After all the years of working as an artist, I have always tried to evolve and improve my skill-set. I do much more efficient work today than I did 5 years ago. However, tonight I decided to go back to the basics and build a display box by hand. Sure, it was time consuming and my fingers are raw from the use of the exact-o, but during that 30-minute exercise I really appreciated how far I’ve come. I appreciated the use of offset printers and cutting dies. I appreciated the production work that is involved in some of my projects. Production work that I pay others to do for me, such as folding, gluing, sorting, assembling, etc. I totally appreciated my computer, scanner and printer. And last but not least, I appreciated the internet – the wealth of information at my fingertips.

Periodically, I sift through my old school work and old client projects. It amazes me that when I first started in this business (over 15 years ago), I didn’t even have a computer to do most of my work. I spent countless hours hand-lettering, hand-cutting, copying, pasting, and copying again. What used to take me 5-10 hours, now takes me about 1 hour. The internet was barely mainstream and if you were lucky enough to have internet access, it was dial up and über slow.

Bottom line: It is important never to forget from where we came… where we’re at… and how far we still have to go.