AAAARRRRGHH!

To everyone who has ever asked me, "what's it like being a graphic designer for a car dealership?" - the answer is: FRUSTRATING.

Here's everything you need to know: take all of your knowledge of colour theory, typography and composition and throw it away. Take every font in your library and get rid of them, except for Arial and Times New Roman; you won't be using them (trust me, 90% of my font library is growing cobwebs). Forget Pantone colours; you'll only need to add more red or more yellow.

Remember white space? That space - both positive and negative - that you were taught to use to give the viewer's eye a place to rest; as a way to focus the viewer's attention; to create visual interest? That space? You won't be needing it. Instead, you'll learn how to fit bloviated text chock-full of industry buzzwords into tiny spaces. And no, nothing can be cut to make room.

Oh, and the logo always needs to be bigger.

To answer the other question on your mind, yes, I have tried to discuss design with my boss. I've tried countless times to explain why having blank space on a legal-sized mailer is not a bad thing, and shouldn't be cluttered with more stuff; why I can't just pull an image off of the website to put in an ad; why DPI is important; why vector is better than raster; why there are better fonts than just Arial; why yellow isn't necessarily a good colour to use to attract attention. Everything falls on deaf ears.

When I first started, I made every effort to bring new ideas and fresh designs to the plethora of monthly collaterals that I generated; I tried every style I could think of, from Deco to Bauhaus to modern to contemporary. Now, I really don't care. I've all but given up after a year of having every design shot down in favour of a generic product that a rabid howler monkey using GIMP could create while masturbating. I know everything my boss is looking for: a logo that's at least one-third of the entire piece, yellow used somewhere, and a standard sans-serif font (Arial, mostly) varied only in the sense of bold and italic. Everything else is either "too small" or "too hard to read".

In the year that I've worked here, I have ONE piece that I'm reasonably pleased with, despite it being heavily edited.

Everything else? Not good design. Too cluttered and clunky; too heavily edited; no form; skewed text forms. But, it's what the client wanted - so it succeeds, I guess - but it's nothing I'd want to show potential clients.

So, I'm looking to move on. Will other places be perfect? No. Will they be better? Yes, because I'm looking for something with an actual creative department; a department that has a manager who knows what the hell I'm talking about when I bring up typography or kerning or tracking; someone who doesn't look at me like a deer in the headlights when I try to explain a basic compositional element.

Until then, I'll be making the logo bigger. And possibly yellow.