< irrational >
I get upset when someone tells me they liked my first design way better than the second.
I get upset when someone tells me they liked my second design way better than the first.
When they ask me, I say I don't care. They both have their benefits.
</ irrational >


At work yesterday I was asked to explain the designer process to my manager. He doesn't understand what I do as a designer at all. He's tried looking through my files and can't make heads or tails of them. So, I explain it to the best of my ability. As a designer I find it difficult to explain things without visuals. It's also hard to stay big-picture, but I managed. He appreciated my explanation, took notes, and said I helped him understand a lot.

Towards the end of our impromptu, closed door meeting, I revealed my little rant about being a designer. I think this is primarily a woe for web/print designers, but might also apply to you other designers out there in the wild blue yonder. I didn't know how he'd take it, but he was being open-minded and listening, which was nice.

< rant >
I said, "When a designer does something right, something perfect, it takes a long time to get there and make everything work cohesively together so that when others view it, they don't have to think. Everything makes sense. Everything looks easy. So, in looking easy and simple, they think that the effort getting to that point was easy and simple."

In reality that effort takes lots of time, trial and error, battles, and testing. Nobody sees that. They see easy, so they think easy. Sometimes I stare at a wall or ceiling for hours. I go for walks. It might look like I'm doing nothing, but really I'm mulling over my data inputs and trying to think of the best way to implement it. There might be 4 right ways to implement the data and an infinite wrong ways to implement that data. Sometimes you implement it a wrong way and you have no way of knowing it's wrong because you're too close to it. It takes a fresh mind of another to point out any problems and how to make it better.

</ rant >

Thankfully my manager was able to understand me and my random wandering speech. He made an analogy to football (U.S.) players receiving the ball. On the field they make it look effortless, but it take a long time before the team is able to perform cohesively without error.

I guess that makes me a pro football player or something.

Art eventually. I do have stuff done, but a new computer has prevented me from uploading anything. My Dell broke unofficially. I'm claiming Vista broke it, but XP was doing a pretty good job at breaking it, too. I ended up purchasing a mid-range Macbook. I'm just bummed I have to buy all those CS programs again.

I've been wanting to do a lot of art here recently, more wildlife illustrations. I dunno if you guys would be interested in that or not.