in [sight]
Many people have been commenting on my lack of glasses lately, this wouldn’t be much of a problem accept I am legal blind without them.
I have spent a majority (21 of 23 years) of my life without the aid of glasses. You could imagine it creates many problems but being a child you find ways to adapt. Not to mention, it was all I knew. I remember the day I put on a pair of glasses, look out the window, saw a tree, and thought to myself “leaves have definition like that?”.
The reason I felt this is all significant is because it’s fairly ironic how, as an aspiring graphic designer, I live in a very visual world and love visual things. How can you come to appreciate visual things without sight?
If you know me, I am obsessed with the abstract and unseen meaning behind everything. Everything has a deconstruct-able value and I will always find and associate it. Having to adapt with my vision impairment, I have often found myself being able to distinguish more abstracted patterns and then predicting their outcome or creating memory of the pattern to recall later.
Example, reading becomes very hard while driving with impaired vision. Over the years I have learned what certain letters, letter pairs, and words look like as a very abstract blob and this allows me to read before I can actually see the word.
What has this lead me to realize? I believe my life long impairment of vision has molded how I think, how I act, and even my skill set. You will see in my design I am often abstract and complex yet simple. It’s a dynamic balance between creating something you can distinguish and something you have to imagine.
I have went through my whole life abstracting compositions into patterns easy to understand as a coping mechanism. This coping has now directed the remainder of my being and makes so much sense.
YAY for introspection and self analysis!
