When I moved to Minneapolis, I had no idea that it was a major center for graphic design in the United States. I was just trying to escape the sunlight.
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So I moved to Minnesota where I hoped it would stay cold enough to keep me in long pants and indoors. It was just lucky chance that I was a web designer in the middle of the dot-com boom living in a ground-zero design capital. It was unlucky chance that even though it snows relatively little and stays cold for nine months, the summers can bring 100-degree heat for weeks on end. WTF, Minnesota?
Despite the weather, it's beautiful here. Some of our monstrous architecture notwithstanding, there is a high level of design here as a result of so many designers living together in one place. Target has a lot to do with that, as they employ hundreds of local designers. There are also quite a few national advertising agencies based here. You can't throw a snowball in these parts without hitting a design student. Well, you can, but it's not nearly as fun.
The Minnesota chapter of the AIGA is really quite large, and one of the first local chapters of the national organization. I've been a member for two years now, and it's been a great way to meet other designers. I got hooked into a great community of people who made me feel like I was coming home--people who would understand my font jokes and commiserate about making logos bigger and making logos bigger.
Designers don't like making logos bigger. Please don't make them do it, or they will make merciless fun of you in amateurish YouTube videos.
Designers on a whole are normally a pretty good-looking bunch. You might expect that from people whose sole purpose is to make things look nice. Their sense of design helps them to dress well, they have well-marketed hair, and very few of them are walking around with peeling lobster heads from their 10 minutes of weak sun on that mostly cloudy day last weekend.
But even those bright-red designers aren't really ugly; their self-design is simply too avant-garde for you to understand. Haven't you heard? Red is going to be huge this year.
Oh. Well, maybe next year.
