I recently read Merlin Mann’s post Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion where MM talks about some of the stuff he wishes he could go back and tell himself when he was in college… and it got me thinking about the kind of stuff I would say to myself if I had a time machine and could set it to the fall of 1997.

If I were to go back to 1997 to tell myself what to do differently in college, I would’ve said to have a double major in Fine Art and Graphic Design, and a double minor in Marketing and Business.

What I did was major in Graphic Design, without a minor. Big mistake. Here’s why:

My passion is for painting. Sure, I love graphic design, especially typography and web design, but my passion is for fine art. I traded my passion for a “sure-fire moneymaker,” graphic design, which is an industry that has been glutted with over-qualified professionals like myself since 2000. I graduated in 2001. Great design jobs have been hard to find. The dot-com crash happened and tons of designers were out of work, and the market was glutted with out-of-work designers, kind of the way it is now. Then 9/11 happened (I was on my way to a job interview that morning.) At the same time, anybody with a computer and a pirated copy of Photoshop could call themselves a designer. Now, we’re seeing more and more of that outsourced overseas, so the really primo design jobs have turned into marketing and design consultant jobs. Which brings me to my next point.

I took one class in marketing, and that’s it. I should have taken more, so I could better understand how marketing works, both as an artist and a designer. If I better understood marketing, I would probably have a more secure position as a marketing/design consultant rather than just a designer still banging out mechanicals like I was ten years ago as an intern. Also, it would better serve my passion, fine art. I would have a better foundation for marketing my art and getting it into the appropriate places for the right people to see and be compelled to buy it.

But all this isn’t to say that there’s nothing I can do about the situation. It just means I just have some learning and catching up to do. But to any young aspiring artists or designers (or designers who would really rather be artists, for that matter) my advice is to learn the business and marketing side of things, and develop something that makes you indispensable, unique, special, un-copy-able, apart from everybody else. Because if you are just like everybody else, you will be paid just like everybody else and remembered just like everybody else. Which is to say, not much.