Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
– Steve Jobs (via Kelowna)
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
you gotta love the world sometimes.
I send my client proofs over a year ago for some new letterhead. It has been discussed a couple times since then, but nothing was ever finalized. So I just sit on it, and will bill it when it’s done someday.
Today, one of their employees send me a file they call their digital letterhead, asking me if I could update the address on it. And guess what the artwork is.
Well nice to know I can now bill the job… and maybe a little extra.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
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.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
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.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
I am off in about an hour and a half, to spend Christmas with my family. (Am I worried about people knowing my apartment will be vacant? No. I have the attack cat.)
So I’m flying home at the last minute to be with the family. Very Norman Rockwell. You know… if his families were a bit more … hostile.
My mother has been talking up her new neighbor. A “cute, young, single girl.” Again… very christmas made-for-tv movie. At the very least, there will be a cute girl near by. Never happened while I was growing up in that town.
—
I was working on an ad for a client earlier this week. And at about 3 in the morning, I saw something that made me think of college. And I said to myself… “hey, self, why don’t you do a version of the ad in the style of every piece of design that ever came out of that school. So I did. Mostly as just an exercise in nostalgia, for me. Yes… I can be just as good as people with 9 years less experience than me.
Of course… the client chose that version. Loved it.
—
Americans suck.
I watched maybe the first 5 minutes of the news tonight, and yelled at the TV at least 5 times. There was just too much stupid for my filters to handle. The other senator Rep from the 5th Congressional District from Virginia said, on TV, that he was offended by the new Islamic Senator wanting to be sworn in on the Koran. (Would you ask a Christian Senator to be sworn in on the Torah?!) And he bragged how he would never touch a Koran with ‘these hands’, and never have one in his office. (“I hate you and everything you stand for!” “What do I stand for?” “I don’t know, but I’m sure I hate it!”).
This story was immediately followed by a story about the Soldiers being charged in Iraq after they went on a killing spree after being attacked. They were apparently so upset by the death of their comrade, that even after repelling the attack, they stormed through homes in the area shooting anyone… men, women, and children. On the news, the family of a soldier accused of killing 10 people in this rampage said they were incredibly proud of their son, and that they were incredibly disappointed in and upset with the Marines for prosecuting him.
Fighting for a reason is occasionally understandable, though seldom good. Fighting for vengeance is just animalistic. If he’s guilty, that fucker better spend his life in Leavenworth.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
random fact…
A few minutes ago, the water running in the gutters jumped the curb and was flowing over the sidewalks. Damn glad I live on the 4th floor. Three major thunderstorms in the last 4 days . In an area where we previously were lucky to get 1 or 2 thunderstorms a year. And at least one major storm earlier in the week.
It’s giving my laptop battery a good run for it’s memory.
…
Yay… the neighborhood is going up in smoke! A minute ago I was listening to the rain outside, when there was a terrible electrical arcing sound, like something out of a Death Ray in a James Bond film. When I went to the window to look, a large cloud of smoke way rising up through the rain. Given the lack of bodies, (yes, I am paranoid enough to go down and check), I’m guessing the rain just seeped in and blew out a street lamp. Still… you know… smoke and electricity!
Sometime between the raindrops, I got out this weekend. Not much, because I still feel very lazy. But a few things. I checked out two new exhibits at the National Gallery, (Photographic Discoveries and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting). Also finally visited the National Museum of the American Indian. Really… aside from the atrium, not that impressive. Watched three movies, this weekend, (Transamerica, Mrs Henderson Presents, and Memento). All good, though not quite great.
I’m remarkably relaxed, going into this coming work week. I spent all of last week stressing out about work. I had a whole string of projects, while not behind, were taking a noticeable amount of time. And I really believe my clients should be care free. But I finished out last week well, catching up on all my major projects, and having picked up a couple new, small projects. I designed several pieces over the course of the week, which not only my clients liked, but I was impressed with as well, and I didn’t have to kill myself on any of them. (*knock wood*).
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
Have you ever read Syrup, by Max Barry*? Pretty good book, released years ago. Focuses on a drink concept created by a man, and his attempts to maintain control of it long enough to get Coke to give him money for it. Product is named Fukk, and comes in a sleek brown container. Very angsty and shit. (No… really, I have a point here.) So I was waiting in line at the Soviet Safeway on Monday, and I notice a stack of Coke bottles on the floor. In slick black containers. With the name “Bläk” on them. At the exact same time, I both wanted desperately to buy one, while hating the thought of what went into that product if it was anything like Barry’s story.
*Barry spelled his name with two Xs on that book, as a joke.
That same day, I decided to go down and check out the Hispanic Immigration protest marches on the National Mall. I wasn’t expecting too much. I’d only heard of this particular march the day before. And marches that take place on a weekday are typically pretty small. But almost as soon as I stepped out of my front door, I knew something was up. The one sure thing to scare off the few locals who are willing to descend into the tourist regions of DC is to tell them there is a major protest or event going on near the Mall. But As soon as I left my apartment, a good 8 to 10 blocks form the Mall, I was surrounded by locals heading down there. Mostly hispanic families. Whole families, with grandparents, people fresh out of work, and babies in strollers. Several times I passed a pickup with a bed full of shouting people and waving flags. By the time I made it to Pennsylvania Avenue, I was caught up in a huge wave in people flowing onto the Mall. Another wave of almost equal size was flowing out of the Mall. By the time I got up to the Mall proper, it was really enough to stop you in your tracks. The entire Mall, full, practically shoulder to shoulder, with people, mostly hispanic. Tens of thousands of people at least. Bigger than 90% of the major gatherings I’ve seen on the Mall. The size of the Protest was staggering enough, primarily because I wasn’t expecting it. But a few other things rather quickly stood out. People who come to DC to protest are usually upset. They’re pissed an they want to make sure everyone knows it. Their signs are angry, their chants are angry, their costumes are angry. But at the Protest this week, everyone was smiling. Everyone was cheering. (Something I’ve never heard on the Mall in 8 years here). It had to be the most positive experience I’ve ever seen in DC. Sure these people wanted change. But they didn’t come in saying “you fucked us over”. They said “we love it here”. “we want to live here”. “We’ll do anything for this place, if you’ll just give us the chance”. And everybody was waving the American flag, in one way or another. Flags on poles. Flags on sticks. Handkerchief flags. Flags as capes. Flags as shirts. Flags as signs. 50… 100,000 flags, all being waved every time a cheer went up. These people, who were there to protest some seriously disturbing bills aimed at them and people who help them, were more positive about America than any other group I’ve seen bring their message to DC.
Anyway…
Since Monday morning I’ve been torturing myself over a project. It’s not particularly complicated. And I had no trouble coming up with some clean layouts that looked just fine. For various reasons they were just fine as is, really. But I really wanted to come up with some stronger “concept” behind the whole thing. But there were just so many things working against me. The type of project, the resources I had to work with. The nature of the client’s personality. So it drove me nuts for three days. This afternoon I told myself it wasn’t worth it anymore, and packaged up everything to deliver to the client. And after 15 minutes discussion, they narrowed it down to exactly those early, safe versions I worked up in 5 minutes on Monday morning.
Did I mention their “new” logo strongly resembles cigarette packaging?
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
“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”.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
I don’t go more than two days, without thinking of something I want to write here. Some of them are so prolific and meaningful, that it almost makes me feel intelligent. Some of it’s just pointless crap that’s pissing me off. Okay… some of the pointless crap ends up in the “…bites” section below. But that’s what it’s there for. All those personally meaningless little thoughts or stories. Trying to preserve the real estate at the top for something more personal. But part of my problem is that I’m my own worst audience. No one could hate my work as much as I do. Wether it’s something I design, or some picture I took, or some words I wrote… as long as I know they’re mine, I’m incredibly harsh towards them. And often when I’m thinking about writing, it’s as I walk around town. In just a block or two, I’ll have an entire entry written in my mind. And even assuming I do remember it by the time I get home, I’ll already start picking it over, and editing it to death. My best writing is stream of consciousness. Thinking with my fingers, I guess.
I mentioned design. Yay, I’m a designer! Even started my own studio. And ya know… design is really fucking hard for me. Long before I get to the above mentioned critiquing of my own work… it’s hard. Somewhere along the way, my mind decided that when it’s time to be professional, my otherwise highly creative thought processes go pfft… out the window. I have an extremely hard time getting into the mental space where I can do design work, as well. And when I travel? Forget it. No work I’ve ever done on the road was worth shit. I’m just obsessive enough to worry about every project. Each new job means that every drop of my energy, concentration, and … you know… brain juice, goes into that effort, for at least 4 days. It inevitably ends with me staring at an email telling myself to press Send so that I won’t be able to make any more changes. And as soon as I hear that whoosh of an outgoing email, a 20 pound weight drops from my chest. I bounce up from the chair, smiling, and looking for something to eat and someone to talk to. (Unfortunately, my friends have real jobs, and don’t want to talk at 3 in the afternoon or 2 in the morning). If I can keep a string of design work going, it kind of eases up. I can stay in the mental place I need for doing that work. The ideas continue to flow. But once I’ve shut it off… I have to go to all the work again of getting back there.
God, I so much prefer being a manager.
This, folks, by the way, is one of the most beautiful women I know:
That is all.
Hmmm… since the Juliette and the Licks show… what have I been doing? When the hell was that show? Mid-October, I think. So there was Halloween, of course. Went to Autumn’s party early in the evening, followed by chiarOscuro around 11. Both parties went better than expected, with opportunities for me to talk to several people I don’t get to see anywhere near as much as I’d like to. Think I’ve finished my last painting, since then, as well. Well… mostly finished. Still some small details I want to touch up. May send it to New York when it’s done, since that’s where the unwitting models live. Went to the Uruguayan Embassy for an art auction by a friend of a friend. Jill visited last weekend. No change since college. Still a tiny little ball of energy crying out “love me!”. Her visit led to me seeing Regina and Raphael for the first time in 5 (!) years. They’re still way too fucking cute.
Lot of work. Not a lot of money. I’m tired. In, oh, so many ways. But still… I’m here. And that something to start with.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!
The author of Airbag Industries is cranky again:
“But unlike the Kinkos copied zines of old …. the cousin to the zine, the blog, has in general has become rather stagnant and complacent in it’s form of post and comment, two-column centered with a drop shadow. I don’t consider any blog-based site free from this trap…”
— Greg Storey
It’s not the evil ’blog ruining the world. Blog software comes with default templates. You can’t have it any other way. If MovableType has been downloaded a hundred million times, you can be sure ninety-eight million of those people couldn’t create their own template if their laptop depended on it. And at least ninety-six million of those people don’t care what their journal looks like. You can’t really complain about the design aesthetic of those websites, since the don’t exist as designed objects. It’s like trying to convince me that my blue-jeans and t-shirts will never get me on the cover of Vogue.
Dozen’s of navigational interfaces have had their day. On this website alone, I have tried probably 20 or 30. A single, side-straddling navigational menu is the natural evolution. The single point of navigation, no matter where it is, is a result of the “least-common-denominator” effect. “People” can’t handle having part of the navigation here and part of it there. Having it run down one side or the other has some minor support from theories of user-interface, but is largely the result of the technical limitations of HTML and CSS, even today.
In the early days, I could get away with freaky interfaces, because people brave enough to go online expected to think a little about what they were seeing. But “online” is now a normal. A usual. A thing-that-everbody-is-doing. So while on my own website, everything is up for grabs, when I design for a client, they get what “everyone” expects. To give “everyone” something that they don’t know how to use it to be “doing it wrong”, because… you know… everyone says so. Mainstream clients need mainstream solutions. I have no intention of “getting funky” while I’m trying to teach people how not to die of AIDS.
(God knows I encourage people to “do it wrong”, ’cause what the hell is the point of going through life knowing what to expect?. But everything in it’s place.)
But frankly, the web has always been a matter of content over form. If you’re lucky, you find a way to make the form of the content attractive… but you’re always trying to convey content. The earliest sites were just people saying “this is me, and this is what I like”. Then people started elaborating on what they like, and creating fan sites. (My earliest website had a page devoted to Janis Joplin). Then people put up portfolios and resumes. And so on. And so on. The evolution of the web has always been a matter of finding ways to share more content, in terms of technical capability and sheer quantity.
You give me a beautiful, innovative, awe-inspiring website that only has naked pictures of Dick Cheney… and I ain’t having anything to do with it. But if you have nothing but blank pages with pictures of Angelina Jolie… I am so there.
Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!