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.