« monumental bitch | Main | hey now, I liked 'battlefield earth' »
March 30, 2004
genie in my pocket
There is a genie that lives in my pocket. He always grants my every wish, but never quite gets it right.
This morning I turned in my first print job ever to the printers. I'd always wanted to do desktop publishing, but never meant to get here via HTML and web work. I just ended up working a lot with Photoshop, and then with Illustrator, and eventually InDesign and Quark.
It all started with my park ranger jobs, actually. Every place I had a summer job or park internship, they had always just purchased an image / document scanner and Adobe Pagemaker, and declared that I was the geek to learn / teach how to use it. They never purchased machines with fast enough processors and memory, however, so it was always cumbersome. It didn't help that I didn't know much about image optimization either...all my first scans were huge .tif and .bmp files.
These days it's a breeze...I got a beefy machine and the de-lovely Adobe Creative Suite. It's like skiing down a powder slope with a cool buzz going on on a sunny day.
Anyhow, I'm also involved with this museum project, creating exhibits and designs for old student / faculty engineering competition projects, like an old solar powered car, human-powered sub, and some robots that need to be put on display by our open house on campus in April. It's what I went to school for, I'd done an undergrad exhibit design project, and now I'm coordinating with an exhibit design company for real, and gettin' paid for it.
Except that this project sort of fell into my lap after I said I'd 'help' with it. I've learned at a university when you say you're going to 'help' it means the project is now yours. It's always been something I've wanted to do, and now I'm doing it, except that I have this huge newsletter deadline I need to meet at the same time. That's the downside of it all.
But, with boredom as my enemy, I am fairly certain I won't find much idle time in the near future, especially with a big, fat, out of shape website that needs a total overhaul and redesign. It's actually a project I can't wait to get started on. I'm talkin' a total info management enema to the thing, streamlining and reorganization.
Anyhow, after 6 months the job is going well.
Posted by jimbo at March 30, 2004 10:19 AM
Comments
Its good to hear a little bit about the interesting places work is taking you....
and deadlines... what was that quote by Douglas Adams... "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go
by." ;-)
... I have been doing print work for years yet I still get an ulcer going to press... so many variables...
Posted by: kenn at March 30, 2004 1:52 PM