more or less had in mind all along, so I set out to teach myself all of the industry-standard design software I could get my hands on. All without the knowledge of my bosses, who worked in an other town entirely.

Fast forward seven years, and here I am, a freelance graphic designer for both web and print, though I specialise in web design (including Flash). I've been doing this pretty much from the moment I got my first 30-day evaluation copy of Paint Shop Pro 3 (ugh). So why does all that make me beleaguered? The fact that I'm self-taught, mostly.

There's a strong belief in North America that possessing a university degree (henceforth known as the 'Smart Coupon', or SC for short. That's a Philippe-ism, by the way) is the end-all and be-all for getting a career, despite the fact that Bachelor's degrees (that's the undergraduate degree in North America) are just as common as secondary school diplomas, and Master's degrees are getting to the same point. For many fields, a SC does not guarantee that a person is suited for a post in that given field, nor should it preclude non-degree holders like me the opportunity to advance in the same given career fields and be paid just as much for our efforts and talents (well ... certain professions such as engineers, physicians, dentists, morticians and the like notwithstanding). No one is going to die if a graphic designer doesn't have a SC and wants to work as a senior designer or creative director in an advertising consultancy. Nor will moral or ethical codes be criminally broken. Nor will god kill a kitten. Nor will a personnel director grow hair on their palms for hiring a non-SC designer and paying them the same fees as their colleagues. I mean ... come on. Anyway, the point is, being self-taught means I don't get the same consideration as my art school graduate hacks ... err ... colleagues, and it's pretty infuriating. 'So why not go back to uni, get the SC and solve the problem?', you're wondering. Well, for many reasons. Firstly, uni is dreadfully expensive in Canada. One year of art school in Halifax would probably cost me in the neighbourhood of 12 000$ CAD (which is roughly 4 880 GBP) with academic fees, supplies, housing, et cetera. Per year in a four-year degree programme. That's a LOT of debt to have just for a piece of paper that effectively says I can draw. Another reason I don't fancy going to uni at this stage is that it's a matter of pride for me to be self-taught; I'm very happy with the gains I've made in terms of seeing myself very much as able and talented as an art school graduate to competently and professionally carry out a design project from concept to delivery; in my mind, going to uni to get the SC would somehow undermine all of those efforts and years of hard work.

Anyway, enough of my rant.

I'll wrap this horribly verbose profile of mine by adding that my favourite authors are Neil Gaiman and William Gibson, and that my favourite sort of music (the stuff that makes me happy and that I listen to whilst designing) leans toward the industrial/darkwave/EBM/goth scene. Names such as Front Line Assembly, The Birthday Massacre, Funker Vogt, VNV Nation, The Sisters of Mercy (Doktor Avalanche !), Contagion, Delerium, Intermix, Covenant, Apoptygma Berserk, et al. Having said that, expect some rants about these and other fine subjects from me in the future.

Cheers !

PS: And for those who are curious, the body of my graphic design work can be found here: http://www.neueweb.com" >http://www.neueweb.com

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