[Previous entry: "Nothing really special."] [Main Index] [Next entry: "good old San Diego"]

07.05.2001 Entry: ""were not real graphic designers.""

If anyone does read this you might be wondering why I haven’t updated for the last week. Well this last week has totally sucked and I have just had not had the time to update. I have so much to update about and I just don’t know where to start. I guess I can start out with Monday morning. So here is what happens, I’m walking out the door on my way to work when I find a notice attached to my door. I open it up to find they are evicting me from my studio. I went to the management office and asked them why and they said because kids are not allowed at my place. First of all it says nowhere in my contract I signed about kids not being allowed. The only thing it said is that I cant have anyone over more than 10 consecutive days. My kids have only spent the night about 10 times and that was not consecutive.

So as you can see things are starting to suck. So I go to work and do the regular network stuff that I do. Now here’s were things get even worse. The head of marketing comes up to me at 5:00pm that night begging me to finish a project for her. The Project is a 21 page, full color brochure (technical overview) describing how our IP satellite system works. The project was supposed to be sent out that morning to our investors. I guess what happened is the lady that normally does all the print design just kind of said screw you to the Marketing Director. So here’s what happens, as soon as I get off work I drive thirty miles too pick up the zip disk from the design lady that supposedly had all the graphics in correct formats to be used.

So I get home and find out that the template that the lady made was in quark. I’ve never even seen quark before so I was like, “oh crap!” Luckily my partner Diana used quark for a few years when she ran the newspaper at San Diego State. So now it was in Diana’s hands to get this project finished by morning. The thing I didn’t know is how long page layout takes for print. Diana told me she used to average 2-3 pages in an 8-hour day at the newspaper. And 5 pages max during a rushed job. So I was like. “Oh man, there is 21 pages plus a cover and back cover.” So we ended up working in quark from 9:00pm to 10:00am. I was so tired and I still had to go to work and put in a 9 hours there.

So I drag my sleepy self into work and handed the finished project in to the head of marketing. That’s when she tells me that the brochure was supposed to be a .pdf file. I was like saying in my head, “what the hell? We just spent 13 hours finishing this brochure in quark for nothing!” Here’s the problem with this, quark can’t convert to pdf easily. First you have to convert it to eps (encapsulated postscript) and then to pdf and once you do that there are no changes to the text. If I had known she wanted it to be a pdf I would have just done it in illustrator. So she freaks out and calls the guy she works under, the CEO, and tells him its going to be sent out even later to the investors. The CEO them orders me to go home and fix it and have it ready with in the next hour. So I jet back to Diana’s house and start converting the quark file to eps (encapsulated postscript.) We finish doing that and then drive to my place because Diana doesn’t have Adobe Acrobat on her computer.

Now this is where things start sucking again, all the eps files that we just converted start getting incorrect parser errors and opened all funky. All the graphics that were in the brochure were corrupted and not displaying right. So I call the Marketing lady to inform her what’s going on and she starts yelling at me and saying all this rude stuff to Diana and I. By that time Diana was like tell her that we don’t want anything to do with this anymore. By this time its about 4:00pm Tuesday. The marketing lady calls back and tells me to stop what were doing and send everything back to her so she can have a real graphic designer finish the brochure. I was like ok, so I ftp all the files over my vpn connection to the server at work so she can send them to a so called “real graphic designer.”

30 minutes latter I get a call back from her begging for Diana and I to finish the project for her. I guess she realized when she called some of the other designers she knew. When they told her it would take them from 3-5 days to finish the brochure for her. So she tells us to take our time and just have it ready by Thursday morning. So after that I went straight to bed and slept for 12 hours only to wake up with the biggest migraine Wednesday morning. Thinking we only had a few hours of work on the brochure Diana and I didn’t start working on it till 9:00pm last night. That’s when the zip disk with all the graphics started displaying major funky. What we thought would be a 2-hour project ended up being a 9-hour project. The only part that cheered me up was the 4:30am jack-in-the-box run “you got to love those cheese sticks!” So we finally got the brochure working and emailed it to the marketing lady.

I get to work and find out the pdf wont open up due to some invalid image errors. I am so frick’n pissed off now. The marketing lady starts to yell at me again and threatens me with my job. Saying, “my jobs at stake if I don’t get this fixed with in the hour.” Once she said that I was about to do some hardcore ninja moves on her but I decided to just calm down and think of a way to fix it so it would work. I tried a few things and finally end up converting the pdf to a jpg in acrobat and then touched a few things up in PhotoShop. Well that finally worked and the brochure was finally finished. So I once again sent it to the marketing director and she sent it to the investors. Three days of hell and I still feel major stressed out.

If anyone actually got to this point and read this much I’m impressed. I’m still very much upset about this whole thing because I got blamed for everything when really it was the graphic designer ladies PC formatted disk. If only people would realize that PC’s were not meant for print. Don’t get me wrong I like PC’s, I would chose my Linux box any day over a Mac. But when it comes to print Macs are the tool to use. Diana I both agree that the PC formatted disk we got for the lady was corrupted. We believe this because the two of us have worked on so many projects together in quark, illustrator, PhotoShop, and acrobat and never had one problem. What really sucks is how the marketing lady still thinks its all our fault.

The thing is we put this thing together for her as a favor because here main designer walked out on her. I think the two of us deserve a lot of respect for the time we put into this. We put about 24 hours worth of work into this and if you double that, that is 48 man-hours. I want some respect for that and I cant even process the fact that she treated us that way. The part that pisses me off the most is the last thing she said to me. She told me to give her all the files so she could take it to a real graphic Design Company and get it printed. The thing is the quark file is already finished and there wont need to be any changes or corrections. I don’t know where she gets off saying, "were not real graphic designers."

It’s funny how when people don’t understand things they tend to blame other people. The Marketing Lady was at full blame. You cant expect to have something like a 21 page brochure be put together over night. I think we did a great job for having someone just give us a word document and a few image files at last minute. Maybe you’re wondering what this brochure ended up looking like? Well feel free to take a look and tell me what you think. Just remember to be nice with the comments, I wouldn’t want to break out some ninja moves on ya!

A few screen shots [cover] [intro page] [another page] [back cover]

The printed Quark files looks 100 times better and the only reason it looks blurry and messed up is because it was converted to a jpg.

Posted by erica @ 07/09/2001 08:18 AM PST

What was the Marketing Lady thinking? No way she should have a major project like that unready the day before it's due. She definitely owes you something like FREE chalupas for a year! Be careful around her, though. The CEO has probably chewed her out and she'll be testy for some time. You may want to explain to her the problem with the disk.

Are you seriously kicked out of your apt? That's lame...but legally, if the "no kids" clause is not in your contract they have no grounds to evict you. Tell them you know a good lawyer (Josh's uncle).

Posted by Bill @ 07/07/2001 10:02 PM PST

I feel sorry for whoever tries to fix it. Somehow the illustrations I fixed got reverted to what I got originally and the quark file once I put it on the disk decided to become some weird file format. I only charged her for eight hours when it was over 20 easy.That stupid disk messed everything up.If I knew how she was going to be I would have just said I was not going to finish when she told me to give her the files the first time.

Posted by diana @ 07/05/2001 06:44 PM PST