Speider Schneider wrote an excellent piece on Six Revisions about How Wannabe Designers Burden the Profession.

Absolutely brilliant.

Here is Speider’s check-list to see if you are a designer or just playing around:

If You’re A Designer

• You are the weird kid who drew in your schoolbooks while other kids studied hard and told the teacher you weren’t working.
• You make a living, or at least a good part of it (the economy being what it is), from design.
• Peers treat you like a professional.
• You’re somewhere on the first page of Google for something you designed.
• Relatives demand you do a logo for their new business and you wish lightening would strike you dead right there at the dinner table.
• You want to strangle people for offering you $50 to design a website for them.
• You worry about a client paying so you can make the rent and eat.
• You complain about having to pay the outrageous price of some design publications.
• You get angry and call the people in the design magazines “overrated hacks.”
• You consider wearing a hook and eye patch from all the design software you have to pirate.
• You know the difference between RGB and CMYK and know they are not TV stations.
• You think crowdsourcing and design contests are eroding the industry.
• You swear your kids will never go to art school!
• You are starting to see a point to this article.

If You’re A Wannabe

• You were the kid telling on the kid drawing in his/her schoolbooks.
• When a relative asks you to do the logo for their business you get excited and tweet to your 12 followers about it.
• When you walk up to a group chatting at a design event, they roll their eyes, become very quiet and scatter quickly — while you are still in mid-sentence.
• You are on the first page of Google only for being arrested or burning down your house by smoking in bed.
• You get excited at $50 for designing a website.
• Your spouse pays all the bills and you have no idea where the checkbook is kept, nor do you care.
• You subscribe to every design magazine to put on the coffee table but never actually read them.
• If you read the design magazines, you feel anxiety rising within you because you are jealous of the people in the publications.
• You ask your spouse to buy the latest version of Adobe CS, 24 hours before it’s released and they do it just to shut you up.
• You enroll your kids in every art class there is in town and go with them and yell about how their work is “sloppy” and “lazy” until they cry.
• You think this article is mean and I’m an idiot.

So, who are you?

Whether you are a professional or just playing around, I suggest you give this a read.

[via Six Revisions | Image via D. Sharon Pruitt]