Domestic Geek

Some days when I'm cruising on stock sites like iStockPhoto.com and the like, I see images and illustrations that caught my eye from the many publications we print. I've decided to get off my duff and learn to illustrate people so that I can get my work onto iStockPhoto and one day come across my work in one of our client's magazines. A weird goal? Maybe. I still think it would be cool, though. Damn, why is illustrating people's faces so freaking difficult?

When I was in design school, the woman that taught our prepress classes was amazing (she owns Phases Design Studio)! A lot of designers really don't get the technical side of things and their eyes kind of glazed over when she talked. She also held people to strict, high standards and that put a lot of people off. After I got over the initial fear of her because of rumors of how mean and unfair she was, she quickly became one of my favorite teachers ever. She has such a wealth of knowledge about how computers worked, prepress issues, design sense, font problems, etc. I used to love picking her brain.

I remember a piece of advice she gave in class one day and it echoed through my mind yesterday as I was dealing with yet another set of problems caused by designers that do not really understand the tools they use. "If you want to be a really good graphic designer, one of your first jobs out of design school should be in a prepress department." I received a similar piece of advice from Joelle over at Moxie Design Studios awhile back regarding being a web designer. She suggested that if a person really wanted to be a great web designer, they should start out in a web production company. Wise women both.

I guess my whole point here is that if you're going to truly master a craft, start out somewhere where there are lots people who have been doing it a lot longer than you and be open to picking up as many tips and pointers as possible. I know my thirst to understand how and why things work and my ability to ask the right questions is gaining me knowledge that, while making me a better prepress employee, ultimately makes me a better designer. It's kind of sad that we don't really have true apprenticeships anymore.

You know, back in the day, expandable themes were kind of cool. If you're not familiar with the term, it means that a section of a site can expand or contact as you make a browser window larger or smaller to fill the space so that the whole site fills the window. That was fine for the days of 800x600 or even 1024x768 resolutions, but right now I have an Apple Cinema Display with a 1680x1050 resolution. Most times my main browser window fills the screen. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to read a blog entry that spans almost that entire entry sans sidebars? It's a royal PITA! Even better are the ones that have two columns: one that floats right an one that floats left with no set width for the whole page. It leaves a big huge freakin' while hole in the middle of their site. Not pretty, let me tell you.

I've got an idea in my head for something I'm working on and I'm ready to bang my head on the wall.

I'm sure it can be done, I just haven't figured it out yet.

I wish I was a CSS guru instead of just a really good hack. Hmph.

Do you want to know why I don't do web design for a living even though I studied it? IE. Yep, that stupid web browser...the spawn of the browser world let forth upon this earth by those jerks over at Microsoft. It is its own monster. I hate making a perfect good layout that looks absolutely lovely in every browser known to man EXCEPT Internet Explorer. I then hate wasting hours upon hours trying to figure out why things won't line up by one pixel. Grrrrr.