It's hard to be a team player if there's no team!

As you might guess from the name of this blog, I've been at this design-thing for a long time. I've seen the industry go through a lot of changes. When I got my first gig as a staff artist at an ad agency, I worked with a whole team of other professionals, including customer reps, photographers, copywriters, typesetters, lithographers, color photo scanner/separators... all specialists in their fields. My job as a designer was to develop the idea and design, acquire the right team for the job and coordinate their work to get a final piece produced. If we'd been making a movie, I would have been the producer/director, working with a writer, staging and lighting staff, actors and the rest, then supervising the editor, and delivering the final work for distribution. Quite enough to keep one person busy.

The early 90s saw new computer tools being developed for design and production. By the mid 90s, I was concerned about being able to keep working; I knew the industry was headed toward being completely handled by computer and that all my hard-won skills with Rapidograph pens and T-squares and triangles were about to be rendered moot. I hunted for ways to learn the new skills I would need. Fortunately the place I was working at the time decided to make the jump from traditional production to digital production without ditching its current art staff, and we were all pretty much in the same boat: we all needed to learn EVERYTHING. Most of us had some geek-tendencies and started picking the skills up quickly. There was one guy who just wasn't getting it though -- he was great with the Xacto blade but not with the mouse. He didn't last very long, and I missed him. First member of my team gone.

As expected, more and more tasks were completed by the designers with our Macs. We set our own type -- goodbye to the professional typesetters. Good news: lots of flexibility, and no more waiting a day to get a strip of type back. Bad news: rather than using that saved time to shorten our workload, we started doing half a dozen variations to see what they looked like, and our clientele learned (and then demanded) that they could get those half a dozen alterations within hours instead of weeks. We got scanners, and started doing scans of logos and black and white photos, moving eventually to doing our own color scanning, which meant goodbye to the professional color separator. Good news: lots more flexibility with resizing, where before once we'd ordered the separations we were locked into that size. Bad news: we lost the years of expertise and access to super-high quality color scanning, and had to take on responsibility for color correction ourselves. We started embedding the scans into our text document so that the entire job could be completed on one work station, ready to send to the printer, which meant goodbye to the lithographer. Same sort of good news/bad news... production time compressed (not shortened, just packed more full of stuff), years of expertise lost. Then came the stock photos, and goodbye to the photographers. The copywriters had been blown off long ago; why pay another person? Anybody can write. (Gawd.)

By the turn of the century, a designer had become a composite of all of those lost professionals (while not acquiring the combined paychecks of the whole team, mind you!). The tools all became more powerful, and soon anybody with a computer and enough dough to buy the software could be a designer. There were fine-tuning tools in the software for beautiful kerning, delicate color adjustments, accurate trapping, and conversion from rgb to cmyk profiles. Not that the "just buy the software and start passing out business cards" designers (coff, coff) had a clue what any of that meant. Printers' nightmares increased with more and more frequent submission of completely unusable digital files (I noticed that early on, InDesign changed the color name in the Swatches palette from "white" to "paper." Gee, I wonder why...). And the designers were more and more required to be a one-person art and production department, isolated and dumped upon.

(Yes, I'm whining. I've been at this long enough to have earned the right, thank you.)

Another shift has happened, every bit as rattling as the transition from traditional to digital production, and it's not just in the design industry. Publishing, retail sales, document delivery, and so much more have been turned inside out by the transition from traditional media to online media. Newspapers can only carry yesterday's news. Retail shops can only carry limited stock, and can only drop their sale price so far. Document couriers? Who needs 'em? Good news: fast, fast, fast, fast. Lots and lots of options, and immediate comparisons. Bad news? Somebody's got to be able to create the applications that will get the message online -- fast and accurate, and a new challenge: hacker-proof -- and that's not going to be your friendly neighborhood designer.

Now personally, I really like programmers. I like their geeky creativity, their offbeat humor, their ability to make magic happen behind the scenes... and the fact that they can do so much that I can't. I like working alongside a programmer -- I like designing and organizing a layout, knowing that the programmer can write the code that will make those blank cells fill up with good stuff from a database, or create a usable document of answers to the questions in the form I've designed... "here's what I want to happen; what do you need from me?" That's what I used to do with the lithographer back in the 80s. We'd figure it out as a team. It was fun, it was challenging, and I got darned good at my job because I learned so much from those experienced professionals.

Sounds great, right?

Actually...

It's all supposed to be one person again. So goodbye designer, hello programmer. It's your turn to learn everything that I know because you need to "handle the web site." Job descriptions that come up with a search for "graphic designer" require a list of skills including php, javascript, jQuery... apparently there's really no more call for just a designer.  Where the transition was a matter of learning to use tools to manipulate a layout, now it's wandering off into a completely different and weaker part of the designer's brains. Same problem if it's the programmer being asked to also be the designer. The idea that this whole desperately complex job can be handled by a single individual is ludicrous.

Yes, I'm stating my opinion as if it were fact. It's my blog, deal with it.

I'm currently taking classes to upgrade my skill set, and have tried my hand at developing sites from the ground up, but they are, to date, pretty basic in their functionality. I can design it, but I still need help with the programming. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I still have to learn, if I'm going to remain viable as a professional designer. I would so much rather play to my strengths.

There are PSD-to-HTML services out there (the designer supplies a Photoshop layout, they chew it up into code), but I haven't tried them out yet. Maybe that's the solution. But I so so, so, so miss having a team to work with, someone I can sit across a table from, making notes on a sketch pad. Guess that's all handled online now too. It's as if we've all been asked to sit quietly in our own little isolation tanks and not interact with anyone anymore. Hey, just get out your smartphone and text. Keep your head down and walk right into a tree. (Or trip into a fountain at the mall.)

I miss my team.

The Exodus

Fall of 2011, and Facebook is rolling out a real-time ticker and their Timeline. And people are freaking out. I was all set to play with the timeline thing; thought it might be kind of cool, but... there's something else... FB follows me around the web, wherever I go, taking notes and reporting back to the rest of the FB world what I am up to. I don't even have to hit a "like" button or a "share on Facebook" link; it just knows where I went. 

Hmph. I don't even like someone following me around a store... much less around the web. 

FB is starting to feel like one of those flying bugs that won't leave me alone. It's annoying. And... it's invasive. I don't really WANT everything I do broadcast to the world, thank you... Seems that a lot of my friends feel the same way. A lot of them are cancelling their Facebook accounts (or planning to -- I'm curious about whether that's an easy process or a difficult one). A lot of them are porting over to Google+, which is finally becoming active instead of a silent wasteland. Myself, I pulled Facebook off of my main browser (Firefox), and launched Safari for the first time on this machine (which meant it was a browser with no preferences or cookies or history), and quarantined Facebook over there. If it's not going to play nicely with my other browsing, I just have to separate it. 

Bad social network. No cookies.

To DIY or Not To DIY, that is the question.

My sister Nancy makes a valid point in her comment to my last post ... it's not appropriate to restrict graphic software to use only by industry professionals. Not in this day and age of do-it-yourself everything. I have mixed thoughts about this trend.

I like very much that there are tools available independent artists like Felicia Day and Projected Twin to bypass the big studio entertainment business blockades. They can create and distribute their own creative work, gather their own audience, and stay in direct contact with them at the same time. The tools are getting more sophisticated, and while "The Guild" may never have the special effects of a Speilberg blockbuster... it doesn't need to. It's great and it's out there, and it's not by Paramount or 20th Century Fox or Tristar. Yay all over that.

On a smaller scale, there's a self-checkout at the library, and at the grocery store, and of course the gas station... do your own taxes online... ok, still good...

How about going to WebMD to self-diagnose? How about going to one of these online trading sites to pick some investments? There are lines drawn for things that can affect your health, like purchasing certain medications, but there are many other things that you get to do all by your own little ole self, whether you are able to make wise and informed choices or not. Granted, you're not going to lose your savings or your health if you choose to create a jpg when you really need a gif; I'm just wondering at what point it becomes more problematic than convenient to do it all yourself?

Yes, this is an extremely silly comparison. I bring it up as two points on a wider scale. Maybe there should be a scale of 1 to 10, where sewing on your own button is a 1 and doing your own appendectomy is a 10.

Acronym Soup

I've learned to dread the phrase "Can you send me my logo?" Years ago, that just meant sending a sheet printed logos in different sizes. Easy. Now it's this whole ordeal requiring a full-blown inquisition... what format do you want? ("Oh, I don't know...") OK, how will it be used? Is it being printed? Digital or offset? ("huh?") Somehow I have to extract a bunch of technical info from a non-technical person in order to know whether to make an rgb.jpg or a cmyk.pdf or a spot color .ai or an indexed .gif. If I just send them whatever I have on file, I inevitably get the phone call saying that wasn't what they needed... can I send it another way.... no, that wasn't it... could I just talk directly to their printer/web designer/engraver/sign maker and see what it is they need...

My opinion: The proliferation of desktop publishing software to the general public has been a wretched development. I almost think you should have to be licensed before you are allowed to handle these bytes of data. And Word should have some kind of a warning label. "You probably can't use this software for what you are planning to do."

Hello, new Mac

My trusty old Powerbook G4 finally passed into silicon oblivion... I took it to the nearest Mac shop for responsible recycling. Seems strange to think that it's not here anymore, even though I haven't been able to use it for a while (the graphics card sputtered out after a long illness). That little machine had become a part of my home. I was all moved into it and had it all set up, and could generally find whatever I needed even through the digital clutter. I must admit, it had become a pretty fair reflection of how I live in the real world -- too many notes-to-self on the desktop, too many old and unused applications still loaded, too many long-completed projects left on the hard drive, too many started but not finished projects left to keep the finished ones company.

And now here I have a brand spanking new one! It's spiffy, it's speedy, it's minty-fresh and has scads of available disk space. And no clutter at all! How long can I keep it organized? I wonder, if I can get a handle on keeping this little digital lap warmer clean, will it motivate me to keep the rest of my home clutter-free?

Probably not. But for right now... hello, zen. This is nice.

Slash and Churn!

I have a guest rant today! This all started with a question I fired off to a friend and fellow geek (ok, actually I'm seriously out-geeked here). Our exchange follows--used with permission, but my Guest Ranter requested anonymity "as it's probably half wrong, but it's the mostly-right part that counts." (Note... you have to get past a couple of exchanges of fairly dry Geekish before the Silly starts!)



Me: "Random question, what's the difference to a computer between a forward slash and a back slash? Don't they both just indicate directory structure?"



GR: "MS-DOS, Windows, and variants use the backslash "\" for folder structure. UNIX, Linux, and most all other operating systems use the forward slash "/". Windows systems running IIS for serving websites use the forward slash for folder structure on the front-end of the website. Clear as mud?"



Me: "The only thing I didn't follow was "IIS" -- is that a system, or a flavor of a system,...? Weird that they'd change from one style of slash to another from the computer system to the web server. Wonder if there was a reason for that. (Or if it was like a NASA thing; one side uses metric and one side doesn't and let's explode something...) "



GR: "IIS is Internet Information Services, Microsoft's suite of site-hosting services for "serving up" WWW, FTP, etc. sites. Similar to Apache web server for Linux.



The internet (and later, the WWW) was around long before Microsoft and Windows existed. It was a happy place, full of unicorns and rainbows and peace-loving beings from all walks of life. The earliest (and still dominant) infrastructure for the internet was built on mainframes and minis running VAX, VMS, AIX, or other UNIX-like systems, so the WWW and the rest of what we collectively refer to as "the internet" sort of inherited that style of folder structure. And then, along came Microsoft.



When Microsoft came on the scene with DOS, and later, Windows, and started making their Operating Systems more network (and thus, internet) capable, by necessity they had to adopt the existing nomenclature for folder structure, especially for running servers. Otherwise, while the rest of the world is linking to http://www.site.com/folder/file.html, if Microsoft had it their way, sites running on Windows would be http:\\www.site.com\folder\file.html and you'd have broken links all over the place.



On the "back end", the nuts-and-bolts part of the server where it does its dirty work, Windows servers still handle folders as drive\folder\file.html but automatically translates that to drive/folder/file.html when the file is being publicly served.



It gets really frustrating when lazy web developers use old and broken versions of MS's Front Page suite, which never did correct the / vs \ behavior, and you'd wind up with a link like "http://www.site.com/files/drivers\windows\driver.exe" --see the switch halfway through? This is still such a widespread problem (solely created by Microsoft's unwillingness to conform to perfectly acceptable standards), there is a plugin for Firefox called "slashy" which automatically corrects "broken" slashes. Of course, IE automagically fixes this bad behavior, but no standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Opera, or Konqueror automatically fix this behavior, because technically speaking, it shouldn't be there in the first place!"



There's supposed to be a fun little end-rant-tag here but I've yet to figure how to get this site to stop stripping it out...



This makes me think of the scene in Zoolander, with Fabio accepting a "Slashy" award: "This means you see me as Best Model-Slash-Actor... and not the other way around." [smirk]

An existing and proven business model?

I think I'll set up a design business like an insurance company. My customers will have to pay me a monthly retainer to do nothing. If they DO have a project come up, I will raise the rates and make them pay a certain amount of it up front, no matter how many months worth of retainer fees they have already paid. If they have any existing bad design, I will refuse to do any new design work to improve it. And if they ever try to do something on their own that I deem dangerous to good design, I will drop them as a client.

Should work, don't you think?

Next they'll just put 'em in the Crackerjacks box

This just in... as posted by Babs, my icon and inspiration (and the answer to so many of my "drawing a blank" design times: "WWBD?") -- iStock has made it possible for all us designers to unload all those pesky logos that are just taking up space on our hard drives. And here it is:

If you create one of the first 10,000 approved logo designs for iStockphoto by January 1, 2010, we’ll pay you $5 per approved logo and another $5 if we reach 10,000 approved logos by that date. So fire up Illustrator to create some amazing logos or dust off all those much-loved logos that never made it past the third round with a client.
Woo hoo. "Fire up Illustrator", huh? This is just depressing.

Re-defined behind my back!

I've discovered something. Designers are now programmers, by agreement of just about everybody except myself. Listings for graphic artists are now all for User Interface Developers, Flash Developers, Actionscript developers... I'm sure there are quite a number of skilled visual creative professionals who also happen to be skilled programmers, but in my experience, the visualizers usually cringe at excessive use of code, and the code crunchers would prefer not to be pixel-jockeys. But during my career I have seen the job of "designer" absorb several other careers: image scanner, typesetter, lithographer (truly though, how many designers even now really understand how or why to trap their graphics?), air brush retouch artist . . . I miss the collaboration with all these skilled pros. As a new artist at an ad agency, just a few months out of school, I was able to spend a lot of time with one of the local litho shop owners, and I learned more from him than I did in any of my college classes. Now the guy sells real estate. Sad, this elimination of the team, but apparently it was inevitable. But I cannot for the life of me see how a designer is now also supposed to be a programmer. There is some helpful software, yeah... but I simply can't see it happening. Perhaps the programmers will now all be expected to be designers... aye me. I've already seen the results of THAT idea. No, no, it takes two completely different types of thinkers to really do both of those jobs well. Unfortunately that's not what the ole bottom line wants. The bottom line wants to cross right through one paycheck or the other. I have no solution for that.
...OK... let's see.
play_btn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, playMovie);
stop_btn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, stopMovie);
function playMovie (event:MouseEvent);void
Oh, yeah. That's what my BFA is all about.

Designer, Brand Thyself!

I finally got a custom header put together for this blog. Truthfully I didn't mind the "generic" Blogger layout at all. I like what they came up with a lot, and it was no chore for me to keep my musings under their very well-designed header while I figured what I should do on my own. It's much easier for me to design a look for someone else than it is myself. My sis can probably relate; it's similar to her hiring a professional organizer to help her clear the clutter. Hire someone who isn't ATTACHED, who can just get the darned job done. I'm much too aware of the huge list of fonts on my system and I want to try each one. Does it REALLY express what I want to say? Do I want to wear that as a brand, all the time? This process becomes a great exercise in learning empathy for my own clients.

The font I used this time is an old one, Lubalin Graph. It's not what I was planning to use at all; I was planning more of a hand-made font, maybe a very-slightly-funky sans serif. This one I just tried out and it sat there properly. For now. It may change. Right now it's just a header, I'm not calling it my brand.

The art is a painting I did called "Bright People." It's in oil, which is not a medium I use now (too messy!); I just really like the imagery here. What are those colorful people talking about? Why is everyone else blandly staring off in another direction? I would hope to be one of those bright people.

Now if I can just find a type face I feel that way about.

Blowups and no sense of proportion!

I can't get over how few people seem to understand the concept proportion. No drama, and nothing abstract or conceptual here, just the literal ratio of height to width. I get a lot of requests to enlarge a photo or piece of artwork to fit a certain area (usually to fit a standard-sized frame), and the toughest concept for people to GET seems to be this: if I enlarge it one direction, it's going to be enlarged the other direction too. Either that, or it gets stretched or scrunched. I'd think that anyone who works with images would have a good grasp of this idea, but apparently not.

I dunno if anyone will ever see this, but I'm going to make a recipe to follow here.
Divide the desired width by the original one. Take that number and multiply it by the original height. If that result is the same as the desired height, then you've got an original of the same proportion as the new size you want, and you can enlarge it without having to crop it. If not... guess what. Something's getting cropped off.

The options:
1) "float it" -- sort of like the "window box" that movies sometimes use if they are being shown on a TV screen.
2) Distort it -- if it's scanned digitally for enlargement, it CAN be enlarged more one way than another to fit; sometimes you can get away with it if it's not to drastic. Don't try it on a portrait though. Yuck.
3) Get a custom frame made.

Random graphic communication

I've been keeping watch lately for communication graphics without words that just show up as part of a day-to-day routine. It's actually trickier than I might have imagined to find them. A red octagonal sign at an intersection communicates "STOP" even before you notice the word printed on it... but the word is still printed there. Some of the nonverbal graphics I've been consciously aware are arrows (up and down buttons on an elevator. A severe bend in the road. More info on the back). I also will count the striped crosswalks painted at intersections; those have a pretty clear meaning without need for explanation. But I'm disappointed; it seems there would be more examples than that. I'm either seeing them but am so used to them that they are only registering subconsciously, or I live in such a small town that there just isn't much need.

There is one thing I remember from one of my previous jobs though -- it was in the pressroom, which was full of all sorts of big heavy equipment. One machine had a couple of huge rollers that paper fed through, and there was the silliest graphic stuck to it as a warning... it was a silhouette of a guy with long hair, and the hair was caught between the rollers. Silhouette-guy's mouth was wide open; I could practically hear the yelp. It was an effective graphic, I must admit, even though it would never win any design awards.

Who is using a contemporary iconography now? The search continues.

Accessible Info

In the last week I've been asked twice what exactly a graphic designer does. I'm sure there are graphics professionals who would define the role differently, but as far as I'm concerned, it's my job to make information visually accessible (as well as unique and attractive). The old Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes entry packages are an example of anti-design (my opinion). I suppose they served a purpose; miss putting one sticker in place and your entry is probably disqualified ("You may already be a sucker"). On the other hand, the early church had developed a whole iconography to make information accessible to even those who couldn't read (man with a bee hive? That's St. Ambrose. Saint with a palm branch? One that was martyred). Iconography is a little different now. Today if you see a symbol surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal bar through it, you know that you are not supposed to do something (don't smoke, don't enter here, no ghosts allowed). These are pictures that might save a thousand words, even if they don't necessarily paint as many.


I went to a design presentation some time back during which the speaker was disappointed in the lack of a contemporary iconography. Whatever Hieronymous Bosch might have been trying to say in his bizarre artwork is mostly visual gibberish now. And while this type of symbolism isn't quite as necessary now that more people are able to read, I think it is still possible to remind an audience an entire story with a recognizable picture. Our iconography has just changed from religious symbols to fantasy symbols: Indiana Jones with the bullwhip, the Jedi with their light sabres, Mary Poppins with an umbrella and really weird shoes. Or one of the bread and butter jobs of a designer now: branding. Red and white concentric circles for Target, a bloated check mark for Nike -- calling people to our new religion of commerce.


Those are my first thoughts on accessible information as a designer's job. I'm on the watch for examples of good communication and of buried communication. I'll see what I can post here.

Technical Hiccups

Cooooooold snowy day -- 27 degrees and windy. Whitecaps on the bay. Best gas price $1.67. Got let down by technology twice today... I have pretty snow pix to upload to my Facebook account, but all attempts at uploading have failed. On a lower-tech front, I have some sewing to do, but I seem to have bobbin issues today. Bobbin wants to tie knots under the fabric. Arg. Well, could be worse. Just found out another friend has been without power for 4 days... while my lights are on and my heat works! So not so terribly miserable. I'm wondering about motivation these days. So much I want to do, and don't. I think it's partly being lazy and partly being overwhelmed! Really do need to chomp things into smaller pieces and have some small successes, I think. Let's see if the Blog will let me upload some pix!! ***

Well, yes, there they are. Not gonna to the right-side align next time; it's not great. Pix are taken December 14 around March's Point. I dunno what the seagulls were excited about but they look good in the photo.

Holiday Music. Yech.

Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Filled up the truck for $1.79/gallon. Love the price drop, but hate what it's taken to get it.

On my mind now -- Christmas music. Ug. My graphics dept. is upstairs from a retail shop, and we have a holiday radio station playing non-stop. Does anyone really need to hear "Jingle Bell Rock" again in their lifetime? One of the gals downstairs really likes it. I, on the other hand, think it's some of the lamest music that could be foisted on us. I wouldn't object if there were some really grand music like Handel's "Messiah" or maybe Benjamin Britton's "Ceremony of Carols" -- but no, that sort of thing isn't anything that you can play at a retail shop, I suppose. Maybe if I had a passel of little kids that I adored coming to visit every Christmas, I'd have a different attitude toward this genre, but I don't... so it just makes me grinchy. Wasn't that how they forced Noriega out of hiding... by playing music at him that he didn't like, all the time?

Where in the world are my headphones...

Dream Teams

Tuesday nite, crazy windy. Best gas price $2.15 (!!).

I've been watching the "extras" on the Star Wars DVDs over the last few days. There's a running theme on the "making-of" featurettes included with a lot of the most amazing films (LOTR trilogy and Serenity are two more that come to mind) -- and it's how mindful each person in the production is of the vital contributions of the rest of the team. There's a huge amount of appreciation and respect shared among the crew members, particularly when they are working on a project that they are outrageously passionate about, and which is almost too doggone hard for them! It's wonderful to watch the special effects guys raving over the composer, the producer gushing about the costume designer, the director thrilled over the prop makers... all of them saying pretty much the same things: couldn't do my job without those guys ... exhausted but excited... wouldn't miss this for anything...

This looks like creativity at its absolute best. What a pleasure to be a part of that sort of team! And yet I hear and experience a much different thing back here in the real world -- many more stories of frustration and friction than camaraderie and mutual inspiration. What might the elements be which change a work environment from a dehumanizing place into an exhilarating one?

The first thing that comes to mind is a leader for whom everyone concerned has huge trust and respect (George Lucas, Pete Jackson, Joss Whedon... yeah, those would be folks you could probably trust to get it right...). Another thing is a project that's truly worth doing (will there EVER be another Tolkien?). And another thing would be a team of folks who know their job so well that they can work with confidence (as opposed to ego, which I think is a fraud's way of faking confidence). Must be a tough collection of things to put together. I wonder how rare it really is?

Well, as they say on the LOLcats web site... "want."

==========
P.S. Happy Birthday, mom...
==========

If we know history...

Quote: "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it." (Edmund Burke)
Another one: "History repeats itself."
Hmmm. What if we do know history? Even if we don't repeat it, will history take care of the repetition itself? Why am I asking this?

I'm nervous about something. I'm thrilled that the country has actually progressed to the point of electing a mixed-race man with a non Anglo-Saxon name into office. I have read so much positive reaction, not just from around the country but from around the globe (obviously, with some exceptions) -- overall it's such an attitude of optimism and hope. That's good. That's wonderful. It's so lovely to hope again.

But... someone who was aware of things in 1962, tell me if this feels familiar? I was two when JFK was shot, so I don't have a personal experience of it. But I've read about it. So much optimism stacked up around one man, and one idiot (or a consortium of twits, depending on your beliefs) who decided to put an end to it. There is certainly no shortage of idiocy in the world. I still can't believe the news clip showing McCain having to insist on claiming his mic back from a woman who was commenting during the campaign that it was just too scary, the idea of Obama becoming president because he was an Arab.... jeez. (Bravo to Colin Powell who made the perfect response to THAT sort ignorant goofball comment.) I just don't want to see stories like the deaths of JFK & Bobbie, MLK (or even John Lennon, for pete's sake) repeated. I don't know if the country could stand another heartbreak right now.
OK, next post will be cheerful. Promise.

Carefully wading into Web 2.0

Widget check: rain today, tomorrow & Saturday. Best gas price holding at $2.39.

Yesterday I got an email from one of my regular customers at work; she had just joined "Facebook" and put me on a list of folks she invited to join with her. I had read that Facebook was a bit less of a high school hangout than MySpace, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Maybe I'm a late adopter, but here I am with a blog and a social network page, taking a few curious steps into the current incarnation of the web. I feel like I'm standing exactly between two camps; one one hand the teens/tweens/treens (there's a new word) who have already plowed this path thoroughly (and who will probably snicker at what a newb I am ... ), and on the other hand many of my clients who are retired folks, thinking I'm the consumate computer expert. I'm somewhere in the middle.

[[[Hey sis, this is the new Middle Class. I found it!!!]]]

The next thing I need to do is get this silly blog customized. I don't mind the simplicity of the generic header, but I guess it's irresponsible as a designer not to put up one of my own. The difficulty is in wanting it to be PERFECT instead of just different. I've been going over ideas on updating my brand (I know, lingospeak... how boring). For the last couple of years, my home page has featured 4 window panes with a view of a dandelion and lots of blue sky. Not that the dandelion is particularly iconic for me; I just really liked the image. It was mostly about there being a view through the windows, and being able to choose which window to go through (click) to get someplace else. That's pretty telling about my own life; seems I've spent more than a couple of decades looking for a portal to go through, trying to get where I want to be. (Wow, my home page was more profound than I had originally planned. A little subliminal design action, I guess). Maybe that's a springboard for planning the next incarnation. But don't want to do it until I can use it to showcase some new skills, and before that I need to finish getting a good handle on the new software I've acquired... Achh. Where's the first domino??

History just got made

Tuesday, November 4, the night of election day. Gas down to $2.39.

The wait is over! History just got made: Barack Obama just made his acceptance speech as President Elect. -- cool, huh? I'm relieved. It feels so optimistic. Maybe I'm just tired of overly-rich old white guys in power. I am looking forward to seeing what the international reaction is to this result. I hope Obama finds a way to stay close to the ground and attached to reality; not allow himself to be stuck up on a pedestal or pushed by the political machine into some false illusion of what's actually going on. He's sure got his work cut out for him over the next few years. Could the country possibly have come to him in a bigger mess? (Previous administration doesn't get their cleaning deposit back.)

The bummer difficulty has been trying to find a way to watch the return results -- no cable TV in my place, and no broadcast reception, so I've been trying to watch the MSNBC live feed online, over a not-wide-enough-band connection. Hic-cup-spit! Very intermittent audio and video; the speech made NO sense! I hunted for an audio-only feed with no success, and finally found a plain ole radio doing a simulcast and caught most of the speech. Hmmm. Most of the time I don't really miss having TV reception. But every once in a while...

One other sort of whiny-poor-us bummer -- for any of us out here on Nowheresville Island, where our votes are submitted in a drop box which isn't even picked up until 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time-- our votes were sort of moot. I mean, they will be counted, and the numbers will be part of the history of the election and all, but it was all over before any of us had anything to say about it. Like I said, it's whiny. I guess the same could be said for any of the "still gray" states in the middle though. I didn't quite understand how it worked, truth be told, I had the results map in front of me, and you could mouse-over any state to see how things stood there. So many states were just assuming the votes would go a certain way. With 0 precincts reporting, Washington was already counted as blue, for instance. I guess some states it IS a foregone conclusion, but... well, it just seems sort of crass. Gee, I just said politics can seem crass, aren't I making a profound observation?

In the meantime... we have a re-run of the governor's race from last time -- the same two candidates facing off -- last time was, according to the Seattle newspaper, the closest governor's race in American history. It's now 9:30, and I just checked the most recent results online -- the incumbent had a "razor's edge lead." So could go either way again.

Soooooo onward through the proverbial fog. Hope for the light.

Sunday, rainy. Best gas price $2.45 and holding. Been a veg all morning.

Sometime in February all the TV signals will be digital. Analog TVs will need a converter or a replacement. I'm not fretting too much; I haven't bothered to sign up for cable in years, and the only broadcast signal that shows up in this remote area is so intermittent as to be unwatchable. My TV gets used for DVDs and tapes, that's all. Some folks may be in for a confusing time though. Check this out.