Author smiles while sitting on the steps below the Sphinx of Ramses II at the Penn Museum
When I started at VCUarts graphic design program, I was following an interest in fine arts at a university with a lot of other opportunities I wanted, like Mandarin Chinese classes and living in an artsy city like Richmond. I had no idea I was going to fall in love with experience design and museum studies my junior year of college… and I definitely couldn’t have predicted that this passion was going to take me on such a wild professional journey. From Richmond to Beijing to Philadelphia to Taiwan and back again, I can honestly say that my laptop and I have been around the world looking for good design wherever it can be found.
One of my personal mottos is that all design projects are valuable and deserve the care of a professional designer. I will always remember that one day during my senior year internship at circle S studio (a B2B marketing firm), I was feeling particularly uninspired working on a “boring” marketing assignment for a construction company. With all the deadly hubris of a 22 year old, I felt like I wasn’t doing anything important that week since I was making brand advertisements. However, while digging through our archived files, I stumbled upon copies of the clients old logo before they hired circle S studio. And man… was the logo was BAD. And worse, it was unprofessional.
In that moment, a switch flipped on in my brain. Graphic design is an essential skill in the 21st century. This client was contracted to build nearly all of the new buildings going up on VCU campus that year, but I felt sure that the university board wouldn’t have even considered their bid if it was presented with the old logo made out of (possibly) Microsoft Word Art. Good design is not just nice to have anymore, it can be the difference between success and failure of a business, institution, or event. From that experience onward, I had a new appreciation for my own education and for the skills of my design colleagues who create intelligent, inspiring work for all clients. We designers and artists owe it to ourselves to talk about our work as truly valuable and advocate for that respect from others.
This deep realization about the value of my skillset carried me through my disappointing pandemic graduation from VCU, a crazed 2020 gig freelancing and bartending while awaiting news from the U.S. State Department about the status of my Fulbright grant, a year of cautious traveling around Taiwan mid-pandemic to complete my Fulbright project, and back to the Penn Museum where I started in 2019 with my mentor, Tina Jones.
Lu Ming-Te, “Media is Everything”, 2021. Photo taken at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Exhibit Great Migrations