Memphis: Day 3

Today was fairly uneventful. The days have official begun to blend together.

The, thus far, untold story of the drinking glasses continued.

It all started Thursday night. I returned to the hotel room and filled a glass with water and another glass with Cheez-Its. Consumed each and left the glasses on the night stand. Friday night I returned to my room, exhausted and thirsty. I took one of the glasses out of the bathroom and shed the paper cover thing that they put on top of each glass and cup. I noticed there was a suspicious soggy orange speck on the interior. I knew right away it was a crumb from my crackers the previous night. I picked up the other glass and took the paper cap off of it. I saw where my moisturized lips had pressed against the rim as I had taken sips the night before.

It was clear that the housekeeper had taken my glasses from the night stand, stuck them under the bathroom tap and replaced the paper caps. Doesn't seem right.

Today I left a kind note for my housekeeper, and a small incentive, to provide fresh glasses. They do look cleaner. At least there are no blatant signs of use. But now I've got to wonder. I'll always wonder...

I'm pretty sure I hid my discarded bra under a pile of clothes. Yet, when I walked in, it was most definitely peaking out and saying, "Hello, I'm a Maidenform. How are you?"

I should have hidden my toothbrush.

Memphis: Day 2

First off, what was I thinking buying the Family Dollar brand of razor blades when they actually sell name brands? I was so scared to drag that thing against my skin. Fortunately my armpits have survived.

Second, last night in a nutshell: Open bar and tons of food at opening reception. Awesome. Then to a bar called Silly Goose. Sort of reminded me of the Borough. Then to Beale St. What an interesting place at night. There was this street performer who, shirtless, walked up and down the street, building the tension, shaking his coffee can for tips, until finally after about 15 minutes of fanfare, he did back flips down the street. I was a little too tipsy to not be annoyed by the buildup. Jessica and I bought a beer from a bar's streetside window...just because we could. Then we managed to get into a bar for free, because we are two cute little ladies. And also, most of the bars don't have covers, so really, how did they think that would work?

Today was the first full day of the conference. I barely made it to the complimentary breakfast in time. Actually, they were packing up, but I scored a cinnamon raison bagel which I snuck into the theatre for the main session. Too bad coffee is harder to stow in your purse.

I don't really remember what happened in the main session. Maybe parts will come back to me. I know at one point I drifted off and was awoken by applause. It's probably in my imagination, but when I find a speaker boring, I assume every one else does and the applause is really more an expression of relief that it's over than anything else.

I saw one of the main people from Hatch Show Print do his "dog and pony show," as he called it. He showed 100 years of Hatch. Very cool.

I had signed up for a roundtable session months ago when I got an email about it. But I had forgotten who I signed up to roundtable with. It turns out it was Andy Epstein, the inhouse expert for AIGA. When the time came to go to the event, I contemplated skipping the roundtable. It's sort of an intimidating idea to sit at a table with 10 other designers and an expert and just chat. If stuff goes over your head, you can't really hide it. But it actually turned out to be a highlight of the conference for me. It made some things more real for me and I think I'm going to take away a lot more from that. And I shouldn't be surprised at all, but Mr. Epstein seemed to be a very genuine person.

Later today I fulfilled my duties as "reviewer." About 100 students brought their portfolios and about 100 designers were recruited to review them. I talked to 5 people. It was a good experience, but it left me feeling very tired. I sat down on a squishy chair in the Design Center and felt my eyes glaze over. I took myself back to the hotel and ordered dinner in the hotel restaurant. I was zoning out so bad that the staff kept asking me if I was okay. But I still managed to order and enjoy a delicious meal. Caesar salad and pasta carbonara. Wow, the pasta was great!

After having survived the roundtable, the portfolio review and the super cheap razor, all in one day, I feel I can do anything! But for now I'll just brush my teeth and fall asleep.

Slip In Memphis

Arrived in Memphis last night. After looking at and touching everything in my hotel room, I went to the lobby to find food. There is a little bar area. I walked up to the bartender and he said, "How can I help you?" "I'm hungry," I told him.

He asked where I was from and when I told him, the other woman in the bar heard me. Long story short, even though she lives in San Francisco she has lived in Raleigh and went to ECU. We knew a lot of the same people. We started talking and soon enough...new friend!

This morning I woke up at a leisurely hour, made some awful room coffee, took a shower and started venturing through Memphis. Had an Italian sub at Lenny's. Destroyed that. Still have cookie in purse...hmmm. Continued down Front St. and took in some local color. Got a coffee at the Folklore Shop. There was someone singing/playing guitar there, I think his name was Josh Shu or something like that. The only available table was right in front of the stage, felt weird about sitting there, so continued on.

After finding some weird inside-malls I stumbled upon the Peabody Hotel and took a look at the ducks. They were splashing around in the fountain and generally being ducks. I finally made my way to Beale St. I can see how that place is fun at night. It's a little weird in the daylight, though. Like how bluesy can you be at 1pm? It was clearly a tourist destination. But it was great that you could smell the barbeque! And music poured out of every bar. Apparently you can buy beer on the street and drink it in a plastic cup in the "pedestrian areas". No wandering into the street, I guess. I hope to test this out eventually.

Went to the wackiest old fashioned department store, A. Schwab's. It was infested with a school group, Tara Oaks, I think. It was fun to see the kids so excited, but that store is not designed for accessibility. Completely random stuff everywhere. And not like that store in Seattle with all the Accoutrements stuff. Some of these things look like they were ordered in 1964 and they are still trying to sell them. Over the knee red tube socks, anyone? Almost bought a floral fanny pack that said "Tennessee" on it. Decided I'd hold out for a higher-end fanny pack. Took in some local flavor at Wet Willies and actually gave directions to tourists. Yeah, I've got this town down.

When I finished my "local flavor" I started the hike back to the hotel. Went up Main St. This was the only place I was bothered by strangers. Of course, it's the street with all the stuff on it. Got some razors, Reese's cups, and IBprofen at the Family Dollar. Saw a man wearing a red vest that looked like it was cut from felt and it matched his red pants. Awesome.

About to go start the actually conference stuff. I just hope I have the patience to concentrate on all the speakers!

How to Make a Fruit Fly Trap

A few years ago when I was in art school, I lived in a crappy apartment. I loved it. But it had some flaws. One of them was a neighbor who collected empty cans as a means of income. It happened outside our backdoor. One summer, flies and fruit flies began moving in...to our apartment.

Among the many things I learned in college that had nothing to do with academia, was how to smash a fruit fly in mid air. One night I sort of snapped and spent most of my evening slaughtering as many fruit flies as I could.

At the time, I went online looking for help to this problem. When the neighbor was ordered to stop stockpiling garbage, the issue was pretty much resolved. But in our apartment, the fruit flies took refuge. I found lots of ideas online for trapping fruit flies, but I'm not sure if I found exactly what I ended up doing.

Yes, of course, remove the food supply. Don't leave fruit out. They will even eat some plants. And if you have fresh cut flowers, they may nibble on those, too. I read that they will hang out in your drains. But that wasn't really our problem. Our fruit flies were surviving regardless.

So I designed a simple, earth-friendly trap that can be made with materials from around the house.

1. Take an old glass or plastic jar. You'll want something you can see through. Peel the labels off a spaghetti sauce jar or something similar.
2. Find some scrap paper and make a funnel by rolling it up and closing it with tape. Junk mail works. I like to make my funnels long and pointy so they fit in my jar with a few inches left below.
3. Remove paper funnel and put about an inch of vinegar in the jar. Fruit flies love it. They also love wine. So if you have an old bottle hanging out, that will work, too. Or maybe make a vinegar/wine cocktail for them.
4. This is the most important step. Put a drop of dish detergent in the liquid.
5. Place the funnel in your jar and leave it alone.
6. Check your jar in an hour and see how many little flies have met their doom.

Here's what will happen: The little flies will say, "Oh, yum! I gotta get a taste of this." They will go down the funnel and will either fly up to leave the jar, only to be caught at the edge of the jar, or they will try to take a little sip of the liquid, only to find that the surface tension has been destroyed by the soap! They drown. But don't feel bad. They drown doing what they love.

You'll want the jar to be see-through, because it's so satisfying to see how many flies you can catch. You might not get all of them, but it's something.

Any other punctuation you'd like to include?

Today a client asked me to add an exclamation mark and an asterisk to the end of a sentence in an ad. What the asterisk is referencing, I have no idea. Maybe it's for decoration. Perhaps they'd also enjoy some quotation marks, a schwa or a double-dagger. Ampersands are fancy.

They make me laugh. They can have the asterisks they want!

Feeling Centered

They made me do it. They made me take everything in my ad design, stack them and center them on the page. Oh, and of course, make the logo bigger. I don't think I've centered everything on a page since 5th grade when I wrote a poem and carefully typed it up on our Acer and printed it out on our little black and white ink jet--which I thought was awesome, by the way.

The good news is that it wasn't the company for which I work that made me tweak my design in such a way. It was a client who has actually hired "consultants"...thought that's what we were. Guess not. I guess we should have advised them to center everything. I guess we were sabotaging them by advising the logo not be bigger than the credit card they were trying to push, or by advising them to stick to one message per campaign (or at least per ad.)

Classic situation. Designers don't like to be treated like computer operators. We have brains. We think. We think about design...a lot.

Designer Cake

From my hazy cold-infected head, this morning I spurted out what (seems) a rather clever analogy for a common design dilemma. I'm calling it the "go ahead and bake the cake" problem.

A designer is given copy and elements for a project. They work up the project and then suddenly drastic changes occur to the copy or concept.

The metaphorical cake has been baked. The only way to change the batter is to start over.

Sometimes you can't avoid it. Things come to light at the last minute. But sometimes it's just too easily assumed that one thing can be swapped out with another. If it's scraping off the vanilla icing and putting on strawberry, sure. But if it's replacing the eggs with a vegan substitute, that's different.

Stating my opinion

If you're going to use a state outline in your logo... This is something I don't recommend, by the way. And I hope that you are a state or local government agency. But regardless, if you are going to use a state outline in your logo, and you're not stylizing it, at least make sure it is geographically accurate.

I know I spend day in and day out obsessing over little details that 99% of the population doesn't "care" about, but it kills me to see anything stretched or squished. If you are using a geographical element, there are rules that dictate what is correct. Stylizing it is different. But if you are using all the craggy coastlines and inlets of a coastal state without simplifying anything, then please don't use squishing or stretching as your one excuse for creativity.

Logo madness

It's official. I have a client that wants me to make the logo bigger for every piece I design. One of the pieces was a billboard. The logo was already 5 feet tall.

It's a common request. So common that it's a joke. So laughable, that Agency Fusion invented a fictional product, "Make My Logo Bigger Cream."

I still haven't figured out why a bigger logo is a universal request. Bigger is better? Is it built into our prehistoric minds? Were cavemen painting their hands on the sides of cliffs and thinking, "Looks good, but needs to be bigger"?

I'm also trying to figure out why so many things "need" logos. For the moment, I'm going to blame Target because they brought design into our lives in an affordable way. They made people aware of Michael Graves and why his look is signature. They made their store brands well designed, so that people wanted to buy the Archer Farms bottle of water, over Deer Park. They have been quietly educating the public on branding. Now every time a new idea pops up at my work, a logo design is requested.

Or is it, too, more primeval than Target? People crave order and hierarchy, and that's what branding does. A logo can classify an object in a visual way. Making it easy to package neatly into our brains.

In-House in the House!

A while ago I looked for articles, blogs...anything, about being an in-house designer. I found very little. While there are probably a lot more in-house designers than those working for an agency or firm, you rarely hear anything about them.

My college education had a strong lean toward agency work. There was an assumption that we would all go work for agencies where we would be able to bring our dog to work, and yet fur would never mar the polished concrete floors of our pristine workspace. We'd wear black rimmed glasses and jam out to our favorite song while working on a new line of tea packaging. It was always something cool like packaging for wine or beer, not packaging for screw drivers or adhesive tape. And yes, at this agency, the sky was the limit. If you wanted a wine bottle that was pointed on the bottom and had to come with its own hand-carved wooden stand, hell yes there was enough money in the budget to develop that.

Crazy fantasies aside, I've found something similar. One catch. I don't work for an agency. I work as part of an in-house team for a financial institution. I haven't had a chance to work my wine bottle designs into it yet, but I have been able to develop several things from the ground up. Some silly sketches of weird looking characters have been turned into a childrens' site. A kiosk that will hopefully be spread state-wide bears the name and logo that I created.

I think there are some obvious overlaps among freelance, agency, and in-house designers. I say, "I think" since I've never done two of those things. Sure there were a couple failed experiments into the world of freelance. But not enough to qualify me as a freelance designer. More like an eager kid who thought she could do design after her 9-5 job.

It may be that there is no need to make a distinction among the different types of graphic designers. I just don't know since I've never heard or read anything saying otherwise.

I'm not sure if designers working at an agency get little random requests from coworkers, like I do. Probably. It's the nature of our work. We make stuff. A freelance designer, if working at home, can likely avoid that.

For designers, there is an assumption that what we do is fast, and perhaps easy. I know I certainly don't go up to my non-design coworkers and ask them to start a little program or coordinate a few people for one of my pet projects that is due in a couple of days. It's laughable, and yet I get these requests all of the time. Sometimes these projects are a lot of fun. Even when they are, most times I can't justify dropping my other projects for a few hours to work on them.

This is just another day in the life of an in-house designer.

A Comment on Conan

I'm so glad I got to see Conan in New York before he moved to California. I'm still not sure how I feel about this change. Will the show lose its edge?

Update To My Disappointment

Back in September I wrote about how I entered a design contest, got in and had my work credited to a coworker in the show's printed catalog. This morning a new catalog was sitting on my desk. They had reprinted it with the corrections.

This is cool. Although not so cool is how no one actually replied to me or my coworker's emails. And also how they sent the new catalog to my coworker and not to me.

It is little comfort three months after the fact. But it was a pleasant surprise, nonetheless.

Chancery Must Be Changed

I have just discovered a subconscious dislike for a typeface.

This is different than my distaste for Comic Sans, Curlz MT, Times New and Papyrus. I am fairly certain those typefaces are available and activated on my computer, but I'm not sure since I've never used any of them. Times New is pretty neutral and inoffensive. Though it's a little bulky and boring for design work. Papyrus seems to be a popular one for packaging of "spa" items like candles, lotions and whole wheat pasta. I can't even count how many times I've seen Curlz used for tweenaged items. It tends to be used as a logo for stores with names like "Schmoopies" and "Whirl-a-Girl". It's highly decorative and curly and cute, I give it that. I just don't see myself using it. And Comic Sans. I'm sure it was revolutionary when it was designed. It's sans serif but still round and soft. But I really can't get past it's background. In my experience, Comic Sans is a favorite of school teachers making signs. It just looks goofy. I can't take it seriously.

But the latest typeface I've realized is on my computer is Apple Chancery and I loathe it. It's really not fair to say I loathe it. But I do know that when I see it used, or Zapf Chancery for that matter, my brain responds like a robot. It's automatic. A little alarm goes off, "Typeface bad. Unprofessional. Must be changed. Change to anything else. Anything. Anything."

This happened a few weeks ago when I was at work and acquired a file from a sister organization. I was tasked with adjusting the design and changing phrasing so it applied to our company. Right on the front of the design was the friendly phrase, "A gift for you" set in a typeface that I couldn't put my finger on when I saw the printed piece. I thought it was going to be Lucida Calligraphy. All I knew is that the design could be vastly improved if that typeface were changed. I opened the file and saw it was Apple Chancery. I don't kow why, but I was somewhat incredulous. I couldn't even believe that someone would seriously use this font for real professional design.

Maybe it's because Chancery looks so much like the caligraphy that I learned in second grade. Maybe it's because, in my head, Chancery looks like one of the first fonts ever designed for a computer. I envision it being used on one of those old tiny black and white Machintosh all-in-ones, about the same time April Greiman was making that poster of herself. Even if Apple Chancery is a spot on replica of an olde time handlettering, it looks cheap to me.

You can't blame the font of course. It's been villified in my head because of how people use it. People see this font on their computer and it's kind of fancy, but not too fancy. You know, it's scripty but easy to read.

In an article I recently read about an ad campaign, someone commented that Zapf Chancery is better reserved for Kinkos wedding invitations. I think that summarizes it perfectly.