Long Hours of Design

Hm, what’s wrong with this picture (from istockphoto.com)? Hint: how many times has this sucker been downloaded?

Isn’t it Ironic?

Isn't it Ironic?

One of the tremendous things about working as a Creative is—well, the creativity.

Over my years working as a graphic designer, I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects for all kinds of clients—from political direct mail, to non-profits, to very large corporations. Variety is the “spice of life” and so it is for a designer.

And I’ve also gained the ability to be completely flexible, showing my muscle in InDesign one moment, and jumping into CSS the next.

While most of my formal training comes from the school of hard knocks, time and again I’ve proven myself as a competent, creative, hard working, and ever patient designer.

I consistently receive rave reviews from peers, managers, and clients; and I constantly work to improve and learn, and to satisfy an unquenchable thirst to be the best designer I can be.

Never a round peg in square whole, I lend myself to malleability and will never back down from tackling projects I’ve never tackled before.

All this is creativity in it’s purest form—molding yourself and your projects to make something out of nothing.

You know you’ve had waaaay too much time working when you start seeing faces in abstract paper paterns.

I’m going to the gym.

I’m generally on my Mac, and if I’m on a PC, I rarely am doing anything serious or designerly. So I never knew this:

To add the ellipsis ^{[ 1 ]} punctuation mark to text, hit Option-semicolon (Mac) or Alt-0133 (Windows).

Really? You have to type Alt-0133? ^{[ 2 ]}

I’m glad I don’t have to remember that.

As I mentioned in “Quick and Dirty Job Tracking”, everyone should have and use a job tracking system of some kind.

On further inspection, EVERYONE should HAVE and USE a job-tracking system of some kind.

A design department I know recently wasted hundreds of dollars for lack of a job-tracking system.

With modern design groups having gigabytes upon gigabytes of data on servers, with project after project in different folders and placed differently by different people, sometimes named obscurely, files can become difficult to find—to say the least.

With tracking numbers, a simple OS-level search will find you your files.

Otherwise, brilliant creatives spend their time looking for file x y and z.

And that’s too bad.

Or: “What’s New?”

I’ve always opined that Acrobat was the red-headed step child of all Adobe products. I mean, have you ever used the thing? Did Adobe hire a bunch of ex-Microsoft usability and interface design guys for this one? Admittedly, the newer versions of Acrobat are better than they used to be… On the upside, I get really cool errors when Acrobat crashes!

Look, Ma—Acrobat crashed again!

Look, Ma—Acrobat crashed again!

Stet is a Latin word (meaning “let it stand”) used by proofreaders to instruct the writer to disregard a change the editor had previously marked.

This convention is usually marked by writing and circling the word stet above or beside the unwanted edit and underscoring the selection with dashes or dots.

Stet is also sometimes used as a verb, e.g., “Stet that colon.” ^{[ 1 ]}

Stat is an abbreviate for “Statistic”

Statistic is a fact or piece of data from a study of a large quantity of numerical data. From German statistisch . ^{[ 2 ]}