Posts Tagged ‘misc’

I get asked ques­tions about my tat­toos a lot. It some­times strikes me as strange—I have seven of them, which I sup­pose is quite a few, but they’re all really tiny black symbols—so it’s hardly as though they’re at all surprising.

A few years ago, before I quit my job to launch a busi­ness, I had my logo tat­tooed to my shoulder blade. (And actu­ally, I haven’t been tat­tooed since—I’ve run out of stra­tegic body space!) People thought I was insane. “What hap­pens if your busi­ness tanks?” was the pop­ular question.

Of all the tat­toos I’ve had done, I’m fur­thest from regret­ting this one. Admit­tedly, my busi­ness didn’t tank, but I don’t think it would have made much dif­fer­ence if it had. It’s impossible to start a busi­ness without having it become a major event in your life—to me, tat­tooing my logo to my shoulder was no cra­zier than the people who tattoo their kids’ names to them­selves. (And it’s cer­tainly less crazy than those who tattoo their lovers’ names on them­selves. As far as I can tell, my busi­ness will never leave me for a younger woman or run away with all my money. I hope.)

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Please note: this week I’ve been totally swamped with work-work-work-work, and since I’m still in a cast and typing the four thou­sand emails a day that run my busi­ness often makes me frus­trated and dizzy, I am utterly exhausted. I wrote this art­icle some time ago, and while it doesn’t have any­thing to do with design per se, it’s all about pretty things (shoes!) and we all know how I feel about that. We will return to your regularly-scheduled install­ments of rel­evant posts next week!

There’s some­thing about a pair of heels. They’re instantly classy. They work with everything, they make your legs look great, and they can turn the scrub­biest ensemble into a kick-ass outfit. A beau­tiful pair of shoes is a magical creature that will trans­form you into a soph­ist­ic­ated lady-about-town, even when you’re just run­ning out to the gro­cery store in your pyjamas and bedhead.

But when you live in a cli­mate that changes every hour, and the side­walks are almost always covered in ice (or snow, or mud, or random bits of gravel, or some com­bin­a­tion thereof), wearing heels can be haz­ardous to your health. As a girl who never wears flats and rarely suf­fers for it, I’ve picked up a few tricks and tips along the way.

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Before I decided to become a designer, I held a whole array of jobs over the years to make my rent. I wrote for an online magazine and acted as “web­master” for a local IT com­pany during high school. I was briefly a knife salesman, before I real­ized I can’t sell any­thing. I worked at a gas sta­tion on crack alley, serving coffee from the self-serve coffee counter to very con­fused cus­tomers. I was a maid for all of an hour (before I quit). I was a crossing guard, a security guard, and the world’s fastest (and sur­liest) Subway employee. How­ever, by far the oddest employ­ment I’ve ever had came after my trans­ition to a “career”: I take my clothes off for money.

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In the interest of con­tinuing my forays into self-directed and hand-generated pro­jects, I’ve been taking a screen­printing class at the fant­astic Roberts Street Social Centre the past few weeks. It’s been fant­astic, and I’m so glad I took a class instead of learning it myself—while I do love teaching myself new skills, the setup would have been extensive and it may have been more dif­fi­cult to find the motiv­a­tion to “go” to class each week, whereas with a defined class time, I was forced to show up or lose my oppor­tunity. With pro­jects and to-do lists con­stantly piling up, I may oth­er­wise have aban­doned the endeavour for sleep.

The time-crunch, how­ever, meant that I needed to accept imper­fec­tions. Now, anyone who knows me knows well that I’m a tiny bit per­snickety: I’ll spend half an hour adjusting the kerning of a font until it feels just right, I’ll go back over a design that’s already been client-approved in order to “fin­esse” the whole thing, and I typ­ic­ally com­plain that Pho­toshop won’t zoom to a level any higher than 1600%.  While I really do believe that this is a valu­able tend­ency in a designer (and, in fact, I sus­pect that most graphic designers are by nature a touch anal-retentive), it’s also a major hindrance in an industry that is so intensely deadline-driven.

Fin­ished thank you cards, each one screen­printed by hand! I’m not happy with the heart design at all–the lines are sim­ul­tan­eously too thick AND too thin. I think I might prefer this redesigned with more of a skull/vine design in the bottom-right corner.

This is why often my self-driven pro­jects are fin­ished late: while client pro­jects are often do-or-die, if the client is myself, I’m often con­tent to let my expected dead­line pass me by in favour of pro­du­cing work that’s closer to “per­fect” (it’s never actu­ally per­fect, of course.) This is why it took me three months longer than expected to launch my new web­site, and why my Valentines were barely even printed and ready to go by the four­teenth. Given that it’s easy to sour on your own work after obsessing over it too long, this delay is a dan­gerous thing. Wait too long, and the whole thing ends up needing to be scrapped and started all over again!

But with the screen­printing class, I had no option (other than flak­i­ness, which I’m giving up as a life­style choice as much as pos­sible). So I showed up for my second class with a design that wasn’t per­fect, telling myself that it was just a learning pro­ject, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t right. I’m just learning! It’s okay to screw up!

The thing I started to realize as I got into the printing pro­cess is this: everything that looks like a fatal error to me is basic­ally invis­ible to everyone else.  (Not a major rev­el­a­tion, but some­thing I ought to con­stantly keep in mind, because I never seem to remember it.) The fun­da­mental flaws in the ini­tial design weren’t nearly as glaring or as apparent to others as they were to me.

Then, as I pro­ceeded with the printing pro­cess, I real­ized that I hadn’t been as pre­cise with the first colour “plate” (the red accents) as I would have liked. (In screen­printing, each colour is printed inde­pend­ently of the others, much like a tra­di­tional CMYK plate-printing pro­cess that I learned about in school, but never actu­ally had a chance to wit­ness.) Accord­ingly, when I printed the black “plate” on top of the red, the regis­tra­tion often didn’t line up per­fectly, and there was an overlap.

Then some­thing funny happened. I could, in theory, have used an acetate sheet to register and measure the place­ment of every single print to ensure a per­fect output on every single print. I thought about it, briefly, and then threw cau­tion utterly to the wind, and just started printing willy-nilly. Prints came out with white where red should be, and red where white should be, and instead of breaking down into tears or tan­trums, I care­fully put them on the drying rack with the others. Not only was I not upset, but I actu­ally dis­covered that I rather liked these mis-fit mis-prints! Who­ever knew?

And really, where I’m so gung-ho on the hand­made pro­cess anyway, it’s about time I learned not only to accept, but to embrace my mis­takes. (Are you listening, brain? I’m talking to you.) Mis­takes are often the most inter­esting part of a piece of work, and they so often gen­erate new ideas and con­cepts that might oth­er­wise forever remain undis­covered (gravity, nylon, peni­cillin, chocolate-covered bacon). And espe­cially when some­thing is hand­made, part of its appeal lies in its imper­fec­tions: signs of the inher­ently flawed human touch. So often the aes­thetics of error (cracks in pave­ment, burned-out build­ings, rips in a sheet of paper) are more inter­esting, alive, and vibrant than the ster­ility of pixel-perfection.

Can you spot the errors? I bet I can find more than you can!

Now, if only I can apply that sort of thinking to everything else I do, I might finally be able get some sleep!

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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So, having noticed it’s been nearly six months since I last updated my web­site, I think it’s about time I took the plunge and hired someone to help me keep this busi­ness run­ning better. I’ve con­sidered this a number of times in the past, but my gen­eral inab­ility to relin­quish con­trol, of any­thing, to anyone, has always pre­vented me from going through with it. Time’s come to grow up, ditch the nar­cissism, and realize that I’m not the second coming, and I need some help from time to time.

That said! Here’s what I’m looking for. (more…)

About 95% of the work I do tends fall into the “logos and web­sites” cat­egory, but every now and again I’m given the oppor­tunity to work on some­thing a little dif­ferent. One of my favourite “little dif­ferent some­thing” is the resume. I’ve designed a number of them, and I always enjoy them. They’re chal­len­ging from an inform­a­tion hier­archy point of view, and people really notice them. I’ve heard all kinds of com­ments, in part I think because people are so used to seeing the same boring MS Word tem­plates.

Julie Smith is a Toronto lawyer whose resume I recently designed. She sent her resume out to two dif­ferent com­panies one day, and was given an inter­view on the second. Later, she passed along this com­ment from a headhunter:

Your resume looks fant­astic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find your­self facing unem­ploy­ment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to ruminate on the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate in whatever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

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.

Have I men­tioned how much I love my cli­ents? I checked the mailbox yes­terday and found a box full of deli­cious chocolate muffins (thank good­ness cus­toms didn’t open the box!), accom­panied by this note:

Hi Sarah,

So sorry to hear that you lost a con­sid­er­able amount of work when water spilled on your com­puter. While chocolate zuc­chini muffins (no nuts–in case you’re allergic) won’t bring the material back (wouldn’t that be great), per­haps they can fuel the recre­ation pro­cess. Just want to let you know that we can be patient for an ulti­mately high-quality product.

Cheers!

ACT

How utterly sweet & lovely is that? I am an incred­ibly lucky girl to get to work with such fab­ulous clients.

Oh, come on, everyone Googles them­self at some point, don’t they? I do it mostly to see what (if any­thing) the internet has to say about me, and if any of it will come back to haunt me. I have, at times, been known to dis­close too much online.

A Google search for “sarah semark” yields this hil­ari­ously erro­neous news­paper art­icle from last year, in which my cat is actu­ally ref­er­enced as a busi­ness partner, and this sim­il­arly hil­arious and out-of-date port­folio site, which I should really take down, but I’m far too absorbed in my own per­sonal his­tory to do so.

I think I really like Instapaper, when I actu­ally remember to use it. I have a tend­ency to look at some­thing long and tedious, then either book­mark it and forget about it, or print it and have my cat turn it into long-winded con­fetti. Instapaper is a really neat way of storing these “things I mean to read”, not like I need yet another form of to-do list. (My cur­rent system involves a primary hand­written list, in my note­book, which then ref­er­ences my “email to-do list”, or some­times my “rss to-do list”. Some­times one day’s list will ref­er­ence another day’s list, or a list spe­cific to a pro­ject, as in, do one item from said list, or do entirety of list.) (more…)

Point taken.

I have hated the blog thing for so long, des­pite having spent a good deal of my form­ative years keeping online journals. But if I buckled to Face­book for the pur­suit of fame and for­tune, I can buckle to the weblog world.

That is, if I can actu­ally do it consistently.