About Me: My Design Background

I started some “About Me” posts a week or so ago to make sure that my readers knew the person behind the blog. Today I will tell you about how I actually got into graphic design.

Drill Field at Mississippi State (source: Wikimedia)

I have always had a crafty/design side to my personality, and when I went to college I knew I wanted to pursue something along those lines. By my second semester of my freshman year at Mississippi State University, I had landed in the Retail Floristry Management major. This was the perfect degree for me because it gave me art and floral design classes for my creative side, businesses classes which have helped me immensely in starting and marketing a business, and also horticulture classes, which helped me help my husband start a landscaping business. So, I graduated from MSU with my bachelors in Retail Floristry Management.

You have probably deduced that this is not the end of the story. I had the opportunity to move back to MSU and Starkville, Mississippi, a few years after graduating. I wanted to work on campus, and to do that, one needs to have a Master’s degree. So I decided to get a Masters in Educational Technology. What interested me the most in this degree program was web design. So I learned how to create websites.

Once I got a job on campus as a campus activities coordinator, I began to see the need for graphic design along with my web design skills. We needed to market our campus activities, but did not have anyone to design posters and flyers for the events. So, I stepped in! I taught myself how to use Fireworks and Photoshop. I really loved this part of my job, so I was led to pursue a job as a full time graphic designer.

I have worked at a few places since MSU, pursuing all of the tricks of the trade. In the last few months, I realized how much I want to work for myself…this lead to the creation of Purple Lemon Designs. This gives me the opportunity to pursue my own designs in order to one day be my own boss. I am not there yet, but I am getting there!