Today I discovered that my neighbourly (and I really do literally mean neighbour) op-shop is selling earth-greetings cards, it’s a peculiar opshop in that it sells some new things as well as standard opshop things. Earth Greetings is Interesting in it’s philosophy, I not 100% sold on all their designs, but some of them a quite lovely, and hey – it’s Australian based. That’s another win on the environmental factor.
Category: <span>Design</span>
I have made a few interesting observations about design the past few days, and wonder at times if I am walking into a obsolete career.
The other day I pulled out out wedding photos in order to finally do something with them and wound up facing the reality that the cheapest means of an album was a coffee table photo book, like those that Iphoto produce. I found Iphoto somewhat limiting – probably because I haven’t upgraded my mac to Leopard yet, but got put something similar called Blurb. Thus far I am fairly impressed, we shall have to see what a completed book looks like, but the cost and the design software is clean and fairly impressive.
But there you have it, designed photo albums for anyone with half a bolt of computer know-how’s finger tips. There are templates for layouts and lots of them, and lots of them are quite nice. Yes it is still limited. (There are ways to get your own layouts into the software, I intend to explore that avenue).
The simple fact is, anyone can make a photo book.
In the few photography classes I’ve taken, photographers either bemoan the coming of the digital age because it takes generic photography further from their hands or they celebrate it and the capacity it opens up for ease/scope and the need for photographers to display a greater level of skill.
Photographers still make money and for the most part they still take better photographs.
It is the same for designers. You can go and make your photo book and perhaps you will be happy with it and perhaps you have some skill or eye for it, but for the most part the sample books out there – the ones people have created and paid to have printed look like absolute crap. What surprised me most was that many professional photographers books look just as ridiculous.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, at the very least read up on design, or for or goodness sakes pay someone to do it, or even get your arty-eyed grandson to help you.
And ladies, it might be fun to make a wedding album and you might not care if it’s not super professional but please, please, please do not use pink text over a photo… or pretty much anywhere, however much you like pink. It’s difficult to read and screams tacky.
Dear Communication Design Students,
A word of warning about printers. Bribe, plead, cajole, beg or beat the university printers into giving you what you want. Commercial Printers will charge you through the nose. I did it all but the uni printers would not cooperate this time.
This is how I beat being charged through the nose the day before my assignments are/were due.
1. Draw a mental radius and scour the yellow pages for printers.
2. Call them up
3. Get lucky in finding someone who doesn’t charge a download fee (or rather who gets it wrong and so has to go off their word). This mistake on their part saved me a lot of money. Usually it’s $10 a pop/file, this place it was $5 but they guy forgot because it was a ‘new’ thing and so they couldn’t charge me for it. That’s $50 saved.
4. Have an incompetent receptionist (I’m sure she’s good at her job, just not the printing stuff) take your work and follow your very clear typed instructions (badly). While you head off home to do other things while it’s being completed.
5. Return to the printers because of a phonecall. She has printed only two things of the many and the sizing looks suspiciously off.
6. She sits down with you (at the computer) to print the rest of the stuff. For some reason some of the stock standard PDF’s don’t even read on the shonky old PC.
7. She tries to print a simple 1-side A3 and the document is huge and half missing
8. She tries fiddling with the same old settings over and over and over again
9. She goes to answer the phone and lets you on the computer, you do some digging and find a setting that says 150%. You change it to 100%. The document prints fine.
10. Other issues when she goes to print more things. And so on… “I’ll print it in grayscale first so I don’t have to charge you as much”
11. There is a lot of excess paper, you have spent an awful lot of time at the printing place helping the person who should have completed your job.
12. Due to mistakes and files that wouldn’t open, I still have several things that need printing, thankfully they are only A4 and so I can drive to Ron and Anne’s (my parents-in-law’s) tonight to use their laser printer.
13. She charges you less than she probably should, only $30 – maybe because she feels bad and adds an just an extra $4 for ‘proof’s’/mistakes. Wow. Cheap
But worth the hassle?
No freaking way.
…oh and remember those prints that were done at the start? The sizes were wrong, had to redo those too.
I had the opportunity once upon a time to do art in school and I didn’t take it. I instead opted for Chemistry, Biology and the like. Interesting certainly, but not really for keepers. I had to print out some uni Chem/Physics/Maths practice exams today for my boss’s son (Yep, that’s me with the time!) and in looking at them wondered why I ever bothered. Yet I enjoyed myself immensely – problem solving. I am a left brained girl with an earnest right brain,or perhaps I adapt to adapt?
But when I think that I had the chance to be taught art by this guy, I am disappointed.
Of course I didn’t know he made work like this back then.
Michael Peck’s work is currently in exhibition at the Metro 5 Gallery, I am crossing my fingers that I’ll get there before it concludes as it’s not too far from uni. My mum took my little sister (who is taught by him) there, and they came home raving. Now there’s incentive to get things finished by Thursday!
