Wednesday, July 09, 2014

You know you're a graphic designer when...

Saw this today and thought it was far too true not to post. If you are a designer read, relate and enjoy. If you're not, but have spent any amount of time with me in which I was stressed about a project [that's always] then I think you will get a good laugh [at me]  

:: 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 boyfriend/girlfriend’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. (this is so true)

:: You know that rivers are more than just water.

:: When you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.

:: Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash

:: 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 understand that you speak a different language than your non-designer friends. It's called Adobe and they will never understand. 

:: 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 acuiring 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 trillionaire 3 years ago.

:: You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport

:: You watch the superbowl just for the commercials

:: You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away

:: You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas

:: You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes

:: You are completely immune to subliminal advertising

:: You look upon a well-designed project with either: sympathy OR extreme jealousy

:: Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse

:: You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride

:: You practically take caffeine intravenously

:: You have an appreciation for everything unique

:: You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.

:: You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement.

:: You buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like”.
(even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)

:: You look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am".

:: You need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed”

:: When you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.

:: When you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what the mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..

:: Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.

:: You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.

:: You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.

:: You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD

:: You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.

:: You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.

:: Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure

:: You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.

:: You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.

:: You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.

:: You’re up ‘til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.

:: The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”

:: You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.

:: Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.

:: The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.

:: You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.

:: You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.

:: You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”

:: Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”

:: And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…

:: You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.

:: Apple+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.

:: You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.

:: You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.

:: Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop

:: The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!)

:: Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.

:: Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.

:: You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.

:: When your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.

:: If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.

:: You Know You’re a Graphic Designer When deciding on the right crop doesn’t involve a choice between corn or wheat.

:: You’ve considered naming your children things like ‘Kern’, ‘Pica’, ‘Bézier’, and ‘Serif’.:: When you think watching “Helvetica” is the best thing to hit DVD, and even worse, when you know that the name Helvetica was derived from the Latin word for Switzerland and that it was originally called Neue Haas Grotesk. (Very very true!!!)

:: When you can’t remember the word “fog” and instead refer to it as the “Gaussian Blur.”

:: When you write essays, papers, and letters with InDesign.

:: When the best use for papyrus you’ve seen was on toilet paper.

:: You look forward to seeing PMS

:: Printing your wedding invitations cost more than the dress, engagement ring and honeymoon combined

:: Your favourite scene in American Psycho is where they discuss business cards

:: You test the stock and weight of EVERY piece of paper you come across

:: You always travel with your X-Acto kit

:: Your idea of a hot night is joining the serifs of two Baskerville L’s

:: When your mousemat is also your placemat :)

:: You’ve named your fish Gill Sans

:: You physically can’t get a Tattoo containing wording, for fear of the kerning being incorrect, or the characters being just that little bit different.

:: You can understand everything on this list.

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