WHY DID I RETIRE?

On July 28th, 2006 I stepped aside from the business of designing and creating advertising, as I knew I would. Stepping aside was easy for me, and I am glad I did.

When I talk to people today, and they ask why I retired, or are surprised that I did, I know there are thoughts in their heads that are only suppositions, and not really based on facts as they really are.

Physically I feel OK, mentally I like-wise feel OK, but to put it mildly emotionally and creatively I feel like I gave my all. Maybe it is burnout, maybe it is disgust, and maybe I don’t care anymore for the grind of daily creative pressures and responsibilities coupled with the diminishing ability to hear well, even with the assists from two hearing aids. Since my heart operation I feel more taxed physically than ever before, and for the last three years I have really noticed a drop off in my stamina. I exercise everyday to try to build up more stamina; I have been eating right this past 3 months to lose weight, and doing what I can to stay healthy.

Being creative is all I ever wanted to do, be it painting, drawing, woodcarving, music, cooking or even writing, and I still love it all. When I started out in the advertising business, I was filled with creative energy and enthusiasm that got me a very good paying job in a great company and I am very grateful for that. But advertising design has an adversarial aspect to it that encroaches on enthusiasm, the constant competition with myself to do better and be different, the clients aims, the changing technology that can wear you down when you grew from something that was personal to something that becomes mechanical, the need to be a technician and an artist makes it less than art, and no fun at all.

I take great pride in being responsible for bringing computer art to my old company, when I requested that they get computers they realized it was time to come into the end of the 20th century and so they acquiesced to my needs. The sadness of it all is the new designers of today do not know how to think on paper, and are constricted to thinking with a computer. I made it mandatory that all the young designers working under me think on paper first then commit to a computer after I approved their thinking. One day I walked in on one of my young designers, and she was using a computer print of what she was going to run by me for approval as a sketch. She was actually tracing off of her computer printout!

Creating prior to computers was hands on design. One designed and when one did, it had a style, a trademark look of the designer. You could view the work and say; “That’s Joe’s work”, but with computers, you may as well be looking at a spreadsheet. In fact one of the last things I did was to create a data base spreadsheet of artwork I had created so the company I was working with could keep track of the volume of work I was turning out with a computer! And the more I created, the more they wanted, and the more I needed to expand the database. I won’t go into the number of meetings I had to deal with, or the different silly little worries of the other departments, the inane needs of department heads that were terrified by the thought that they needed to adjust to my way of doing things. And worst of all, I became an administrator, a baby-sitter, and that is not creativity.