pantagruel

tortoise enclosure

John Cleese on creativity:

I like Cleese's metaphor of making a 'tortoise enclosure' to give creativity a safe space to emerge, which I wish more people understood. So I'm going to get on my soapbox about it.

Creating and maintaining a boundary of deliberate down time is difficult to do in a traditional workplace. I make a point of not answering the phone when I need a mental break, but there's fallout from that. People either get bent out of shape that I'm not immediately available to answer their call, or disguise their annoyance by breathlessly asking if I'm alright. Because I might just have been abducted by masked Tibetan throat-singers and whisked off to the icy mountains, where I will be forced to drink yak-butter tea for the rest of my days, all because I didn't answer my phone for a few hours. Or respond to my text messages. Or be online and visible via instant messenger.

There are some artists who can produce work that has discernible stages: you can see the start, the middle, the end, and the finished piece at any of its stages, and recognize it as work in progress. These are the designers and artists of the world who make control-freak clients very happy. At any point, the client can ask to see the work, and will be thrilled to be shown something that looks like a design or an illustration. Their creative process is methodical, workmanlike, and probably looks very professional from the outside. It has steps! Stages! You could use a Gantt chart to track their creativity! Those artists sit down at their desks and eagerly churn out product, don't mind being asked for updates, cope well with interruptions, and make any client who likes project management very happy. Their creative process is a mystery to me, but I suspect it involves a bullet list, outlines, and perhaps spreadsheets.

I am not one of those artists. My creative process:

Get given a project

Long stretch of apparently no work

Snarl at people who interrupt my thinking

Blindingly fast making-of-stuff

Show finished project to client

You see the problem, I'm sure. My creative process, from the outside, pretty much looks like nothing, for most of the time that I'm working on something. Until someone gets used to working with me, it can be rough on them if they're not a kindred spirit. My process can make a methodical person's head explode from frustration that I am not doing things the way they would; which is to say, The One True Way to Do Things.

For a long time, I felt badly for not being a methodical artist. Being methodical is seen as the path of the righteous: working hard, being diligent, a good student, a good worker. Working the way I do, on the other hand, smacks of procrastination, laziness, doing nothing, and not taking assignments seriously. Just last week, as I was leaving for the day, I waited for the elevator with some coworkers from departments that are seriously left-brained and methodical. One of them teased me about how much 'nothing' I do all day… not realizing that my workload is about five times what theirs is. But I kept my mouth shut, because a minute-long elevator ride is not the time to get into it. Incidents like that, driven by the assumption that I do 'nothing,' have plagued me throughout my academic and professional life.

Rands describes this nagging feeling over at Rands in Repose:

Up To Nothing

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you're doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you've suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that's still a known quantity -- I'm currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, "Why do we have leap years again? I forget." And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They're not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

You've built this guilt into your office. It's why your screen is not facing folks who walk through your door. You're worried: "They might see me doing nothing".

You're not up to nothing. You're aimlessly mentally wandering -- an act made famous by every bright idea ever had in the shower.

It's taken me decades to accept that trying to work in The One True Way to Do Things makes me miserable, unhappy, and results in subpar work. I simply cannot start making something until I can see it clearly in my head. That goes for writing, design, or art: unless I've thought out each aspect, I can't make it happen on the page, screen or canvas.

Now, let me be clear: working this way is not procrastination. I have deadlines; I plan out how much time each project will take; and I deliberately allow time to think about a project when I give an estimate of how long it will take me to finish it. It's also not a way to overlook the importance of craftsmanship and practice: if you think you're so talented that you don't need to regularly practice your skills, you're deluding yourself. It's setting aside time for decompressing and letting my brain be creative. It's building John Cleese's tortoise enclosure.

sitzarbeit

Every morning that I'm in the office, I make coffee, then settle down to catch up on the news. I churn through my Saltmine U email, turning the flood of emails I get from 4 pm - 6 am into items on my to-do list. On sunny mornings, I watch the sun hit the Getty Museum on the hill across from my office. It almost makes up for being at my desk by 6 o'clock. I'm not a morning person at all; it takes an immense amount of willpower for me to get up at 4:35 a.m., and get my butt in my office chair by 6.

Sitzarbeit is a great word. Not only does it mean sedentary work, but it also means 'the effort it takes to keep your ass in the chair and working.'
I read about 100 RSS feeds every morning in the time it takes to finish my first cup of coffee, before my minion gets into the office. I don't understand why anyone would want to sit through a barrage of useless 'news' during the dreck that passes for television journalism in the mornings, these days -- why put up with all the segments on celebrities' latest liasions, when you can read exactly what you want to know more about in the world? Madness.

In the morning's news gazette was an apropos article in AIGA's blog: "Embrace the Strain," by Andrew Twigg.

Fewer resources, limited time, slashed budgets, rising costs. These restrictions require we work faster/harder/smarter to deliver the same results as before the economy collapsed in 2008 and ever since, while it’s struggled to gain traction. Add to that the competition of “name your price” logo operations and so many websites soliciting spec work, and the idea of delivering successful work while still managing to pay the bills can be daunting—and even a bit depressing. … Since 2008, I have heard many designers bemoan limited budgets, clients who hire the owner’s cousin’s teenage daughter to build their website, clients who opt for a pre-designed logo purchased anonymously online, or timelines that are unrealistic (“I know it’s Thursday, but can you have a 16-page brochure released to print on Monday?”). But these are the same kinds of challenges we’ve faced as designers for as long as there has been design. Even as close friends are laid off or design firms close up shop, the same challenge applies: Make do with what you have. There is no other option.

I imagine Twigg intended that to be inspiring, but it hits too close to home. Fewer resources? Check. Limited time? Check. Slashed budgets? Rising costs? Check. In the last couple of months, my client base has doubled because of a division merger. As a result, my group's workload has shot through the roof, as we rebrand… oh… everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything from technicians' trucks to fax cover sheets to service level agreements, not just the website and logos.

As a result, there's an awful lot of sitzarbeit lately. Which is killing me, according to this infographic:
<a href="http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/sitting-kills"><img src="http://images.medicalbillingandcoding.org.s3.amazonaws.com/sitting-is-killing-you.jpg" alt="Sitting is Killing You" width="500" border="0" /></a><br />Via: <a href="http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org">Medical Billing And Coding</a>

Perhaps a standing desk is in order. Or a treadputer.

blah, design, designing, Saltmine U, work, sitting, sitzarbeit

waxing nostalgic

I love working with my hands.

When I started my first job in high school, I worked at a family friend's custom framing shop. The shop was just down the hill from where I lived, less than a hundred yards away. In the afternoons, and on Saturday mornings, I learned to cut glass, mats, and moulding; drymount posters and art; and fit the mats, glass, backing, moulding, and art into a finished, pristine framed object. It was surprisingly physically taxing, and required an attention to detail that I did not, and never will, innately possess. If I let my attention slip, I'd earn myself a slice from razors or glass or paper, or a stray nail from the air gun. I had a bandaid on every joint of every finger, the first month. I left that shop exhausted and bloodied every time, for the first three months.

I would take the mats, attach them to the art with acid-free tape, making hinges; laboriously clean the residue off the cut glass; then match the mats and glass up to the art and its backing. Then I'd fit the glass, art, mats, and backing into the frame, sealing it in with staples or nails, and gluing protective paper to the back of the frame. I'd slide the finished, framed pictures into their huge plastic bags, sealing them, writing the customer's name on masking tape on my hand, then sticking it to the package I'd made, then hefting the package into the series of slots where it'd go until the customer came for it. When I walked out, I'd have done that at least twice; most days, three or four times. On a really good, quiet Saturday, five or six. Looking at the rack full of my work, I felt like I'd done something useful, and filled me with a sense of accomplishment. Before I showed up, there was nothing; now I had worked, and Made Something.

It was a similar rack which led me to working in graphic design. I was taking a class in magazine production, and had to come see the professor in his office, which of course was Wossamatta U's publications office. I walked in, and saw a rack full of proofs by the front door. After I'd seen the artists, art director, and typographer all Making Things, I knew it was the place for me.

There was only one problem: no interns were allowed.

So I simply started showed up every day, in between classes, for an entire semester. I watched the designers and asked questions. In the face of my stubbornness, my future boss relented and said I could intern, once the semester was over.

I learned design during its transition from paste-up to digital, in what I refer to as The Bad Old Days. I learned how to use a proportion wheel, the difference between a pica pole and a ruler, and to do surgery with an X-acto blade. I came to love making proofs, and putting them up in the bin for clients, just as much as I'd loved assembling frames. For you kids out there, instead of doing your layouts in Quark or InDesign, you used to have to take your copy to the typographer, who'd type it up on a typesetter, then hand you the photostat to cut out and paste up onto your board. You'd use a waxer to smear the back of your layouts with hot wax, which you'd then carefully stick to the board. It was messy, painstaking, and it took forever to do a simple layout. Which is, I suppose, what made it so rewarding when you finally had an assembled proof, and then a finished piece to hold in your hands.

I do very little of that these days.

I work at a computer for roughly 10 hours a day, most days. And while I'm producing work, to be sure (else, I'd be out of a job), I don't get anything like the satisfaction of holding something tangible, until the thing I designed has been printed, bound, and delivered. Even that is fading; today I have to get in touch with a print rep I used to work with, and tell him that I just don't do enough print work to make it worth keeping me as a contact.

Back when I started, if you'd told me I'd miss pasteup, I'd have said you were on crack. But I do, and it's nice to see that someone else misses The Bad Old Days, too.

In every profession people date themselves by the work practices or technology in place at the time they entered their chosen field. We say things like "but then, I was a surgeon before they invented anesthesia," or "my first computer filled three rooms, and generated enough heat to power a small city." In the rest of our lives we tend to want to minimize our age and experience, but in things work related, longevity is a badge of honor. That is until you become a cranky old whiner.

As much as I sometimes want to, I can't honestly date myself back to metal pages in any way, shape, or form. I worked in shops that still had letterpress presses, but they made plastic plates from film by then. No, my coming-of-age in the graphic arts is definitely the paste-up era. And though I'm mostly thrilled it's gone, I also feel a little sorry for those who didn't experience it. Paste-up is not a technique that will likely enjoy boutique revival someday, though there is a moderately active market on eBay for old waxers.

Paste-up, in all its glory, was more than just a page-composition technique. It was an art form. It had a social hierarchy of sorts and took place in a unique work environment. When the history of page composition is written, paste-up will be just a footnote compared to the reign of metal (300+ years) or the coming longevity of digital pages. But for anyone who worked in a high-production paste-up department, the memories will linger like the smell of Bestine and hot petrochemicals.

I still have Bestine in my office, by the way.

design, printing, work

getting from cuneiform to Copperplate

From I love typography, an utterly awesome post about the origins of the alphabet. If you were ever curious about how we got from cuneiform to Copperplate, here's your chance to find out. It's fascinating how the English alphabet's evolved through the centuries, from losing letters like ð (eth) and ƿ (wynn), to adding z to replace g, of all letters. Well, fascinating to me, anyway. And while I'm on the subject of now-defunct letters: 'ye,' as in 'ye olde tavern,' is not pronounced 'yee.' It's the indefinite article 'the,' which used to be spelled þe -- (thorn, 'th' + e). Over time, that turned into a ligature, . Seeing signs for 'Ye Olde Tea Shoppe' drives me nuts, because 'ye' (pronounced 'yee') should only be the plural of 'thou,' as in, 'Ye gods.'

Can you tell I did a stint as a copy editor?

Speaking of letters, the Fontifier service lets you turn your handwriting into a font. The kerning's a bit off, but for $9, it's a damn good deal.

I suppose you have to be a special sort of geek to find this sort of thing interesting. When I was a kid, I had a dictionary with all kinds of great articles at the front of the book; one was very similar to this, and told the history of the English language, complete with illustrations. I've spent the better part of the last hour looking for this book online, but it's tough, when all I remember was that the cover was pale yellow, with burgundy type. I could pick it out of a pile instantly, but by name? Not so much. Does anyone else remember this book?

alphabet, copy editor rants, letters, typography, work

Drupal Camp LA

This weekend, I went to Drupal Camp LA -- a conference about an open-source content management system (CMS), Drupal. An extremely geeky time, but a good one.

Saltmine U is thinking of abandoning our current CMS, which is 1-ancient, 2-clunky, 3-buggy, and 4-insanely expensive, for an open-source solution. We're debating Drupal vs. Plone, so I thought it would behoove me to go (especially since the conference was at UC Irvine, and free.)

At the conference were many of my counterparts from other UCs. It was fantastic to be in the Higher Ed session, where we could really get down to talking shop. It was great to talk to the ten other people in the entire state who also do that part of my job. No one's eyes glazed over! I felt less alone. Though, I did envy them a bit -- I was the only one who was also an art director, so the entirety of their jobs were about a third of what I do. Damn.

A typical session, as seen from the back. This one was on backend performance and servers:

Here's the group photo from Saturday. Can you find me?

Twitter came in damn handy. Many people have asked me what the point of Twitter is, and my stock reply is, 'It's great at conferences.' And it is. You simply add the hashtag for the conference (#dcla, in this case) to your tweets, and ask things like, 'Hey, where's the iCal file for the schedule? #dcla' and get almost instant responses. This might not sound like much, but when you're frantically looking for where room 1200 is in a building you're not familiar with, it's damn handy.
The Saturday night party, courtesy of MediaTemple, was particularly fun.

A night at the pub went a long way to making up for having a serious chunk of my weekend taken up with work. If only I could drink every time I was working offsite… alas.
To sum up, I met a lot of great folks, and had some great conversations. I'll definitely give Drupal a serious look, and maybe eventually use it to power my website, as a test run for use at Saltmine U.

Saltmine U, work, web wrangling

Saltmine U

Randall, you hit it out of the park with today's xkcd. I cannot stop giggling.

Today's comic sums up the last ten years of my life.

I wish more people knew how much agony, arguing, and heated debate goes into designing a university's website, especially at a large state-run institution. It gives 'design by committee' a new meaning, as no one on this earth does committees better than academia. Public relations wants to turn it into an alumni magazine; admissions wants it to be a recruitment tool; staff want to know how to find HR paperwork; students want class and housing information, and visitors just want to know where to park. It's got to be everything to everyone, intuitive to use, and bulletproof. It must also be accessible to every browser and platform known, but still look good, and somewhat uniform in appearance across departments and divisions. We fight battles to the death over taxonomy, hierarchy, and user interface issues.

I'm proud to say we have all of these available at Saltmine U; six of them are available directly from the home page, and the other two are a level down. (Having a university that spans an area larger than some cities means that there's no one single campus address. We have our own zip code, for crying out loud, so you have to look at the campus map or directory to find the address you want.)

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Speaking of Saltmine U, I have to say that this last academic year has been rough. Which is perhaps one of the great understatements I've ever made. 2009-10 shall henceforth be known as The Year I Busted Ass To Keep My Job.

From July 2009 until now, my primary focus has been almost solely on justifying my existence and proving I'm still useful. It's meant that I do little else besides go to work, bring work home in the evenings, work on my days off, and work on most weekends. Not much art. Not much writing. Not much else. My typical weekdays have looked like this:

• 4-4:30 a.m. - work out / panic that I've overslept and skip working out
• 4:30-5 - get ready for work / even greater panic because I've really overslept
• 5-6 - commute to work / drive in if I've overslept
• 6-8 - sort myself out, drink coffee, read and answer email, deal with any overnight crises
• 8-12 - meetings
• 12-1 - lunch
• 1-3:45 - design / more meetings
• 3:45-6 - commute home
• 6-10 - dinner with friends or family / cook dinner / work / collapse / work out if I missed it earlier
• 10-12 - wind down for the evening

Yes, that's four hours of sleep a night, roughly. On the days I'm not in the office, I've spent at least an hour, on average taking care of work. Maybe more like two hours. Then run around doing errands, visiting friends who say they never see me. Or trying to work up the energy to create something for myself. Stress relief is now a necessity, not an optional way to spend my time. It's not been exactly the most fun year ever.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm happy that I'm still here at Saltmine U (the last few weeks' deadlines aside). I'm doing good work, and I've been reassured about my position being stable. That's a huge relief. I've won a couple of internal awards, for the fifth year running. I'm relatively safe, as jobs go. Soon, my salary will be restored to its pre-furlough state. Budget willing, I might eventually get my long-overdue cost-of-living increases which I haven't seen in three years. No idea when exactly that might be, though.

As you might imagine, I'll be very happy once the pressure eases up, and I can once again work on things I find fulfilling on a personal level. Like those 'art' and 'writing' things I hear so much about. Until then, back to the saltmine…

design, university, work, Saltmine U

a comment that really ought to be a post

I got a bit carried away today, ranting about the idea of making it as an artist, over at my friend Colleen Doran's blog. Since some of you don't read her blog (and why not? hmm?), I thought I'd bring the discussion here.

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I’ve been thinking about the idea of making it as an artist, and freelancing vs. a day job, and how money relates to all this. So many things have to happen to make it in the arts (and by ‘arts,’ I mean all of them):

• You have to have the aptitude and talent for your art;
• you have to be disciplined enough to develop your skills;
• you have to get your ass in the chair and produce work;
• then you have to get your work seen;
• then you need to be able to follow through on deadlines and not shoot yourself in the foot by being a pain in the ass to work with;
• then you need to get paid well enough, and in a timely fashion;
• then you need either business sense, or enough common sense to hire someone you can trust to manage your business;
• you have to be able to keep on doing this for decades;
• and then you need to stay current, change, and grow artistically, in order to have a career, instead of being a fad.

Talent’s only one of many factors. It’s crucial, but only one. Work ethic, discipline, time management, and luck: you need them whether you’re doing art as a salaried monkey, or as a freelancer, or as a part-timer. Yet, there is this great schism between people who do art part-time vs. full-time. The part-timers feel like wannabes; the full-time people feel like they have some innate trait that sets them apart from lower beings who are not Real Artists.™ And this idea that Real Artists™ are able to completely support themselves financially in every way, and have no worries, because they’re Just That Good and can turn jobs down…

…well, that idea makes me stabby. The real distinction is whether or not you’re a professional; not how much time you devote to it, or how much money you make from it.

To use myself as an example -- I do some sorts of art (art direction, design, and writing) during the day, as a full-time salaried gig. I do some sorts of art on the side (illustration, painting, design, writing). Regardless of what sort of art, or when I do it, 100% of my income is generated by art. It’s fair to say I’m a professional artist.

I make a decent living. Compared to some of my friends who are also professionals, I don’t make much. I envy their flexible schedules and in some instances, the insane money. Some of them envy the stability and insanely good benefits I have, because they often spend weeks between jobs every year. Couple of my friends are ones who you wouldn’t imagine ever being out of work. And yet, they too must scramble to cover the gap financially when pipes burst and cars die -- so they work on smaller things to keep everything going as they look for more work. I know only one professional creator who doesn’t ever have to worry about money, and he’s totally blowing the curve for all of us.

What many people forget is that even someone who does art on a freelance basis full-time isn’t spending 100% of their time generating art. There’s looking for work, bills, invoices, taxes, client meetings, phone calls, conference calls, emails, research, and then the simple business of living the rest of one’s life. It’s not a glamorous gig.

art, art direction, artist, work

Pantone changes PMS

Pantone's changing their color system. Will they finally organize their colors by, well… color?

The venerable Pantone Matching System, aka PMS, is the way designers talk about color. It's so pervasive, that most designers begin to think of colors by their PMS names. There's a movie clip at the Pantone site that illustrates this.

Why is it so ubiquitous?

Because most languages don't handle nuances of color very well. To describe a color that you perceive as 'red, with a little blue in it, but not purple, but kind of dark, not a pastel,' is not only unwieldy, but another person looking at the same color will probably describe it differently. If you've ever gotten into an argument about what color something is, you can see why it'd be useful.

But if you say that same vaguely red color is PMS 200, well, there's a system for not only naming that color, but duplicating it. If you've ever had to try to get a bunch of fabric from the same dye lot, or paint from one manufacturer, you know how tough it can be to match colors. PMS 200 is consistent from use to use. Every printer knows exactly what inks to mix in what proportion to make that color happen on a page. This saves a lot of hassle when sending a job to print, because you never, ever want a printer to guess what you wanted on a job.

As you might imagine, this is crucial in print design… and fashion… and, well… every profession that uses color as a major tool. This is such a major tool that most designers have quite a few PMS colors memorized, and can give you a rough estimate of where a certain number will fall in the color spectrum; e.g., PMS 360-380 is the green-chartreuse range. Such a major tool that I fervently hope I will not have to erase 17 years of knowledge and memorize a whole new numbering system. If I do, I'll join the legion of designers with X-Actos, Bestene, and Super 777 spray mount storming Pantone's corporate headquarters.

(Just found a product shot of the new color book. It seems to mostly match my old one. WHEW. Still, why did they not write an FAQ or make that more prominent in their press release?)

This book, though, looks interesting: it has PMS colors for print AND web, all in the same book. No more guessing at HEX or RGB values!

I should be really excited about this, but I'm already coping with the news of Frank Frazetta's death. That's enough change for one week, I think. Or, far more likely: I'm just too tired to get excited. I took on a freelance pro bono project, and it chewed almost all my weekend. Friday night, Saturday morning, Sunday, and all day yesterday. I'd put in for yesterday off work, months ago, as Sunday was my birthday. It wasn't quite how I'd envisioned spending my day, and I'll leave it at that. If this were a paying job, however? I'd have billed $3k for that many hours.

Note to self: stick to doing this kind of work for 503(c) groups so you can write it off on your taxes, at least.

Onward.

design, designing, tech, work, Pantone

so you need a typeface

This chart by Julian Hansen is beyond lovely. I think I'm going to have to print it out and hang it in my office.

In other news…

Life at Saltmine U. continues apace. It has been exceedingly busy here, leaving very little time for blogging. One of my major projects, the intranet redesign's second phase, shown above, went live a few weeks ago. It was a bumpy road, full of delays in approval, being sidelined by other priority projects, code issues, and a last-minute showstopping bug that took three weeks to work around. (Though really, any last-minute bug is showstopping, I suppose.) This is the first time I've been able to delegate the coding, and just focus on the design and interface. Apart from a few complaints from people who didn't read the notice about the site not being compatible with IE 6, it's been received well. I do love that kind of troubleshooting, though. The phone calls ran like this:  

—The intranet's broken.
—When you say, 'broken,' can you be more specific?
—It doesn't work.
—Okay, which bit isn't working, exactly?
—I can't get to [obscure page that by uncanny chance, was only ever used by this person].
—Ah. Are you using IE6?
—What's that?
—Your internet browser; when was the last time it was upgraded?
—Upgraded?
—Right. I don't suppose you had a chance to read that email sent out a couple of weeks ago, in which we let you know that you'd need to upgrade your browser in order to use the new site, did you?
—Oh. Er… no.

These conversations make me incredibly grateful that I no longer have to support an entire office as their IT monkey, on top of everything else I do. Now I only support my own team. (Which is more than enough, let me tell you.)

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I need a new iPhone soon. My first-generation iPhone is still working decently, but has been dropped so often that the camera no longer works. This is exceedingly annoying, as that was one of the features I liked best: being able to quickly take photos of things that caught my eye during the day. Should I get one now, or wait until the fourth-generation comes out in a few months?

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Also, I have a new doctor, who has a plan for treating my lithium-induced hypothyroidism. I don't usually get into health issues on this blog, but it's so massively life-changing to have a doctor who has the same condition I do, and who Gets It. Simply not having to argue with a doctor to try to prove that no, I'm not sitting on the couch and eating Doritos all day -- that's beyond wonderful. I'm optimistic about the plan she has. Even if it does involve giving up one of my two vices: french fries. Alas.

design, work

working in the big house

Johanna Björk's article, "The Ins and Outs of Working In-house," made me grin ruefully. Many people think that my job as an art director is glamorous, which makes me spit coffee from laughing so hard. Mad Men gives the impression that my job consists of spending my days dreaming up witty copy as I order my fifth martini at lunch. The reality is something a bit less exciting, I'm afraid.

As Björk points out, the stability, access to clients, and name recognition are all quite lovely. But things like using the same six typefaces for years, and 'greige' walls can get to you.

advertising, design, work