Posts Tagged ‘diatribes’

Things I’ve learned lately: appar­ently, the internet likes breasts. Who knew?

When I posted my Get­ting Naked entry a few weeks ago, my web­site traffic spiked impressively.

Look! It sort of forms a boob shape, too!

I’ll admit, I was a touch nervous about pub­li­cizing my extra­cur­ricular activ­ities, for a second, for fear of neg­ative back­lash. North Amer­icans in par­tic­ular can be par­tic­u­larly prudish about nudity in all its forms, artistic or oth­er­wise, and where this is, in theory, a Busi­ness Web­site, it did cross my mind that some may con­sider it unpro­fes­sional to dis­cuss such things.

These days, the line between A Busi­ness and That Busi­ness’ Owner is becoming blur­rier and blur­rier. More and more people are freel­an­cing or run­ning sole pro­pri­et­or­ships, and the ubi­quit­ous­ness of Face­book, Twitter, and Google means that, whether we like it or not, we are all bec0ming more and more pub­licly access­ible. I see there being two ways of approaching this, whether you’re a busi­ness owner, career-minded pro­fes­sional, or vag­a­bond with an iPhone.

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Thank you to everyone who responded to my hiring notice; I’ve selected a can­didate and am looking for­ward to being able to tackle new pro­jects in the very near future, including the much-anticipated (by myself) and much-required over­haul of my web­site. More details to come soon!

I received an abso­lutely phe­nom­enal response, and was able to meet with a number of really fant­astic people. (I wish I could have hired everyone!) That said, it was inter­esting being on the other side of the hiring pro­cess, and I think if I’m ever in the pos­i­tion of applying for a job again, I’d do things a little dif­fer­ently as a result.

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The Good: Digsby is gor­geous. I love the gigantic fluor­es­cent “down­load” bar that gets OS-specific after you click on it. I love their coming soon page, too, although I might have pre­ferred to find an actual download.

The Bad: No more Digby. I’m trying hard not to think about it because it makes me sad. Why aren’t there more beau­tiful & clever, highly sat­ur­ated things around? (I am hap­piest in tech­ni­colour). I don’t under­stand why “reality” is so inter­esting. There’s enough reality right out­side my door; I’d rather the fantasy when I’m looking to get out of my head.

and the Ridicu­lous: Minggl thinks “b3k 4w5″ isn’t a valid postal code. It took me three tries to figure out they wanted me to cap­it­alize it. Ser­i­ously? Canada Post will deliver my mail if I forget the majority of the address and scrawl it upside down with a six-inch-wide marker, but some web app that isn’t ever going to send me mail can’t val­idate a lower­case postal code?

Also, why are all web apps named by dys­lexic five year olds now? I miss real words.

I’ve been doing some work with email news­let­ters of late. It is, of course, a bit of a chal­lenge, given how email is even less reli­able at prop­erly inter­preting standards-compliant CSS code and the like. (Ser­i­ously, one of these days, all these com­panies will get together and start imple­menting code con­sist­ently, across the board, and web designers across the world will sud­denly find that what used to take ten hours now only takes one. Com­panies like the fab­ulous BrowserCam will go out of busi­ness. Why is so much of our eco­nomy built on busy-work? Screw the unem­ploy­ment rate, I want effi­ciency!)

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Out­look 2007 will make things look ugliest. Appar­ently, this is because it uses the MS Word ren­dering engine. Now, ser­i­ously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design any­thing in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, how­ever, provide this handy little “val­id­ator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Out­look. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unre­lated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been dir­ectly involved in doing design work for a cam­paign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the elec­tion than I usu­ally am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Liber­tarian, if you can! Effi­ciency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)

I have a ter­rible tend­ency to throw what I refer to as “all night work parties”, which usu­ally end up com­prising about two and a half days straight of me staring into my laptop, clacking away and for­get­ting to sleep or come up for air. They’re admit­tedly not the most glar­ingly healthy way of get­ting things done, but I do tend to be the sort of person who works in spurts, and when the fever comes over me, I often like to run with it. (I actu­ally exper­i­mented with a “normal” schedule, wherein I slept at least a little bit every single night for a month straight. It was inter­esting, and I may try it again at some point…but not just now.)

So a few weeks ago, I was crashing at the tail end of a work party, and ended up falling asleep next to my laptop, gigantic glass of water in hand. Yes, you know where this is headed. A few hours later, I woke up spilling said gigantic glass of water all over myself and my poor laptop. (Lovely way to wake up, might I add.) Nat­ur­ally, I pan­icked. There was much cursing and wailing (me) and sparking and crack­ling (the machine) as I tried to figure out what on earth to do. It wouldn’t turn off, and it took my sleep-addled brain a good five minutes to figure out that removing the bat­tery would do the trick. The poor thing was soaked, and ruined. I was in a sim­ilar state. That machine was, in effect, the entirety of my busi­ness assets, and the tool by which I can earn my living, and it had just crackled out and died on me. (more…)

So since I no longer have internet at home, I’ve become a bit of a con­nois­seur of free wi-fi zones, altern­ately known as “a vag­a­bond with an expensive laptop”. I usu­ally tend to alternate between the lib­rary, a few coffee shops, and the train sta­tion, and I have spe­cific guidelines about what makes for a good place: it should be rel­at­ively quiet & empty, it should have lots of power out­lets that people don’t mind me plug­ging into, and the people shouldn’t get cross with me when I’m there for eight hours and only buy a coffee. (Though admit­tedly, I try to buy a coffee at least every three or four hours, as I’m sure it counts as a utility expense.) (more…)

I was recently con­tacted by a design stu­dent at Loy­alist Col­lege looking to inter­view a designer for an essay she’s writing. Ego-bloat aside, I do really like it when young(er), just-starting-out designers ask me for a “worldly” view of the industry. (Amaz­ingly, it’s happened more than once!) (more…)

My job is not stress-free!

I am pretty much a con­stant bundle of stress. And while I realize your art­icle is more of an advertorial than any­thing, I still have to dis­agree. (more…)

The last few months have brought about a lot of per­sonal mad­ness. Design work, as I’m dis­cov­ering, isn’t as acco­mod­ating towards mental chaos as other forms of artistic expres­sion are, thus I’ve let things stag­nate. Why don’t humans hibernate in the winter? Nothing would make me hap­pier than eating a lot and sleeping through the bliz­zards, ice rain, and cold winds that give me con­stant headaches.

My Grande Olde New Years’ Res­ol­u­tion is to spend less time organ­izing the 4829 songs on my hard drive and more time doing actual design work. (more…)