How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer

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"I wish I could go back," said Anna. "I guess I thought it would always be there, and I could go back and learn more when I was older. But now I'm older and it's gone." *** "All the great art scenes are like that," said Mariah. "Renoir's career was half over before the term Impressionism caught on. And Fitzgerald and Hemingway had given up on the Left Bank long before the place was overrun by talentless hacks who wanted to imitate the Lost Generation lifestyle. And the Beats had mostly left San Francisco before busloads of visitors started to do tours of the Haight-Ashbury. When Johnny Rotten couldn't work with the Sex Pistols anymore, he left and the London punk scene began to die. Later on, he said he regretted his decision to leave. Everyone thinks they can go away and come back later, but they never can. When Joan Didion and her husband left New York, she quipped that some other couples were staying too late at the party, but that gets it all backward. The party ends whether you want it to or not, and it takes an unusual arrogance to celebrate the end of an era that some people will remember as the best years of their life. Hemingway lived in Paris during his twenties, but he didn't write about his experience in Paris until he was in his sixties. No one ever knows they're part of an art movement; it's something you only see afterward." *** "But if we only see it in retrospect, then how can we find the next great art scene?" asked Anna. "What do I look for? *** *** This story follows the unassuming Anna Barnev for ten years, from when she is 16 years old to when she is 26. She starts off eager to learn what she needs to know to become a professional graphic designer. There are the technical skills: the nuances of color, the appropriateness of a font to its purpose, the software needed to do commercial work. But there is so much more that she barely suspected: the importance of accepting an invitation, the willingness to accept criticism, the ideas offered from other artists. *** As her skills grow, she develops a passion for the expressive possibilities of emoji, but when she realizes that companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are potentially stifling people's political expression via their influence over the Unicode standard, Anna becomes an unlikely warrior willing to take on the tech giants. *** Along the way, she is gifted with incidents that seem like lucky breaks. It is only years later that she realizes her ability to capitalize on those lucky breaks had nothing to do with luck, but rather, had everything to do with her courage and determination.