Old posters home

Back in like ‘04 or so, my bandmate Aaron was home for a holiday break. He was 20 and had just got a job at the Apple store in the Chestnut Hill Mall. When he told a cousin (a slightly older guy in finance) about the new job, the cousin dismissively said “well… you gotta start somewhere.”

This has always stuck with me as being 1) a shitty thing to say to a person and 2) a strangely good thing to say about any creative pursuit.

You truly “gotta start somewhere.”

Ira Glass (of This American Life fame) has this great and widely-shared bit on how hard it is to be a creative starting out and knowing that your work isn’t very good.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good…

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work - they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work … It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

… It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

Or, to put it more succinctly, a quote from Adventure Time’s Jake the Dog

"Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something."

The somewhere I started (and sucked at) was show posters. I made them for my band and for other bands in the Boston area. They are (in hindsight) not good posters! But I enjoyed making these, stuck with it, and made a lot of them. I was happy with most of these designs at the time but it was still frustrating because I could see the gap between what I was trying to do and what I was able to do. Over time, the gap narrowed.

Flash forward a few years (editor’s note: actually many years, old man) and I’m still making posters and I’m still learning and still trying to close that distance between what I imagine and what I can create. There are little improvements with each effort - incremental gains with each design - but it’s still a struggle and that’s a good thing. Celebrate our progress but still know there’s work to be done. When the next project begins, all we can do is put pencil to paper and start again. We gotta start somewhere.