Work smarter

I’m finding it very difficult to want to work. There are times when I’m completing a task and feeling very good about it all because – well – it feels good to be productive.

Other times, I just want to have it all rot away so that I don’t have to do or think or plan. I’m not going to say I worry, but it really doesn’t feel all that great when you need to work this much and the free time is like a guilt trip.

You should be working, Muriel. Why are you sitting there, watching re-runs of Wings?

P works much harder than I do – and he would do it without a single break if I wasn’t around. I don’t know how he does it really; I think he can see our future better than I. He knows he’s working so hard for what we want in our life, and I feel like I’m working (or procrastinating) so hard for nothing.

As if I’m wasting my life away.

An industrial robot reproduces all 66 books of the bible in calligraphic script. The process takes seven months, non-stop.

Even if it’s a machine, the idea of smelling that ink and seeing the typography makes me all dreamy.

Want to make this month your most creative? Our resident creative expert offers up a different exercise to complete each week. At the end of the month, see how differently you’re seeing the world around you and your work.

Week One: Approach one project in a different way every day.
Each day since the 1960s, the Japanese-born artist On Kawara has made thousands of “Today” paintings, hand-drawing the month, date and year on canvas after canvas after canvas.

Try a variation of Kawara’s routine. Pick a creative project you’re working on—or one you want to start—and spend an hour each day this week approaching the project in a different way. If it’s a visual piece, look at totally different styles, colors and sizes each day. If it’s writing, try different words, rhythms and points of views. If it’s a recipe, substitute different spices, cooking methods or plating options. If it’s a piece of music, play around with different melodies, lyrics or instruments.

Do the same project a different way every day. See what turns up.

It sounds boring, but in fact, building lots and lots of prototypes is fascinating. I always think failure is more important than success because you learn something from failure. The process of gathering yourself together and overcoming the disappointment and of trying another idea is — it’s a sort of drug, actually, for me. ...And I wish children were marked at school by the number of failures they made. I think they should be given extra marks for having failed and learned how to solve a problem.

Great Expectations by Todd Henry

Creativity is rhythmic and requires peaks and troughs of productivity. We can’t constantly live at the peak.

It’s a law of graphic design: Clients are capable of extraordinary stupidity.

Don’t Shoot the Client

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. But I ended up going to Monster.com for some info to give to Birgitte and I start looking up graphic design jobs in Portland.

AND I APPLIED.

There were only two, so it’s not a big deal. And I highly doubt I’ll receive a response, but oh my gosh what if?

I also applied to a ton of local businesses looking for a graphic designer. I’m so silly.

All of these don’t apply to me, but a lot of them do. (I have definitely almost rear-ended a car, but my typing is outstanding, if I may say so myself.) So I thought I would share the humor to any other designers out there.

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(in no particular order)

• You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
• You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
• You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your friend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
• You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
• You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
• You consider meals interruptions.
• You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
• You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
• You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
• You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
• You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
• When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
• When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
• You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
• You’ve actually paid for a font.
• You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (Everyone thinks they are a designer.)
• 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.
• You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
• You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
• You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel (and not affectionately).
• You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
• You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
• You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
• You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
• If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a gazillionaire 3 years ago.

Thanks to BittBox

I need to make myself.

From now on, I have to take steps to improve my (and our) work lives. We want what we want, and I want what I want, and how are we supposed to achieve such things?

Step One: Wake Up!

I’ve been working on school work every day, which is good. But, I’ve left the work behind for P, which isn’t good.

So, tomorrow I will photograph and start editing the products of one our clients. Perhaps even start up on some new website design for a different client.

Once I’m on summer break, I’m sure I’ll be able to help more, but if we want our own house with our own lives, I need to help him.