I told you I was hardcore...

Occasionally whilst gracefully avoiding the steaming piles that comprise the negative bits of life here in Ann Arbor I find something that makes me smile. This - found on BittBox - is one of those things.

Bit of warning: if you're not a graphic/web designer, you may not get teh funneh.



25 MORE WAYS TO TELL YOU'RE A HARDCORE GRAPHIC/WEB DESIGNER

1. You've had a client that thought they knew more about design than you.


2. Your clients pay you for your professional expertise and skill, yet you've run into one of "those" clients that refuses to take the advice from the very person he/she is paying for advice (you).


3. You've had a client that insisted on using the font "Papyrus" and you had to hold in your barf as you prepped it [the design] for printing.


4. You've requested a vector logo from a client, and instead, they email you a 72 dpi image they grabbed from a website.


5. You've used typography as a texture.


6. You don't have a favourite font because you love "Typography." Not Fonts. Choosing a favourite font would be like choosing a favourite child, it's just wrong.


7. You collect as many free stuffs from the interwebs as you can on your hard drive, hoping that one day, that cool project will come along that you can actually use some cool shit on.


8. You'd rather have a free font than a gallon of gas.


9. It's hard to talk about frustrations at your job with a group of friends because they have no idea what "Vector" or "DPI" is, just to name a couple.


10. You've had a client ask you to "Make the logo bigger."


11. You've had a client that insists on "filling up the space."


12. You've learned to over-price web design projects because most clients are more picky about their websites than a high-school girl picking out a prom dress.


13. You feel like you're "On Call" half of the time because clients procrastinate so much.


14. You know keyboard shortcuts that require four fingers.


15. You've lost hours of work because an application crashed, and you had to start over from scratch because you were in "the zone" and forgot to save. Basically, you were having so much fun being creative that saving was the last thing on your mind at the time.


16. You've "Live-Traced" something.


17. You spend more hours per week looking at CSS showcase sites than you do at the gym.


18. The only thing that yould make you happier than the demise of IE6 is world peace.


19. You've done everything but give up a body part to talk a client out of a "Flash Intro." Yeah. I said it. Flash Intro. Sad, so so sad. (goes along with #2)


20. You have enough fonts on your hard drive to last you for: 1 font per day for about a decade, give or take a year or two.


21. You know, explicitly, what a "Flourish" is.


22. You worry about negative space as much as the content area.


23. You get phone calls from friends and family members on a regular, sometimes annoyingly-frequent basis, wanting yor services for free or extremely cheap. (and the "portfolio" line makes you want to throw something across the room)


24. You've had a client that wants a website they can "update" on their own, but doesn't know shit about websites.


25. You're never more than 99% happy with your final product because you believe that EVERYTHING can be improved upon. (especially those tight-deadline projects)

Am I hardcore? You decide. Here's my responses:

1. Not A client. ALL of them.


2. Yep. Even had one tell me, "graphic design is easy. All you do is put stuff on paper and make it look pretty."


3. Not "Papyrus," but the dreaded "Comic Sans." Ironically enough, they wanted me to use it in their logo.


4. Every damned time. I've even had a couple send it to me again after I very carefully and clearly explained the difference between raster and vector and told them all about resolution. The next day I got not only the same logo from their site, but also a link to their site in case the logo didn't come through. They eventually decided to handle things "in-house" and I never heard from them again.


5. Quite a few times, actually. I highly recommend using the caps in the "Porcelain" font. Enlarge, rotate, position so bits are in the bleed/trim area, and voila! Repeat as desired.


6. Oh hells yeah. I've had several professors and a couple clients call me a "font freak".


7. Well, DUH. It's nifty; it's free. I'll use it eventually.


8. Right now, I'd take the gas. Well, so long as I have sites like dafont.


9. Sometimes. I have friends who, like me, are geeks and know exactly what I'm talking about; I also have friends/acquaintances who think DPI is who sings that hot new pop song.


10. Not so much clients, but my current employer. One of these days I'm going to submit a proof that consists entirely of the logo, sized as large as the document.


11. Again, my boss. Apparently white space is the enemy and it must be vanguished at all costs. This means that - unless I score a rare victory - all of my projects are exceedingly text-heavy and clunky.


12. It's a good thing I'm not freelancing for my current employer. All of the webpages I've created have taken entirely too long, mostly because everything has to go through a committee comprised of people who are never here/available at the same time.


13. #$&% yeah. I'm still waiting for text revisions on a brochure that I was supposed to have three months ago but could be coming "any day now, so be ready because it'll have to go the printer immediately".


14. Save For Web in PhotoShop. 'nuff said.


15. Actually, no. The only time I've lost work is because the computer decided to chuck a wobbly when I did save.


16. Well, yeah...but not in public...


17. Doesn't everybody?


18. THAT'S a toss-up. The demise of IE6 would make me exceedingly happy. Hell, world peace might come as a result of folks being overjoyed at not having to implement hundreds of fixes for buggy or non-existent DOM/CSS/Javascript support.


19. People still ask for those in this day and age?


20. Stay out of my Fonts folder.


21. Yep. It's the decorative curl of a letter in a script font that can be used as a border, but it's usually a decorative ornament (i.e. a dingbat) that's used as a border element.


22. All the time. You have to have balance, man.


23. Mostly The Wife™, usually for a gallery show. I don't mind because 1)it's more work to show, 2)it's usually something more creative than I get to do at my day job, and 3)I usually get paid in b33r.


24. Yep. Didn't know a bloody thing about HTML, either, but wanted to be able to update the site even though they had requested items that would require CSS and JavaScript.


25. You're not being a perfectionist if you know one more minor tweak would make it better.