Such · a · pretty · girl · Happy · in · an · ugly · place

The office moved last week. We’ve gone from a dark little cave to a bright, echo-y hall of douchebaggery. I never thought I would miss working in the cave that completely blocked all means of cellular communication.

I am one of three designers that did not get an office. This is still a step up for me, though, because I was previously at the tiniest desk in the office. I now have a big-girl desk that I haven’t quite gotten used to. All of my stuff is still crammed into a tiny corner, and I lose job jackets because the account execs drop them wherever on my desk and I keep forgetting that it’s all my desk.

My desk is right outside of pervy coworker’s office. He’s taken to listening to terrible, whiny 90s radio rock on his shitty internal speakers. I guess he thinks because  he has an office that it’s cool to play music with the door open and leave it going as wanders aroung. My adjacent coworker finally had enough and stayed late to tear pervy coworker’s computer apart in an effort to silence the speaker.

The acoustics in the office are terrible. We have a nice high ceiling, which makes for insane echo. There’s no place to go in the office and talk without everyone else hearing it. One of the owner’s major complaints about the old office was how sound carried, and it’s at least 50 times worse in the new office.

On our last day at the old office, pregnant coworker was on one of her plentiful conference calls via speaker phone. The owner walked by and muttered, “I can’t wait until I don’t have to hear that shit anymore and I can just tell her to shut the goddamned door.” I’m pretty much convinced that the reason all the account execs got offices with doors in because the owner was tired of hearing everyone’s conference calls.

The first day in the new office, pregnant coworker jumped on speakerphone. I walked up to the office manager’s desk (which is on the opposite end of the office) and said, “You’d think that she’d close her fucking door since she has one.” The office manager couldn’t believe that it was pregnant coworker’s phone because it was so loud. The office manager told me that she was going to go back there and make lots of noise until the door was shut. I left for lunch and when I got back, the office manager stopped me to tell me that the owner had gone over in the middle of the conference call and slammed her door. We had a hearty laugh.

Speaking of pregnant coworker, I found out recently that she threatened legal action if we didn’t provide her a breastfeeding room at the new office. Eventhough the vice president and the office manager pumped in their cars and bathrooms, she’s too good to do that. She actually said “I’m not going to sit on a toilet for hours while I pump.” Hours?? Really? It’s going to be great when she gets back from maternity leave (assuming she returns, I’m not 100% that she will), and does absolutely nothing because she’s too busy being an entitled cow.

birthday jesus-one of the most hilarious stock images i've ever found

I started working on xmas themed ads in August. Ugh.

We have a client that has a large “worship” market, that they believe is only christian although that is not the case. They always want to really jesus-up the mailers and ads they do, eventhough a pretty large chunk of their mailing list are synagogues. So instead of fighting it this year, I just decided to search “christmas jesus”.

The search yielded this beauty, which I am compelled to work into a mailer now. It’s too tongue-in-cheek to just let it slide. If i’m going to be forced into pandering to the evangelicals, I might as well have fun with it.

I’ve also found out recently that:

my pervert coworker wears girls’ jeans. Not that this surprises me in the least because he’s in his 40s and dresses like he aspires to grace the pages of latfh.

and my pregnant coworker got bit in the ass for looking at daycare centers when she was in her first trimester instead of pediatricians, like a sane person would do. She was on the phone with her preferred pediatrician for most of an afternoon trying to bully herself into a spot. An argument which she eventually lost.

I am now guiding my office into the wonderful world that is social media advertising. I pointed them toward the (canadian) Nissan Hypercube fiasco as a cautionary tale. I actually would like to delve into this marketing disaster in-depth, but it’s been done many, many times over now. Suffice it to say, I’m glad that my company is utilizing me as a user of said social media to guide our efforts, instead of some marketing douchebag that really doesn’t know anything abut the medium.

I’m hoping that my company will realize that I’m more than an inDesign and Flash jockey. Not that I want to get into marketing in the slightest, but I feel as though I’m being woefully underutilized.

excuse the sad, chipping toenail polish

This week has been full of ridiculous purchasing. First off I purchased a camera, the Canon SD790IS which i got an awesome deal on. The macro on this camera is amazing, it will focus from about an inch and a half away. I want to marry it and have its babies.

oh the shallow depth of field...

Hands down the best macro I have ever seen out of a lowly point-and-shoot. I couldn’t even see the fuzz on my silicone cover with my eyes.

my filofax's clasp. gorgeous macro. i can't say it enough.

I’ve had the camera for a bit, but only got to test-drive it for the first time today on my lunchbreak. I think I may need to change underpants now, oh my god.

However, I’m kind of regretting buying this because the fan on my laptop’s processor finally gave up the ghost. I swear to god that Apple engineers their intel macs to immediately break down at the three year mark. So, I’m being forced to upgrade a bit early. I was planning on upgrading next year, but Macbook forced my hand.

I’m going from a Macbook Pro 2ghz to a Macbook Pro 2.66 with the “anti-glare display”. One of the things that was holding me back was a lack of matte display in the new models. Glossy screens are useless for calibrating for CMYK press production, and since I’m primarily doing print-based design, I need true print color. However yesterday, the day the 15″ matte displays were released, was the day my fan went down in a deafening blaze of glory. Thank you Apple, for allowing me the choice of a matte display — something I’m sure you only relented to stocking again due to the combined outcry of the design industry — and charging me a $50 surcharge for it. It’s beyond me how a matte display could possibly cost 50 additional dollars to produce. Especially since in my generation of MBP, the generation you released the first glossy displays in, you were charging an additional fee for the glossy display. There should not be an addtional charge to change screen finish. Period.

the post-revision round 3 "minor changes" effected 25 of the 64 pages

The catalog that has been owning me for the past month is complete. Mechanicals made and uploaded to the press at 11:20, our deadline was noon. Although the client was seemingly trying very hard to get that to not happen. Not only did we get one day to make any “final tweaks” they had to the document, which included a 2nd redesign of an entire section, we got a redesign of a spread at 5 o’clock yesterday.

this is a 64 page catalog that I had 5 days to initially roll out. 3 days for R1 revisions, 2 days for R2 & 3 and basically half a day for the final revisions. Did i mention that the client gave us pages 1-3 days late for every round? A few times opting to send us very low res scans, that we couldn’t even read, at the end of the day the revisions were due, which was useless and we’d have to wait for the next day shipment anyway.

Why can’t more clients just mark up pdfs? It’s so much less hassle. If you’re working in marketing, you should have Acrobat pro and know how to place comments. You shouldn’t be:

• Faxing over changes (This is especially fun when they reference colors you can’t see.)
• Scanning and emailing low res images with changes written on them
• Sending changes in a Word doc, especially if it’s a multiple page document and your changes don’t reference anything other than the sentence that needs to be changed. We designers love a good scavenger hunt! And by “love” I mean “will punch you in the neck for sending us on”.
• Mocking up the design you want in Excel (Seriously. Excel.)
• And under no circumstances, should you be embedding low res images in Word/Excel documents and be expecting a designer to pull these images out and convert them to suitable print res files with our design alchemy.

This should be required upon art school graduation.

I’m always concerned when I get thrust into an art directing position. Not because I’m concerned with my ability to perform the job, but because i’m so snarky and have such high standards. I’ve been working on a way to work the Design Police Visual Enforcement Kit into my everyday life, in a way which won’t make anyone cry.

I’ve been vindicated at my day job. The guy who was hired on that didn’t know anything was fired. However, not before before he created a cover for one of the two catalogs I’m working on in completely the wrong program. I found out at 4:40 that the cover had to be completely rebuilt by end of business. I managed to get it done, because I am a design ninja, but it screwed up my Friday. I had another catalog due then and I was rushing all day to pull it off, making up the time I lost having to rebuild that cover. Who builds a catalog cover in Illustrator, without bleed if the entirety of the catalog is built in InDesign? Meeting that guy convinced me even more that SCAD is not the place to go for a quality education in design. They awarded him a graduate degree and the only only program he knew how to work efficiently was Illustrator.

I would like to preface this with my distaste for introducing non-chocolate flavors of Frosty. Frosties are supposed to be chocolate, and that is all. Not vanilla, not a part of a shake, not some odd blizzard-esque concoction, but chocolate. Which for some reason arouses a great thirst whenever I have one, like they’re full of salt.

Wendy’s is running quite possibly the most annoying campaign for their new “Coffee Toffee Twisted Frosty”. One, the name is stupid, and two, this is the kind of crap they’re spamming the air waves with:

That commerical was on incessantly before I stopped watching tv around the time MJ died. I couldn’t take 24 hour news coverage of Michael Jackson interspersed with this crap. What on earth is Wendy’s target market? I honestly can’t figure it out from their commericals. It almost seems like they’re targeting specific foods to specific audiences. And Frosties are apparently targeting the hipster douchebag demographic.

Bonus: As I was searching for the first obnoxious commerical, I ran across this one:

There seems to be some sick trend of making up jingles and trying to pass them off as being legitimate. Like the stupid $5 Footlongs commercials where everyone starts singing the $5 footlong song like it’s been around as long as the Big Mac song and everyone knows the words to it. Or the Hillshire farms “Go meat!” cheer, which, I’m forced to admit makes me giggle.

My jingle hate is exacerbated by the ever-so-timely use of a boyband. This commerical would have been current 9 years ago. It’s a shame Wendy’s spent thousands of dollars to get this crap made. As much as I hate the first commerical, it at least follows current advertising trends. And yes, I do realize that the commerical is a parody, but it falls flat on its face even taking that into account.

Between this and McDonald’s complete rebrand to targeting the young urban crowd, the only fast food place I can get behind advertising-wise right now is Burger King. At least Burger King is successfully targeting the young adult demographic and not just making flailing attempts. I also appreciate the utterly bizarre nature of Burger King’s advertisements, and concurrently find them insanely creepy. It works for them for whatever reason. I’m curious to see how the other companies will find their niche.