Alec Gettert

header image that reads "the better lessons go unsaid"

the better lessons go unsaid

The better lessons in life are the ones that hit you years and years later after the fact. They’re the people that came into your life for even a second but still taught you more than you know. This project is an exploration of these lessons in my own life. The things I’ve learned, painfully or subtly, have slowly welded together over time to create the person I am today. That’s the beauty of these lessons, they make us who we are, for better or for worse. Our younger self still resides inside of all of us, they may have been the ones living these lessons, or maybe they represent an earlier time where we were more pure and innocent. I tapped back into my younger self quite a bit in this project, you can hear from him quite a bit in the book next to you. As you snoop around this project, you’ll find that although this is a very personal project to me, it’s also been obscured, anonymized, for you, the viewer, to be able to put yourself in my shoes. These aren’t just my stories anymore, they’re for you, maybe they’re of you.

Placeholder image, imagine a carosel of photos of my installed project in the gallery space. Here’s a sketch of it at least for now.

gettert_alec_personal photo

About the Designer

It was both never and always my goal to be a designer. Graphic design is what I am getting a degree in, but I can’t help myself when it comes to designing the world I want to be in. You can often find me sketching a fun chair I think I’d be more comfortable in, or maybe an idea for a notes app for people with a similar brain to mine. I have grown to love using design to help people, but also to help myself by working out emotions, problems, or by just playing around.

You will often see a similar vibe to most of my work. I love creating something that is easily readable, emulating classic design styles from movements of the past. I also love web fonts, I mean, I literally lived in Georgia! I find a lot of inspiration from those times. Times where we were forced to be more creative from the lack of freedom of the tech we have today.

That’s where my project comes into the picture. You’ll see this admiration for older print design mixed with motifs of memories and some tiebacks to some things from my childhood. The Better Lessons Go Unsaid is ultimately a project I made to help myself. I wanted to get more connected with my younger self again, as a way of getting closer with family, friends, and really my current self. I needed something driven by emotion to pull me back into my love of graphic design. It’s a simple project, but that was done with intention. A lot of the design, writing style and content, and materials all tie back to my mom, a writer and the person I learned my love of creativity from. The entire idea of the project came from my childhood home office, where my mom had some quotes printed out on the same type of transparency sheets that I use in my project. They were always something that stuck with me, and I knew there was more to learn from those quotes, from her, and from little me who saw them in that safe little office.