Just the other day, I was talking to a friend about a mild inconvenience that was just about obliterating me. I’m using the word “obliterate” here to illustrate the fact that that’s essentially what it was doing to me—disrupting my life in such a way that I was allowing myself to be completely undone by it.

When and where did I get so damn entitled?

I was invited by Troy DeShano to take part in his collaborative design project, Futuralbum. The concept was simple: Create an alternative album cover using only Futura (in any weight) and images from the Flickr Internet Archive Book Images.

It’s been a pretty fine year. Sure, maybe it hasn’t been the loudest but in some ways, that’s a victory in and of itself. Here are a few things I learned in 2014.

From time to time, I’ll get emails from thoughtful folks trying to out someone "ripping off" a design I made. Occasionally—and it’s rare—there’s an actual abuse being reported: Someone is printing a design of mine on a piece of unapproved merchandise, or maybe someone copied a piece point for point and claimed it as their own. Though, to be fair, these are the exceptions.

One of the things I’ve come to love most about the design community is this infectious sense of camaraderie that seeps into almost every crevice of the culture. It’s the sharing of ideas over various chat clients, critiques offered in the safety of friendships, and the opportunities to meet face-to-face over the intimacy of a shared drink or amidst the hustle and bustle of a conference. Those moments where we’re able to be more than a faceless part of a larger whole.

We’re working on a public platform wherein everything we publish is open to be talked about, picked apart, and quantified by any number of external interactions. From Appreciations, Shares, Reposts, and everything in between, we’re able to directly come into contact with the work of others in an entirely new way. And while the majority of these interactions are scripted (click to Like), it’s in the Comments that we’re able to break off the tracks and offer a more extemporaneous approach.

Maybe you’re at the place in your career where you want to be working on things you care about, but no one is hiring you to do them yet. Maybe you’re looking to expand your craft and reach out into the overwhelming world of multidisciplinary design, but no one knows you do anything besides what you’re already known for. Or perhaps you’ve started a smaller side project and, after all this time, it's still not gaining any traction. You might feel like it’s never going to catch on and that you’re wasting your time.

Don't lose heart.

Most days I feel like I’m exactly where I should be.

But some days, I feel like I must’ve stumbled into this career by accident and that I should just keep my head down and hope nobody notices.

Recently, I witnessed a conversation over Twitter between a number of designers that railed against the “popular” mechanism and purported that most designers are more infatuated with being a designer than actually designing. It was laced with superiority; creating a distinction between themselves (i.e., true designers) and the masses of these “posers”—uninspired hacks who do little else than cobble together old or repurposed work for their own personal gain. As if the modern state of design is little else but a sniveling, talentless, cesspool of bad work.

Community, at its core, is a difficult thing to keep in check. On one hand, we’re plugged into the internet for intravenous social stimulation; weathering a world where our very conversation is carried on the backs of tubes and wires with little or no audible speech actually transferred. Here, we can rely on the predictable safety of the “enter” button—keeping us forever self-edited by way of 5 or 6 second intervals. But on the other, it becomes easier, maybe even tempting to lose sight of those tactile relationships where the only thing standing between your face and that of another is a cup of coffee, a tall pint or two. I can tell you now, I’ve seen both the darker sides of isolation as well as overwhelming constancy of social bombardment.

The baggage I’ve carried with me on the ideas of healthy community isn’t something I’m going to work out in the next few months (or even years), but I think they played a large part in what made my experience at Creative South such a dynamic and poignant one.