When someone asks you what you do for a living, there should be an easy answer: I'm a dentist. I'm a 5th grade teacher. I'm a barista. Some seemingly simple-to-understand jobs like lawyer have fancy names to explain what they do: Complex Tort Litigator, Public Defender, Ambulance Chaser.

I'm a Graphic Designer. But when I tell people that's my job, most don't really know what that means for me. Some will nod and say, "cool," while imagining that I spend my days drawing pretty "graphics." Others will tell me about their friend/nephew/brother-in-law who is also a Graphic Designer — he paints murals on vans (really!). These are legitimate forms of Graphic Design, just not what I do. I tried out "Branding Designer" but that was generally met with blank stares. It always requires a whole "elevator speech" to explain what that means. Then I end up rattling off the things I can/do design (logos, websites, packaging...); but that's just exhausting and still doesn't feel complete. So, then I tried just "Designer." But, that was just too vague: Are you a fashion designer? Interior designer? It feels like the Goldilocks of job titles.

It's weird that an industry as pervasive and influential as Graphic Design does such a bad job at its own PR. When I graduated from college in 1995, the joke was that our parents had no idea what we did and what kind of degree they just paid for. But, in the last (almost) 20 years, that still seems sorta true. Maybe it's because graphic design is such a catch-all phrase and can mean so many different things. You can design in so many mediums, including anything from hand-crafted screen-printing and letterpress to edge-cutting apps (or whatever the newest technology is at this millisecond).

The thing people don't seem to understand is that design is less about what you're making and more about the process of making it— creating a concept that solves a problem. If you're not solving a problem, you're creating art. There's nothing wrong with creating art, but that's a different job.

So, now when people ask me what I do, I channel Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction and say, "I solve problems."