Thursday, April 19, 2007

25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic Designer

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.

2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.

3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouses shirt than listen to what they have to say.

4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.

5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.

6. You consider meals interruptions.

7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.

8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.

9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers. Furthermore, even trying to explain what you do to non-designers.

10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.

11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.

12. You can point out what stock photo came from what site in any magazine or newspaper.

13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)

14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.

15. You’ve actually paid for a font.

16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)

17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.

18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.

19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.

20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)

21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.

22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.

23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.

24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.

25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

(Thanks, Patrick)

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

"Where the hell have you been?"

Seems to be a common question lately. In a word: working my butt off. Ok...four words. And we just got back from a vacation to the Mexican Riveria. (Pictures to come next)

We've gotten several new clients since February. For a complete list go to www.credocreative.com and click on "about".

One thing I wasn't ready for was not getting paid right away. I'll spend four days on a project, but won't see the fruit of that for five or six weeks. THAT'S hard to get use to. The bank wants the mortgage payment the same time every month, but I don't always get paid the same time every month. So that's been difficult. Also, I had no idea that this was more "crisis management" rather than graphic design. It's pretty hectic when you've got six jobs all going on at once and due within days of each other. We live and die by "to-do lists".

*sigh* so much to talk about, but so little time. I'm paid by the hour so I better get going. I'll be back sooner.