is that they don’t have to be rectilinear.
This lovely piece, illustrating a short story by Stacey Richter, is by Kirsten Harper, to whom I was referred by last week’s artist, Aaron Artessa.
Go see it on the home page, too—it may be there only until Thursday, though of course I hope longerarchived at Flickr.
After all my whining and demanding of assistance, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know that I finally commissioned my first illustration, and it is now online, live, in brilliant RGB:
This hot, hot pixel-on-screen action was produced by the multitalented and genial Aaron Artessa, whom I met at the club. It’ll be on the home page for only one week, so see it in its glory while you can. Next Tuesday, it will be replaced by the fruit of my second go at working with an illustrator.
In case you’re wondering where in tarnation I’ve been, the answer is “chained to my desk.” Man, this whole “job” thing is really cutting into my blogging time.
For a while there, I was cranking out a shocking quantity of ads and posters and booklets and thumbnails and Quicktime clips. Now our two “festivals of ideas” are behind us, and the website redesign has finally gone live, and I’ve been settling down to trying to make reasonably attractive images for the new home page—they’re much larger than they used to be, which makes my job simultaneously easier and more difficult. (I can’t work around totally crap images as easily, but I also don’t have to crop good images in painful ways to fit a cramped horizontal slot.)
Some tools I’ve been leaning on lately:
I’m sure there are more gadgets I’ve forgotten, but these are the first that come to mind.
Also: bless ye, all Flickr users who not only offer Creative Commons licenses allowing others to share and remix, but who also tag your photos. There is some great stuff on Flickr, and my job would be absolutely impossible if it weren’t for youse guys.
Photo: Pinnacles-30 by Ken Conley; some rights reserved.
Yesterday when I asked, “What does an ‘art director’ do?” Erin replied, “I dunno, exactly, but I do know they have a club!” To which I replied, in turn, “Those directors, and their clubs!”
Then, after work, I went out to have some beers with my club.
Which brings on this public service announcement: People, if you don’t live near a professional club, or if you don’t feel like the professional clubs in your area are the sort you’d like to join, start your own damn club. It doesn’t have to be clearly defined. It doesn’t have to be defined at all. It doesn’t have to even meet—maybe your blog friends constitute a club, as I like to think that mine do. But do try to have some kind of professional group you can call your own, however informal. It tastes good, and it’s good for you! Continue reading “Extracurricular Activities”
And speaking of directing art, tell me your trade secrets!
We’ve mostly been using Creative Commons–licensed Flickr images, Associated Press photos, Photofest, Mary Evans Picture Library (which doesn’t seem to work with Firefox on the Mac—grrr), cheap stock places like iStockPhoto, behemoths such as Corbis and Getty, and specialty archives such as USHMM. I’ve recently started trawling through the listings at PhotoServe, but I haven’t yet used anything from any of the agencies I found there. I’d also somehow never heard of the mega-agency Jupiter until last week.
We haven’t hired any illustrators yet, but we’d love to. Some illustration agencies I’ve been looking at are CIA and Riley. Also, the DrawMo! del.icio.us dump. Any advice or recommendations are welcome (the only illustrations I’ve ever commissioned in the past are maps for fantasy books; I’m not sure that’s the look we want).
Heeeeelp meeeeeee!
Beats me. I’ve never worked with one in my life, but now this is my job title, so I’m trying to figure it out. What do you think it means?
My job so far seems to break down as follows:
I’ve done this kind of work in the past, mixed in different proportions, under titles like “program associate” or “program director” or “webmaster” or “managing editor.” It’s not like my title matters to me—I’m going to do the work that needs to be done, regardless—but I do suspect that other people have expectations of what an AD does or knows how to do, and I have no idea how my skills and experience relate to those expectations.
Have you ever been or worked with an art director? What does the title mean to you?
“Senior page monkey” Schizohedron has written an excellent post called Tips for Fair Workplace Compensation. It’s not specific to the design industry at all, but I suspect this is something a lot of (so-called) creative workers are especially bad at, as we like to think that our jobs are more fun than other people’s. Dude, your job may be what you like to do, but it’s still a job. Get paid for it.
There are so many good points in there that it’s hard for me to quote anything without just copying and pasting the whole thing, but I’ll limit myself to the rousing finale:
They employ you. They do not own you. They don’t govern the course of your career. Only you can decide when your work and your interests no longer follow the same track. Identifying and accepting this sort of discrepancy is not a mark of failure. I define a failure as someone who neglects to collect every cent of compensation and every hour of time off he or she has earned, who instead works weekends and Federal holidays because they think this will impress their bosses. Don’t work for your boss. Work for your professional development, for the satisfaction of meeting your goals, and for the means to enjoy a comfortable, well-rounded life. Work for yourself.
I am a failure. Continue reading “Get What You're Worth”
Hey, remember when your computer had a leetle teeny screen, and all your software used to run slower, and you just couldn’t get as much work done as you do now?
Yeah, so try doing your multifaceted, exciting twenty-first-century job on a 12″ laptop that, despite being totally loaded when you bought it three years ago, is somewhat poky and sluggish when you try to run InDesign and Acrobat Pro and Photoshop and Bridge and Word and Eudora and BBEdit and Linotype Font Explorer and Firefox with at least four windows and sixteen tabs open. It does not make you feel very efficient, let me tell you.
Continue reading “Day 9 of 90”
In the home stretch here, trying to wrap up as much as I can before I leave so that my teammate, H., who’s survived a surprising number of defections, isn’t stuck with a whole lot of stuff that I could have gotten out of the way for her.
I’ve been thinking I should summarize what I’ve learned during my short stint in Big Publishing—and I’ve learned a lot. But it’s hard to put the big-picture stuff into words that don’t sound like a complaint. I don’t have any complaints about working here; just observations. I would have been happy to stay for a couple of years, if something better hadn’t come along. That was, in fact, the plan. But something better came along!
So. Some of what I’ve learned . . .
Continue reading “My last day!”
Having just gotten back from the weeklong holiday and totally forgotten how to do my job, while blathering about choosing text faces the other day I omitted two very obvious considerations:
What kind of type is used in similar books?
What typefaces are used on the book cover or jacket?