Someday in PAGE

Tomorrow I start making money as a designer. Someone’s actually going to pay me for this, which still feels like a con I’m running on the entire creative industry. But here we are.

There’s PAGE magazine—eight euros, the thick, glossy thing every designer in Germany reads. It’s where the work that matters gets documented. And the dream is simple: someday, your name appears in there. Your project. Your name under something you actually made, taken seriously enough to print.

I have a very clear fantasy of what that article says. Brilliant new Killers website, made the internet actually better, moved to a villa in LA with someone completely out of my league. The version of myself where everything I touch works perfectly and everyone notices. The version where success is as straightforward as it sounds.

But I’m also aware that PAGE doesn’t care about fantasy. They care about real work, and real work is slower and less glamorous and doesn’t come with movie-star girlfriends. And honestly, I’ve stopped caring about half the things I thought mattered—Grimme awards, MySpace, whether Apple dominates anything. If that last one happens, something has broken anyway.

Jenny and I are both starting this tomorrow, and we’ve got this stupid confidence that we’re going to shake something up in this field. We probably won’t. We’ll just make work and hope it doesn’t suck. But that confidence is what gets you through the early part, before you learn what you actually don’t know yet.

For now, it’s enough that someone will pay me to try.