Mask

I struggle to fit myself in a group, I struggle to find myself interesting and to identify myself in certain ways. I am an anxious person, but I don’t want to represent myself to the outside world as an anxious person. Even in graphic design, I love creating, looking at and interacting with graphic design, but I don’t want my personality to become ‘graphic design’. I am a white male, but I am not proud of this and I definitely don’t want this to become a personality which I am proud to identify myself with. In general I am really reluctant to share myself with the world and struggle to feel pride in myself and my personality.

Social media is an outlet for me to share myself, there I can share things about myself basically behind a mask already. You can emphasize on or filter out things about yourself which you find hard to share. But it can also be a platform in which it can be easier to share your feelings with people without there being people physically in your company. On social media I represent myself as a sarcastic person, whom is a bit artsy, in love and proud of his girlfriend (which is the truth :) and loves to experiment with graphic design and is proud of his work. It is basically a boiled down version of me, Tijmen, the person. A Tijmen that is always positive and social.

By creating this typography and putting it on my face reflects how I use social media, and how I hide my vulnerabilities on there. The text itself is kind of sarcastic, but has a realistic side as well. By posting things on instagram I show that I’m happy about work I’m actually proud of, or work I’m pretending to be proud of. The mask and typography are made in the style that I often use on instagram to present work and experiments in.