Usually I’m the last to go to bed in the household.  Late nights spent reading have long been a personal habit, but over the course of the last year many of those evenings have seen a common theme: design.  Taking in as much information as I could get my hands on about the ins and outs of making things.  As a teen I was keenly aware of my interest in design, doing a couple of freelance jobs here and there until finally landing a position at a small ad agency.  This role let me focus on my talents, but also revealed to me an inner fear of losing my creative touch.  You mean I have to design things on command?  What if I have no ideas? As a result, I let the designer in me fade away.

Until now.  The last year was one of volatility and change for both me and the world, but I was able to find a constant desire to rediscover myself and my interest in all things man made.  You see, man made things by definition have a designer; they’re just mostly bad ones.  After watching the movie Helvetica and reading about typography again, I began to look at the world with those same eyes I thought I lost.  Just like a composer hears every note in the music, I began to see street signs and advertisements not as a message but as a collection of decisions to kern this letter, choose that color, etc.  Everywhere I looked, I saw not just the product but imagined the thoughts behind it.  My surroundings would never quite look the same.

My friends started to notice and I was afraid of coming across as anal retentive, pedantic or, even worse, obsessed.  However, Ben Terrett, a designer out of London, has shown me that my problem is out of my hands; it is a disease.  The Design Disease.