Ok, so my boss is the owner of our small agency. She was a broadcast major, worked at a newspaper, etc. so she’s been basically a writer and producer. Nothing to do with graphic or web design. She told me she brought me on because I could not only do these things, but could advise her on them.

However, it has become a constant battle for my integrity. I tell her and sell her on the best options, and she goes for the one I disapprove of the most because her cousin’s sister’s boyfriend uses it. Or, as lovely as this is, I’ll do an email newsletter with a text wrap on the right side of an image, and she labels it in all caps “BAD DESIGN.” Unfortunately, what she considers bad design one week she changes her mind on in the next. It’s hard to really understand how she works.

And she does everything half-assed. She thinks she has to micro-manage every aspect so she doesn’t really put forth a quality effort to any particular field. It really bothers me that she thinks she’s so stretched thin. We have a rotating window of about 5-6 clients in a month, needing different things. As only one designer exists in the office, me, I can handle this workload fine as long as I have the proper project manager to take care of it. Unfortunately the new project manager wants to be a designer instead, so she slacks off on the managing part. Why do I always need to remind her of due dates and projects and her responsibilities?

Back to my boss. So she things programming in PHP or ActionScript is a cinch. I tell her I can do things, but I’m not sure what errors will occur because of things like web configurations (we don’t use the same hosting servers for each website we do). She says ok. I barely get to spend a good chunk of the day on the code (about 6 hours) and she says that if I can’t do something about it then she’ll get someone who can. Then she’ll give me talks about how I have to learn too much. I just want to be like, “Please go look at the 150 lines of code I wrote today. You try to figure out what’s going on.” It’s even better when it’s code from a website that I’ve inherit that’s broken. I have to spend some goddamn time figuring out how the code works, woman.

It’s just ridiculous that people can’t appreciate others for what they bring to the table. My boss has tons of connections and we end up getting to do cool clients because of it. I’ve worked with corporations and small businesses side by side and am happy with that experience. However, I would like to work in a shop that appreciates the time coding takes, good design can take, that sometimes you can’t rush creativity, and you learn of deadlines before the day of. I have so many instances of her running in and being like, “I’ve completely forgotten about this one project, I need you to do in one hour.” Occasional instances of this are fine, I do like challenges, but not every day. That just shows poor planning, and shouldn’t that be the project manager’s job?

Since I haven’t posted a specifically design post for a bit, here’s one for you. Forgot where I once found this, but thought I would share. Even though the year has sucked personally, and I have no idea what the future holds, I still can’t help but be hBolded are the ones I think really apply to myself!

1 You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2 You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3 You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4 You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard. (I actually can type really fast, too)
5 You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
6 You consider meals interruptions. (Probably my biggest pet peeve!)
7 You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8 You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9 You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10 You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11 You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12 When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13 When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14 You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15 You’ve actually $paid for a font.
16 You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
17 The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
18 You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
19 You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
20 You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
21 You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
22 You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
23 You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
24 You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper

Which ones are yours?

If you haven’t already read this, go to it: http://prttyshttydesign.blogspot.com/2010/01/open-letter-to-james-cameron-from.html

I’m pretty sure I laughed, and yes, I agree, it is a modified Papyrus (which is even worse). However, when I linked this to my boyfriend, he responded thusly:

Him: You, and apparently every other designer in the world are complete goobers.
Me: Well, DUH.

How could we not be? We drool over the curvature of a fancy ascender, the negative space between geometric objects and the harmonious combination of image and text. But what irks me most about this post are the comments by the people just googling for Avatar shit. They come upon designers using satire about the font, and call us assholes, douchebags, and a number of other things, claiming we designers have no life and are jealous of James Cameron.

The injustice on the internet consumes me, which is one of the reasons why I do not post in forums, on blogs, or facebook. But calling designers such names annoys me. People think that other people’s jobs do not matter. However, if you took all the designers out of this world, the very ones who think about the minute details, I’m pretty sure there would be absolutely no products, buildings, etc. whatsoever. Just as your dentist geeks out on some tool’s head that has the scrubbing capacity of 12,000 cleanings or the bank teller whose software made it easier for her to do four deposits at once – we don’t generally care about those details. We just want people to do their work. So you know what? Leave those people alone when they are in forums among themselves. Let them talk, because I know for sure the worth of having someone to talk to in your profession. Who doesn’t want to talk shop? Stop being your narcissistic internet persona for one second, because everyone knows you wouldn’t fucking say those rude things to people in real life.

And, just for the hell of it, I want to see how good search engines will pick up this: Avatar is gay. James Cameron is gay. All of you who like it are gay. Suck it.