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Fashion, photography, books, room decor, art, and even hobbies seem to make up your "brand". There's this feeling that you have to be consistent with what you do and what you like, whether that's putting a certain Instagram filter on each photo or defining yourself in your bio that you're a runner. We carefully cultivate that image of ourselves online, myself included. And personally, I find it to be exhausting. It leads to overanalyzing decisions, nit picking everything I've done, and trying to see how others would perceive me from just one post.

I was thinking about branding and identity a lot while trying to come up with a design for Project 1. There were so many things I wanted to show, and so many directions I could go in. Should I go with a more minimalistic style? One focused more on digital technology? How do I portray myself accurately? How do I do something that's unique to me? So much of my style seems to be borrowed from others or what I like in the moment. I had a long list of possible ideas, and while they all showed parts of my personality, none of them felt quite right.

Eventually, I started picking things that I absolutely loved-—movies, old advertisements, games-—and found a common thread with all of them. Entertainment. And then questions started popping up, such as how has entertainment from the past changed now with the internet? How is the art that I’m making providing entertainment? And then I had my idea. A combination of the old and the new, and my own experiences intertwined with the influences I grew up with. After all, what influenced me throughout my life would hopefully influence others as well.

So I realized that my entire self could not be told simply with one post or even a hundred. It's told by everything I do, both on the internet and outside of it. People should never rely on simply the internet to understand one another--it's so easy to lose yourself in a perfect image. In a way, we do our own form of censorship when we post things on the internet, as we all too often hide away the bad parts we don't want anyone else to see.