Recently in design Category

So here's a bit of what I was working on. My sketchbook is a mess. It would probably mean nothing to another designer. But I just get enough down so I can remember what I was thinking. That way I can get the idea out of my head and make room for something else.

When I started as a designer, I thought sketching was mostly a waste of time. I felt that it was much easier to modify your art on screen, so why would you waste time with a pencil. And I even had a coworker bitch me out for asking the boss for a sketchbook, because I could 'just sketch on the back of user copier paper'.

Now... I always have to start with sketches. The computer is too concrete. And once I start messing with something digitally, I have a hard time putting it down until it's done. Sketching on paper is fast and loose and much more inspirational for me.

It's now a bit after 6:30 am, and I just sent off some art to the client. I promised them something by this morning, and unfortunately I seem to be better working on this particular project in the wee hours of the day. But I quite like the design, (*knock on wood*), and the payment for the job is pretty good.

This was yesterday's "picture of the day". I took it on my way down to Penn Photo to get some pictures developed. I like it, though I'm having a hard time thus far saying why. It has nothing that jumps out at you. But it's distinctly city, and of a street not yet made up totally of homogenous boxes.

Gawd. It's getting light out. I really need to go to sleep now. I have a hard time sleeping in daylight.

There are a few tricks to getting a good logo. In this case, when I say "good", I am strictly referring to the technical nature of the digital artwork, and not the artistic merit nor communication capabilities of it. The basic traits of a good logo file are:

• vector format
• spot colored
• all type converted to outlines

Ask for it

First, tell your client you need the logo. Yes, they probably sent you a GIF off their website that wouldn't even look good to Helen Keller. But often they just send you the first thing they can find, because they don't know any better. So the first option should always be to simply tell them the specifications of good art, and ask them if they can find it in their own company or files.

And occasionally when the logo is from someone other than your direct client, (a sponsor, for example), you can always find their communications department and call them. Explain to them about your project, and ask if they can provide the artwork you need.

Download it

Unfortunately, fewer and fewer companies even keep good copies of their identity package around. But if you're lucky, and the client is fairly well known or large, you can download their logo. First, check the "About Us" section of their website for a page made just for this purpose. Bigger companies and organizations often have their whole identity standards manual online.

If that doesn't work, check out Brands of the World, (formerly logos.nina.ru). It is a unaffiliated archive online for vector-format logos from anywhere. Their searching and browsing interface is pretty weak, but their archive is very extensive. Even when you can't find the exact logo you're looking for, you can often find a variation on it.

Cheat

Many companies are ignorant of what they actually have in the way of artwork. Or their "regular designers" simply don't share their files with the client. So a good copy exists, of course, and is being used. They just don't know it. But thankfully, everyone is obsessed with the internet, now, without really knowing why. So every major document and announcement is posted to a company's website, and most often in PDF format. Download a PDF of their annual report or similar document, and you can often open the file in Illustrator and grab a perfect copy of their logo.

Don't know where to find the PDF on their huge corporate website? The easiest solution is to use Google. You go to the "advanced search" section of google, and you can tell it to show you all the PDF files available under any given domain name. It's amazing what will turn up.

Suck it up

If their logo is bad enough that you really don't think it should be printed, tell them. Tell them if it can't be found, it needs to be recreated. And if you really don't feel up to it, hire me. :) And once you do have a good copy of the logo, do yourself a favor, and as I suggested in my last post, start a logo archive of your own.

As a designer, you tend to be involved with many logos over time, both your own and others. Everyone and their sister's lesbian roommate's cousin has a logo, and you will eventually probably use them in some project. And if you have any sense at all, you back up all the art from your projects anyway. But I recommend keeping a logo archive, preferably in a convenient location for immediate use. Logos, when done right, are very small files, so they won't take up much space. Not a week goes by that I don't go back to my archive to pull up a logo. If it would otherwise take 5 minutes to dig up the right file, that's a savings of over 4 hours, over the course of a year. But most importantly, it will inevitably improve the quality of your work. It never ceases to amaze me how many companies -- large or small -- can't provide you good copies of their logos. By saving the best copy you can find of everyone's logo, your work improves and you exceed your client's expectations.

I need to be more efficient about tracking what I estimated a job to cost. Whenever possible, I generate a "real" estimate with Quickbooks (QB), so it's all in there, waiting for billing. And for smaller, "promo jobs", I've taking to creating an empty folder inside the job folder, with the price I estimated in the name of the folder.

But the bigger jobs that don't make it into QB also don't get that little pricing folder. Ideally, I should just promise to always input big jobs into QB. But yeah... let's be realistic about what I actually will do. And having to go back and search through emails 6 months old for a price just isn't cutting it.

So price-labeled folder or...?

I'd like to thank Hecht's for making my Saturday, by telling me, when my credit card wouldn't swipe through the magnetic reader, that they'll only manually punch in the cards for people with Hecht's or Macy's charge cards.

So after yesterday's run-in with Hecht's payment policies, I had an interesting, counter-example to the shopping experience. I found the 'perfect gift' at Eastern Market, but the vendor couldn't take credit cards. I didn't have cash or checks. So she handed it to me, and told me to mail her a check. It was the last one, and she was worried it would be gone if I came back some other time.

She had less reason to trust me, and more to proportionately lose. But she said I looked 'nice and honest.'

These are the stories I think of when doing business.

“Don’t fuck the vapid, damnit.” A sage piece of advice that everyone should be taught. It came from an ongoing essay by Kevin Smith, director of oh-so-many innappropriatly funny movies and Jersey Girl. The advice is funny, but the essay is actually interesting. His friend, in the movies and in life, Jason Mewes, is well known for his drug problems. But Kevin Smith is in the midst of a so-far 6 part essay on Mewes’ conflict with drugs. The story itself is sad and touching, but the writing is amazing. It’s not easy to write an engaging and interesting account of an addict’s fight with their demons.

I need to start a list of quotes somewhere.

Beware the approaching vent. May only be legible to designers and geeks:

The saying goes, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This week, I again had it confirmed that this sentiment applies nowhere better than in graphic design. Many is a client who’s tempted to try creating artwork on their own, wether because they’re a control freak, or they believe it will save them money. But it usually just ends up making me money. This week’s client is a semi-regular, who sends me their “finished” artwork to make it print-ready. The process reminds me a great deal of decorating the christmas tree when we were little. After spending hours with my sister and I spreading decorations on the reachable bottom 3 feet of tree, my mother would remove everything and spread it throughout the full length of the tree after we went to sleep. We were happy. My mother was happy. And I keep my clients happy. Remove every photo, convert them to a usable resolution, and change them to a printable color space. Correct, well, ... every single bit of punctuation in the document. (Come to think of it, in 14 years of English classes, we never were taught the difference between a hyphen and a m-dash). Really... stop writing your annual report text in an email program or raw text editor. The world is already over-run by inappropriate apostrophes and quotation marks. Change your spot colors to process colors, and vice-versa. Switch to the professional version of your MS fonts. Add a bleed... everywhere. And move the text away from the edges of the page. (If you ever wanna see that vein throb in the forehead of your print rep, try putting a 8pt. rule around the outer edge of your page or bleeding off some 10pt. type from the bottom of the page.) Take the 15 text boxes you used to create your donor list, and convert them to 1 box, (columns, baby, columns), so that I can change the spacing on about 2 lines. Remove the hand indents you inserted in all 250 lines and use 1 simple command to do the same thing. Swap your soft-returns and your hard-returns, (Wow... that sounds awfully suggestive), so that the now-singular list can be formatted with a paragraph style. Remove all the double spaces you put in-between sentences because an English professor who studied in the dark ages once told you that it was proper. Convert your (oh my god I can’t believe you had the patience) dotted lines made of hand-typed periods to a simple filled tab.

On and on and on. I’m not talking artistic quality. I’m just talking process and procedure. The sheer amount of time you can see they had to spend to get the document to look the way it did is amazing. And it’s sad, when if they knew the tools they had, it woud take a quarter of the time and an eighth of the effort. There really is a reason that a single page layout program costs three to four times as much as a copy of Microsoft Word.*

*Okay... admittedly, I’ve yet to meet anyone... anyone... who properly uses all the features of even Word. I figured out a few years back that I had recieved and cleaned up, at that point, approximatly 10,000 Word documents. And in all that time, and all the time since, I have never recieved a Word document that was in perfect condition, ready-to-import. If I ever do, I think I’ll marry that person and have super-babies. Although as I get older, I am more likely to just accept someone who knows how to set a tab-stop.

Okay... no more funny. Serious design bother now:

I’ll say up front that I’m picking on no one in particular. It comes around from many, many people. And I myself have been guilty of it at one point. But I really get the urge to pummel people with a t-square who say that graphic design is the process of making things look pretty. Yes, the word used is always “pretty”.

Graphic Design is as much about making things look pretty as carpentry is about cutting pieces of wood, or computer programming is about using clean coding, or writing is about filling a column. Take me. I’m a semi-sucessful graphic designer. But I’m fairly bad as a fine artist.

From strictly the design portion of the job description, the goal is to convey a message clearly. (Or rarely, to obscure a message). That means taking into account the people doing the receiving. How they’re receiving. Where they’re recieving. What you want them to do after they’re done receiving. You take into account a huge history of visual communications. You account for cultural traits and mores. You’re job is to manipulate peoples impressions.

And if you perform as a more full-service designer, those things are actually a small part of your job. You may also coordinate with people supplying resources and ideas, and people producing tangible materials. You deal with design concerns versus technical capabilities versus political realities. (The Dali Lama always goes on top). You organize multiple jobs at once, and meet everyone’s schedule.

And like any service-industry job, you have to learn to communicate. Not only do you have to keep the right people informed, but you have to know how best to communicate to each and every individual person. Some people thrive on bullet points. Some need detailed answers. Some people want to control every interaction, while others just want to be kept in the loop. Until you’re President of the United States, you can’t get away with saying “this is who I am, you need to learn to communicate my way”.

Do designers make pretty things? Sure. But think back to whatever psychology you’ve studied. Think about what goes into the human concept of “attractive”.

Never ask me if I'm busy. It's a stupid question. The only time you can definitively answer it, is if you're so busy just contemplating the question is making you late. Tell me what you need and then ask me if I have time.

If you're working in the Washington, DC area, don't use ionic columns in your logos. The icon has been used to such great extent that it's become meaningless. There are better ways to represent patriotism, government, or democracy. And if you're looking to represent this area in particular, DC has a much richer history than just some impersonal architecture.

Was listening to Pandora today. Caught a Johnny Cash song I didn't recognize: 25 Minutes To Go. A little different, but I like it. Been listening to some of his older stuff since seeing Walk the Line.

Cherry Blossom Festival starts this weekend. Given the nasty weather lately, I wonder how the blossoms are doing.

Tomorrow, what is left of the-company-I-formerly-worked-for will undergo what is likely to be one of it's last transformations. They're shedding their office in downtown DC, and the boss and his one remaining employee will work from home. Life was never full of peaches and cream there, but this last year has seen a slow, morbid, circling of the drain, with three employees quitting and another departing for a permanent maternity leave. Previous years had seen people come and go, (over 30 at last count), but this year was all about the go, and not so much the come.

Whether you look at it as failure, or as a drastic scaling back, or just an unwanted change, it's severe. But in order to fail -- in order to go out with a bang -- you had to try something in the first place. When you're bogged down in the day to day drama, that's the hard part to remember. Someone had an idea, or a desire, and did something about it. And if you fail? Well, you already know what it takes to start again. And this time, you're that much better educated. People who try and fail will always have my respect. There's a world of difference between those who plot and plan, and those who try and do.

--

I just finished reading Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA from Iran-Contra to 9/11 by Melissa Boyle Mahle. The title, as with most non-fiction, is a bit inflammatory, but the book itself is fairly good. It's a fairly level-headed telling of the intelligence service culture, from an insider's point of view. And the book is mainly about the culture. While some major missions and events are discussed, they're most used to describe their effect on the atmosphere of the intelligence service.

I'd be willing to bet she was the actual author, and possibly editor, of this piece, because any ghost writer would surely be a better wordsmith. The language is dry and text-bookish. But it's always accessible. While she has generally remains calm and objective, she does have her fair share of axes to grind, (feminism, a nearly pathological hatred of President Clinton. There are numerous grammar and spelling errors in my edition. And she doesn't seem able to step back and view her insider's knowledge from an outsider's perspective.

Overall, the most instructive part for me was the background on so many modern events. She builds logical, if not necessarily agreeable, cases for actions like the invasion of Afghanistan. While the actual actions of Sept 11, 2001 are not discussed in details, the whole book discusses the growth and unexpected nature of Al'Qaeda. And she quickly dismisses Iraq as a complete cock-up on the part of both the intelligence services and the government.

Slowly catching up on work. I'll still be busy through at least the end of the year. And I've had two potentially lucrative referrals in the past week, which won't kick in until after the holidays. And still a dozen jobs on back burners.

No... I don't have a personal life. Why do you ask?

I think I will have to institute some news rules, for a couple clients. I still very much want to be available whenever and wherever my clients need me. But some of them seem to take more advantage of that than others. If you call me at 11:30 PM, it better be a major deadline. If the only time you call me, it's after 7 PM on a weekday or before 9 AM on a weekend, you better be paying me well, on a regular basis. I can deal with the occasional or irregular call or email. Hell... email at 3 AM on Christmas for all I care. I can ignore those. But I think I'm going to have to set thresholds for proper communication, and when a client exceeds those limits within a specific range of time, I'll stop taking their calls at unreasonable hours. You can leave a message, and I'll get back to you at the next possible chance. I'm not trying to punish the clients. The major benefit will actually be keeping me from cringing every time my phone rings, and getting snarky with clients who are paying me good money.

And god's honest truth... if you're going to hire someone to do work for you, you should really be AT LEAST as prepared as you expect them to be. Really nothing irks me more than to have clients repeatedly come to me, completely unprepared, needing rushed work, with specs that change every couple hours... and come back again, and again, and again,... in the same manor. Do you have any idea how much money and time you could save; how much better the quality of your finished product would be... if you simply planned ahead far enough? I'm not asking anyone to be anally organized. But don't tell me you need an ad in 3 hours and expect me to write it and design it. Don't tell me the black and white tri-fold brochure we abandoned weeks ago now will be an 8-page letter-sized booklet in full color going to press tomorrow. And god... if you really can't help yourself... don't balk when I charge you less than any other respectable designer would for half as much work. I want to do the best work possible for you. All I ask in exchange is enough to live comfortably. And my standards for comfort are pretty damn low.

Eh.

I had a good weekend. Holiday dinner with friends on Friday night, followed by ice cream cones in 20 degree weather, and the biggest love sac I've ever seen. (It may have even given Kier a back injury). It's nice seeing friends from school. Just wish we got together often enough to be able to talk about things other than college. (We do stray into the occasional geekiness, but...)

Finally found that last Christmas gift on Saturday. After the usual awkward apartment building party that night, I went to Chiaroscuro for their closing night. Talk about a complete blowout. Over 500 people showed up. It took 5 minutes just to find somewhere to sit at one point. But the music was great, and everyone came out. So many people, that I didn't even get to talk to some of those I knew. Took off at an "early" 2:30 to catch the last train home, though I hear the party went 'til at least 4 AM. I can't complain about any night that ends with a kiss on the cheek from a beautiful woman, though.

Sunday was incredibly lazy, though. Really... don't think I can point to a single productive accomplishment, outside of some text edits to a catalog I'm working on. Never touched the painting. I still want to work on it. I'm thinking if I can get enough work done during the next couple of days, I'll cut out in the evening and paint. Or at the very least, draw.

Am I really an adult?