Josh Kersting

My first introduction to design, or rather when I first started paying attention to it, was an obscure summer vacation towards the end of middle school.

My mother worked a lot and was always on the road, so she took em with her. I suppose I could have sat through the meetings with her but that was boring. Instead I would sit in the hotel order room service and search for hours to find intereseting games that could be played in the browser.

Eventually I stumbled across a text based game with an active community and forums. One section in particular stuck out. It was three letters. Three letters that changed the way I looked at everything. GFX. Inside was people pouring their souls into 400px by 200px pieces of art, battling for bragging rights of who was the best. I kept looking through, post by post, page by page, until finally I gathered up the courage to finally show people what I could do. My simple tag was torn apart. I was devastated but determined.

I practiced making tag after tag and eventually got pretty good. People paid millions in game currency to comission tags, banners, even larger pieces. Ocassionally people would still try to tear my work apart, but I learned that it didn't matter because even if it wasn't stylistic perfection everything was exactly how I wanted it to look. Without me realizing it over the course of that journey I started looking at everything differently, the shapes of pens, buldings, chairs, the mundane and extraordinary. Each one designed to look exactly the way it should. A reason behind every curve and line, wether functional or aesthtic each had it's purpose. Every piece was amazing.