But I’m doing none of that. I’m waiting for a photoshop file to slowly transfer from my office machine in Raleigh to my home, where I am at now. I am at home today because I was told by my sales director that he had cleared it with the big boss and I could take a couple of days off this week while it was slow. You know, to catch up on errands such as above, the basic necessities of life and such that are hard to get to when you work everyday for three weeks straight and live at your office for days on end.

But just I was about to walk out the door for my coffee and hair cut, etc. I received a call from the sales director, who let me know that (oops!) the big boss had no idea I was out of the office today a client needed a change to some ad I had created months ago because it was going into some catalog they were having printed and the catalog was already at the printer and the changes need to be done PRONTO!

Yeah, the sales director lied to me. He does that a lot. In his effort to solve any problem that comes along, and keep me from going insane, he often tells me what he thinks I want to hear. I’m not sure if he believes the things he says, or if he really knows he’s lying. Sometimes I think he makes up realities in his head. There will be future posts about how crazy my sales director is…

So my errand day has been delayed while waiting for a big ass PSD file to transfer from my work machine. Those bastards are lucky I know how to set up VNC and a SSH tunnel. Of course they don’t realize that I know those things, they just expect me to be available to get something done whenever they need it done. My coffee and hair cut be damned.

But here is the highlight of this post. Below is a screenie of part of the ad ‘corrections’ that were sent to me from the client for todays project. Yes, it is a very illegible hand-written post-it note that was slapped on top of a printout of the previous ad I created for them. 10 points to whoever can guess the whole thing:

I think my company name is actually written in there, but honestly I can’t be sure. This sort of thing happens a lot, by the way.

This was a mighty rough week. I lived at the office all week. I ate, breathed, slept and basically lived here while designing print ads. It’s a nightmare, the deadline for this 700+ page issue. But now it’s over… time to head to the Broad Street and be bullied around by private party planners demanding to know why I wasn’t there earlier to help their band set up. Fun.

Here’s a quick thing. I came up with something really cool a few days ago. I had to create an ad with a ’sixties’ feel. Halter tops were involved. Therefore I found a stock photo of a halter top. I though it would look very cool to have the halter top be an actual color photo, but have the girl wearing it be a silouette. I’m sure this has been done before, but I’m not a professional designer people. Anyway I had a photo of a halter top to work with, so I had to find a photograph of a girl from the correct angle to match the halter top photo. Even after I found the photo, it took some creative photo-shopping to make the thing look seamless. Here is my creation:

I liked it a lot. I decided it was the most creative thing I had done in a while, and would surely be a standout point in our otherwise garrish magazine. When the client saw it, their response was ‘Um, that doesn’t work for me. Please make it brighter and more risque. And throw some peace signs in the background for god’s sake’.

After much huffing and puffing I did exactly what they wanted, because that is my job. To my amazement I found a photo that worked perfectly with my layout, of a ‘more risque’ girl in a sixties outfit complete with halter top. Here is my second try:

The client’s response- It’s perfect! Just leave out the girl….

Total time spent on two versions of an ad with a girl wearing a halter top - around an hour and a half. Number of girls wearing a halter top in the final ad - zero. Time wasted? Around an hour and a half.

This happens here a lot. It tends to destroy whatever creative streak I’ve managed to eek out of my soul while doing this job. Lame.

That’s all. more soon.

Yeah I know it’s been a while. I’ve got a list of those ‘I hate my job’ posts in the works, I swearz it. All that’s needed is till fill in the blanks, etc. etc.

But anyway it’s after 3am and I’ve already wrote long-ass emails to my mom and the owner of the BSC so what’s a little blog-post gonna hurt anyone? Also, I have consumed more than my usual share of wine tonight. Be forewarned…

But my only subject right now is this really - why can I not get to sleep at a reasonable house of the evening? I would consider myself a morning person, in that when I am able to get myself out of bed in the morning I thoroughly enjoy the sunrise, dew in the grass, and birds singing. I love it, having the whole day ahead of me, endless possibilities, etc. But in fact it rarely happens, cause I can’t get to sleep at night. I have had periods over the years, mainly when I had an 8am job or class to get to, that I managed to get to sleep by midnight or so. But for most of my adult life I’ve slipped time and again into staying up till 2-3am or later. And the thing is, I’m not one of those people for whom this type of schedule is a good thing. I’m not a night-owl, as it were. My body *needs* 8 hours of sleep a night or I start getting cranky. Not only that, but I’ve consistently proven that those 8 hours should ideally come between 11pm and 7am. At least, that’s what I remember from grade school, cause I think that’s the last time I routinely went to sleep at 11pm. If I routinely go to sleep at 2am and get up at 10am (like lately) I will become a walking zombie within a few days.

And so it has been for the last few weeks. I moved in recently with my girlfriend of five years, Maryjo. Ohhh, you didn’t hear about that internet? Yeah, it’s my official excuse for having no time to write anything here for the past two months. I took it as an opportunity to start getting to bed earlier, and it worked for a few weeks. But old habits, they die hard. Maryjo now has an official fancy job at an officially fancy new library, meaning she has to be at work in Raleigh, NC at 8am. Our new place, it’s west of Carrboro, 45 minutes away from Maryjo’s fancy new job and library. So Maryjo hits the sack at 11pm now during the week, and since there is NO WAY I can make myself fall asleep at 11pm, I’m once again left by myself to spend the wee hours of the morning with you, dearest internet.

So true to word, it’s 3:27 AM, and tomorrow I will be a walking zombie. But for some *reason* I always feel wide awake after midnight. It’s like my final chance to relax and do whatever I wanted to do but didn’t get to during the day. Also, the internet does not help. Shame on you internet! For always being on 24/7, like a late-night white-trash walmart. But I should not blame just the internet, cause even before I had my first dial-up AOL account, I was staying up late cranking up the headphones or watching the MTV. Maybe it’s because my mom made me go to bed at 9pm when I was young. As I got older that hour was extended to 10pm, but still I think once I moved in with my dad at the age of 16 and he said ‘go to bed when you feel like it’ it was like a revelation to me. Like the door to the secret underground world of ‘late-night’ had finally been opened! Now not only could I watch Letterman on a regular basis if I wanted, I could even watch whoever came on AFTER Letterman!

And so it went through the years, to the point where for whatever reason my brain wants to keep going as long as possible at the end of the day. Most nights I have to finally tell myself ‘you really need to get some sleep now’ before I finally hit the hay and turn out the lights. It’s almost never because I’m actually to tired to stay awake. In fact, in the past couple of years I’ve started to even get a paranoia about it. Like, I’m afraid of sleep. Because you know, once you pass that point of no return, just where the hell does your brain *go* for several hours? I feel like I have to let go of my consciousness, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to give up control of my mind for several hours. It seriously freaks me out some nights when I’m laying in bed.

Sometimes I wish sleep was not necessary. I mean, imagine what you could get accomplished if you could stay up all night, every night! Food and sleep, these are things that I feel sort of waste my time a lot. Now food, it does have some upsides to it, but sleep… I just wish we were evolutionally beyond it already. I could be so much more productive!

But, alas it is not so. If I don’t get to sleep soon, I’ll be worthless tomorrow. At least until tomorrow night when the cycle starts again. I tell ya, I’m getting older now and my body is seriously suggesting to me at that now is the time I ‘get better eating habits’ and ‘get better sleeping habits’.

Well, we all must be slaves to our physical bodies in the end, but I tell ya I still thinks it’s a waste of time. Honestly, if I ever *really* need to relax I can just put on the headphones, and meditate to some classic Letterman…

Yes, for I am a graphic designer. I work for a national publication. There are many designers who contribute to this publication, but I am the main designer for the in-house team. I work for the publishers, who thankfully are located in a different state. I work in a basement office somewhere in North Carolina along with the sales director. Just the two of us together, for hours at a time, in a small basement office. For four years I have worked here, and there have been some terribly difficult weeks. You see our publication is a large one though mercifully bimonthly. It’s 300 pages minimum, and up to 800 pages on the larger summer issues.

And it’s mostly advertisements. I’d say around 50 pages of editorial and 250-750 pages of advertisements. Roughly. That’s where I come in…I design our clients ads for them. Full page glossy color photoshopped to the extreme ads. Notice I abbreviate advertisement as ‘ad’ not ‘add’. That’s the first point I’d like to make about my clients…Anyway, there use to be two of us designers slaving day and night in this little basement office to crank out our mega-magazine. But the other fellow was let go almost two years ago. Unlike me he was a trained professional artist. I’m just a hack who had enough computer+photoshop skills to get the job done. Though he had started there a year and a half before me and was completely burnt out, various bullsh*t excuses were made to get rid of him by the publishers/owners. Afterwards it was just me doing the majority of the design for our mega-magazine. And has been ever since. We used to have a saying, my fellow ad-man and I, that our magazine was made for average joes who could ‘pay to see themselves in a magazine’. Except most of them are not ‘average’ joes. They are filthy rich joes. They have the money to participate in the sport for which my mega-magazine is based on. And the question you must all have now is, which sport are we talking about? Just what are these advertisements for? Why so expensive?

Well, my publication has a name but I will not be revealing that. We also have a website but I will not be giving the address (suffice to say it is an ugly mess of bad flash animation). I will say this: it involves innocent animals being bred and treated like slaves. And made to do ridiculous tricks in a show ring while their owners and trainers wear ridiculous outfits. And being bought and sold for beyond ridiculous amounts of money. I think you will all catch on soon enough, but I will not be giving away any google friendly search terms in my posts. Nor will I allow them in comments, so don’t even bother trying to be the first to show everyone you know what I’m talking about. I mean, please feel free to comment, just don’t go naming things.

So, yes, I hate what I do. I hate the people I work for. I hate the clients I work for. I hate the industry that I work in. I don’t even much like being a designer. It’s was fun for a while but I am 300% burnt out on all of it now. But at least I can provide a bit of entertainment for you all hopefully and show you young ‘uns just how important it is to get an education early on based on something you enjoy doing. Imagine that, spending your days doing something you like and getting paid for it.

Without further ado - here is my first point of contention that shall be made: you CANNOT pull a piece of clipart from a google image search and use it in your national print ad. Except of course, you can, if your paying to be in our mega-magazine. Many of my clients are barely literate and none of them understand design concepts and especially not the concepts involved in digital design. So when they see this:

They assume it will be perfect for their national print ad where they are, in fact, trying to sell something. That is the original size image I received with my project file at my work desk, by the way. It has not been shrunk for the purposes of blog posting. If you understand the concept of DPI and LPI then you know where I’m coming from.

So there you have it. Me whining about my job: Part 1. The first in a multi-part series that I just know my gentle readers are going to enjoy the bajeebus out of.