#I'm not an illustrator so you'll have to be lenient

[inevitably-johnlocked]

What is something you wish more people understood about you or if you prefer about your job or hobbies?

Hey Lovely!!

Ahhh, oh gosh SO much, honestly.

So I'm a graphic designer by trade, and an illustrator and freelance designer as my side gig, and my hobbies are art-related as well.

FOR SURE, I have to say that I wish people respected designers as the creatives we are. I've GENUINELY had clients who think all I do is hit a "design ad" button and BOOM it's done, and don't think they should have to pay me because – and this is ONLY because I've been doing this for 20 years – I can finish a print ad in under an hour, and booklets under 5, not taking into account the AMOUNT OF CHANGES and STUPID things I have to talk people out of to not make them look bad.

Some other things:

Microsoft Word is not a design program. I HATED this when I worked at the Paper. Good fucking LORD the amount of times I've had to rebuild an ad because the client couldn't resize it themselves and couldn't understand why if they moved something everything fucked up is astounding.

Canva is good for mocking up design, but I'm sorry, you're NOT a designer if you learned design in Canva. I know it sounds gatekeepy and pretentious, and I am sorry about that, but even with Canva you need to know SOME principles of design to get something appealing out of it. A designer, after-all, MADE your templates you're working from. We're everywhere. We're a silent bunch that's under-appreciated. You're never going to get the precision and nuance and a proper eye that you'll get from a designer. Sure you'll get quick and dirty designs, work fine for socials, but I LOATHE when people send me shit they made in Canva that I have to, once again, rebuild because they can't figure out how to resize in Canva and complained to me that Canva isn't making it look nice when they export it (to be fair, that's a them problem, the tools ARE there for you to do that stuff)

When your designer tells you one thing and you're trying to push for another, your designer is trying to save you the embarrassment of your "vision". We know what we're doing. We spend most of our days knowing market trends and what will make eyes go to your advertisements and products.

Strokes don't fix everything.

I can't read your mind. PLEASE, if you wanted an element there from the start, you need to tell me, and not tell me I'm a fucking moron who should have guessed by the blobs you drew on a napkin as your layout.

Fuck AI; I see the benefits of it for smaller things like content aware fill to add a bit more height to a stock photo I'm using, or the smart-select to route a photo faster, but literally that's all I see useful for it.

I know there's loads more I'm missing, but I've seen SO much that I'm numb to a lot of things and tend to just "autocorrect" stuff without even thinking anymore.

I love my job though, I really do. The joke in my industry is that "I get paid to play in Photoshop all day long" and there is some truth to it after doing this for nearly 20 years. But I wish people would understand that we are trained professionals who want to make them look good, and to do that I need time and money. We are literally background characters for the main protagonists, and the pay isn't great unless you're really lucky (which I am, but it took me 12 years to finally get in where I am), and I wish people would stop saying my job is easy.

It literally is not. Think of it as retail, but you deal with the same people every single day nitpicking the tiniest things over and over again despite you telling them countless times that 6pt font is probably the smallest you should go, but no 3 pt must be on this ad.

Anyway. 🙃

My favourite though is Layout Design. I love designing the booklets and mailers we do at my job, because I get to be super creative. My boss is pretty lenient with me, since "you've been here longer than all of us, you know better than me how this works", so I get to have fun.

Thank you for this question :) And gonna promo myself here, if anyone ever needs design or layout services, I'm your gal :)

[starberry-cupcake]

In case someone is remotely interested, the Mr Spider replica is going places

it still has a LOT to go, but it’s coming along and I’m still working in it. If it ends up looking decent, I’d like to make a video going through it with Jon’s statement as an audio, to see if/how things match up. But we’ll see how it goes. 

Also, these are the authors I’ve been looking at for guidance in this process, which are apparently not usually linked to this (99% of the people think about an edition of The Spider and the Fly illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi, but I hadn’t heard of it when I listened to the podcast, so it’s not among my references). 

We have predominantly Marjolaine Leray, Piet Grobler, Wolf Erlbruch, very little of Edward Gorey and I got my hand writing analysis manual to make up Jurgen Leitner’s signature, even if I’m the only one who will know why the g looks a certain way and the r looks in another. 

Not being an English speaker made it a whole treat when I followed my gut and paid attention to my suspicions, finding out that effectively Jonny had named the flies after actual species of flies, only one of which I could relate to the Spanish name. So, I had to go back on that to change designs and color pallets based on which species of flies they were, also matching the clothes accordingly when they weren’t described in the statement.  

What you are not seeing, among many things, are the puppet try-outs and pop-up try-outs which are driving me nuts. But why would I even make this book if I wasn’t going to include a movable puppet? That’s the hill I’ll die on.  

Will I finish this before the show is over? I don’t know. I hope I finish it, though, I really do.