Currently, I am working on one of my biggest projects to date and also my most challenging – a visual book.

Design is not my forte, in fact, it often overwhelms, frustrates and confuses me. The process of creating a design or layout takes me a long time to do and involves many cups of tea and naughty words. A web site, a painting, a book, they all go through the same, laborious process and no matter how many times I design something, it never gets easier.

When I mention to friends that I am not a designer and lack skills, they always seem to be in shock and come to my defense. “Yes you are a designer!” they tell me and list the sites that they admire or a project I laid out that they fell in love with. This makes me proud because the end result is worth the laborious process that I don’t enjoy.

I remember when I met a well-known author and commented on how much I loved her work and how effortlessly it seemed. She told me that was the highest compliment because there was so much effort involved because the words didn’t come naturally. It was then I realised that sometimes beautiful things take effort, even if they don’t seem to for others.

This gave me confidence to continue to design because for a long time I thought if it was so hard that I was not meant to do it. I felt that I should give up and leave design to ‘real designers.’ I never stopped to think if those ‘real designers’ went through the same, tough process as I.

Working on this book is a long and challenging process. Sometimes, I would rather throw my hands up in the air and just give up. However I remind myself that a challenge feels so good when you overcome it, when you do something you don’t think you can do and the satisfaction from that helps me to forget the frustration of the process so when a new design opportunity pops up, I can attempt it.

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