And as for design?

Yeah...well, I think what I'm gonna do is get back to basics for the moment.

For starters, as I said, design as a career is on hold. Everything I do related to it from now on is strictly for fun and/or for education's sake. No soliciting for freelance work, no worrying myself limp over whether I'll ever work in design again. Of course I will, dammit.

Secondly, I'm going to shift the learning part of it decisively toward web design. And I'm starting simple, by giving myself a refresher course in XHTML, then CSS, and then maybe start dabbling in Flash web development. Honestly, I think I've hit a plateau with print design and I want to take a break. Besides, I'm still a little miffed at being left behind all these years by the web revolution. I need some new shit to grease my wheels with.

That's not to say that I won't play with Flash...there's still goofy little animated logos and such to create. The key word here is play.

Third, I'm going to get off my ass and start drawing again. Anything, everything. And I'm going to make sure that I do some whimsical, fun stuff as well as the tight, crabbed realistic artwork that I often find myself stuck slaving over. I need to loosen up, not just stylewise but in terms of ideas, subject matter...I need to unfreeze my brain. And as anyone who's cooked meat knows, it takes time to thaw.

Yeah. That felt good.