My Design Career Journey

The path that my career has taken has not been a typical or predicatable one. It has, however, been one centered around one thing: design.

As a high school student in the late 2000's, I had my heart set on becoming an architect. I took CAD classes in high school and loved watching HGTV. There was just something about the way buildings could shape a person's experience that intrigued me. During my first year of college in 2009, I actually began as an architecture major, excited and ready to learn everything I could.

Life took a bit of a turn once I got to college and I became actively involved and passionate about a campus ministry. I made the decision to shift my life's trajectory and pursue a career working for that ministry once I graduated. Since working for the ministry required a degree of any sort, I changed majors to graphics design which I felt could be more applicable and practical for a career focused around outreach and communication. Graphic design genuinly interested me in that it was similar to how architecture can shape a person's experience: just through a different medium.

While I was thankful for my time spent working with college students in the ministry, I made the decision after 3 or 4 years to transition my career again to focus on graphic and web design full time. I spent the next two years working for a design and marketing agency doing a mix of print, digital, and web design. This time was a big learning experience for me. While my career up to this point had included design, it was primarily for one "client" so to speak: the ministry. My work with the agency opened me up to creating designs for a wider variety of needs as well as a number of different mediums. While building a website and laying out a magazine are both forms of design with overlapping goals, the methods used to achieve each can vary greatly.

With this wide array of new experience now under my belt, I made the decision once again to shift my career. Even though I enjoyed doing print design and static digital design with the marketing agency, I most enjoyed designing and developing websites. I may not have been thinking about this at the time, but web design is more akin to architecture than graphic design in how people move and navigate through a space. The spaces that people navigate are just two-dimensional and digital as opposed to being three-dimensional and physical. I decided to set out on my own as a freelance web designer, both finding indivual clients and forming a long-term relationship as a contract designer with a marketing agency.

Fast forward to Spring 2025. While I was scrolling on social media one day, I saw a video about starting a career in architectural drafting. I wasn't aware that there were career paths in the architectural field that didn't require a four or five year degree from a university. My desire to work in architecture had never left. While I have enjoyed my work in different areas of graphic and web design, I've not been able to shake the desire to work in a field of design that is even more tangible and experiential. Going back to school for a second bachelor's degree just wasn't in the cards, though, so I just never entertained the thought of being able to make that career shift to end up back where my career journey started. The news to me of there being other paths into the field of architecture revitalized me.

That leads us to today: I am once again a student, now studying architectural drafting and am excited about what the future holds in this new section of my career journey. I'm ready to learn everything I can as an architectural drafter and help others shape and create the experiences they are looking for, whether that be in the floor plans of an inviting new home, the efficient organization of a new office building, or the flow of movement through a new museum or art gallery.