Nice one. :-)

Hmmm.... This is very tempting, but I’ve had a heart to heart with “Norbert”. Please be nice and civil to one another. I’ll pass on this... for now!

ER

My ex-boss is a great example for this thread...
He used to stretch a Helvetica Black Condened to 200% instead of using Helvetica Black Extended. He used RGB-images at 72 dpi & blew them up to somewhere between 150 & 200% (in Quark, not changing the image size in Photoshop). It’s a miracle the company survived so long ;-)
At one point, I started keeping a log of all the things he f*cked up, but after only a few days I had to give that up because it was far too time-consuming.
Oh, and he always used the bold/italic/...-“styles” instead of the proper fonts. Any idea how ugly a bold, italic University Roman looks like?

The horror...

+
Ryan Ford

Well, I just saw some work earlier today from a designer I still had an ounce of professional respect for.

He had taken type and Photoshop-beveled the hell out of it. When I asked him about the reasoning behind such an atrocity, he proclaimed it was to create the illusion of depth, acting as though I was a fool for not seeing the obvious answer.

+
Ryan Ford

Hahaha. Yes. foo.

—————
Paul Ducco
Solid Creative

Thinking you know it all is a bad trait for a designer. Being
afraid of ’getting it wrong’ is possibly even worse.

Phil

Phil: Nicely put. In addition to these things to avoid ( there may be more) what advice to do you positively assert?

Thinking you know it all is a bad trait in any kind of person. If you cannot question yourself, you are capable of some scary things…

Deep down I don’t think anyone really thinks that anyway, it’s primarily a defense mechanism for insecuriity. The problem is if you think you know it all you may never realize what the real problem is.

The ego and insecurity are forever bound…

To a large degree I think that’s what the dance called design is all about.

peace

Thinking you know it all is a bad trait in any kind of person.

Paul, you are entirely correct: only truly ignorant people believe that they know everything that can be known about a particular subject or subjects: every truly intelligent person I have ever known has not been afraid to admit his or her ignorance on a great many subject, even their own fields of expertise.

Ignorance is no crime: we are all born ignorant, and overcome it to varying degrees as we grow...

This discussion has become interesting. good one.

—————
Paul Ducco
Solid Creative

My point of view is that there’s always a fine line between learning & working. It’s as if every project has new things to be discovered.

Could I put it in this way?

’The praises become empty when the learning process is completed.’

There’s also a line between process and result. The process honestly followed is always a learning process. If you have faith in yourself the results take care of themselves and are not something to be contemplated or gloated over once done. I try to just let it go and move on to the next process, which for me is the only part that matters.

The more I know the more I don’t know…

peace

Yeah interesting points about learning processes.

Perhaps a slight digression ...
I have reached a stage of my visual design career, where I now feel I HAVE to focus more on the process, the experimentation, the discovery of ideas and solutions that may not have been discovered whilst thinking “we’ve only got THIS time to produce a (e.g) financial report” or “the client has given us examples of what they’d like” - until now I believe my understanding of brief delivery and interpretation has existed within a kind of bubble. It’s bursting that bubble ... I think ... that holds truly good ideas and truly rewarding results for a career I love.

Basically ... the future is bright, adn bright is exciting.

:)

—————
Paul Ducco
Solid Creative