I just received my new WD 500 gig My Book this morning. I immediately started setting it up so I could begin the long process of transferring my data. I don’t remember if I mentioned this before, but my current HD takes forever to transfer data! It once took me a whole day, from 9am-5pm to transfer 12 gigs. 12. My beautiful TB HD I have at home uses her super fast fire wire connection to transfer 12 gigs in a matter of minutes. Even my 500 gig HD, which has a USB 2 connection, transfers really fast. On a side note, when I bought my 500 gig HD over a year ago, I wanted to get the firewire version. However the sales person at Best Buy convinced me to get a HD with an eSata connection. He also assured me that I could acquire the card for my mac when they had them in stock. It wasn’t until a month later that I found that eSata cards were not made for macs. The archiving session I had a week ago was painful only because it took me forever to back up my files via external HD. I am really hoping that this HD will rise to the challenge and be able to transfer my data at the speed of light. Yes, the speed of light. Perhaps I should name her the Millennium Falcon? Naah, too cliche. On another note, completely unrelated to my HD, I am closing out a number of projects due to my upcoming travel. (I will not be in Thursday or Monday.) I just uploaded a newsletter for print production, translated three web designs into html expandable pages for the client to see and approve, and finished various website updating/alteration projects. Today’s tasks are to start and complete concept sketches of a town setting, get further in the DDA Sketchbook, take some product photography, make a few graphics/roll overs for websites and complete some other site updates. I need to finish these before I leave today.

I’ve been having all sorts of fun times with this sketchbook. Yesterday I began dissecting the sample flip book file in flash. I’m not used to Flash, and I’m even less familiar with the new flip book! The old flip book, which you can view in our Print Brochures portfolio, was pretty easy to work with. All you needed to do was place the desired images into a folder and make sure that the flash files were linked properly. This one is a little more complicated, and for good reason. You can have transparent or tear away pages! It also seems to run pretty fast. I remember finding a flash flip book that had transparent pages for a past print brochure Judy designed. It looked nice but it took a while to load and seemed to have a small lag. Hopefully this flip book, once uploaded, will still be fast. After talking to our lead designer, Carrie, I had a better grasp on what we are going to be doing with this project. Basically there will be one large DDA Sketchbook that you can view from a main page. The sketchbook will have spreads containing the client approved design as well as a few designs that the were shown to the client, but not chosen. As for now it seems that all DDA projects will be contained within this one sketchbook. It could change in the future though. Now you might be asking, “What if I only want to look at a particular project?” If you are interested in a particular project, we will have a link from the project in the DDA portfolio to the corresponding page in the sketchbook. If you’ve seen our portfolio recently, you’ve noticed the ‘Related Projects’ links. The DDA Sketchbook links will be similarly attached to the portfolio.

DDA’s Sketchbook is on the way. We are currently making the template for all the sketchbooks. I need to talk to Rob about making a flip book with an image background so it will seem as though the viewer is flipping through a full book. I think that I may have an idea on how to accomplish that, but since flash isn’t my forte, I’ll have to rely on Rob if my idea doesn’t work. Next on the list is to round up all the samples of different projects we want to show. There are so many to choose from I don’t know how we are going to decide what gets put in first. I also hear that the sketchbook will start in the logo section and then expand. I guess we’re going to have to find all those brochure, website and trade designs that were turned down!

Sometimes I laugh when I should cry or laugh when I probably shouldn’t. Life has no guarantees except that all life eventually dies. Life doesn’t promise you a happy or easy time on earth, even if you ‘work’ hard for it. It can’t promise that it will deal you a decent hand in any facet of your life: Family, friends, work, etc. So how can such fragile creatures (us) go on living in such an uncertain world? The song lyrics “Don’t worry, be happy” come to mind, no matter how cheesy it sounds. The ‘Don’t worry’ part doesn’t mean be irresponsible or disregard consequences of your choices, it simply means to not let things, stress for example, get to you. What will getting flustered do to improve your performance? Nada. The “Don’t worry be happy” philosophy of life is a lot easier when you know it’s OK to laugh at the ironies of life.

I was just forwarded a request from a client for a website change on a project we just launched a week ago. I had to laugh at it because the change desired should have been addressed pre-build out; in the proofing stage. I really haven’t taken a good look at it, but it could be more work than the the client realizes. Yesterday we were rushed over 400 images that needed the backgrounds removed, resizing and saving a special way for the website. As Elise was telling me this I imagined the work it would involve, but I didn’t get an overwhelming feeling. I just laughed at the work ahead of me and thought about how I could do the job the most efficient way. (Thankfully that story had a happy middle and we’ve pretty much completed the 425 image project.) I was also sent an 8 page document that needs to fit on a 3.5 newsletter layout. Laugh, cut, paste, and work with it. Yup, making it work is what DDA is all about. Of course we get to laugh about it first.

My Intel based imac is only about a year old, is named the Pink Panther and has a 250gig HD. Less than a year from getting him I have already used 136gigs of space. I know what you’re thinking. “Big deal, 136 gigs isn’t much.” I can understand that train of thought. I personally have a TB and 500gig external HD at home with only 138mb left on the 500gig and the TB HD is being filled up pretty fast. Regardless, 136gigs for what I do at DDA is a lot. I don’t work with many 4gig file projects, like at home; mostly web design files that range from 150-200mbs and print design files that range from 200-500mbs. I think I may have a few tradeshow graphic or billboard files that are over the 1gig mark. So with only 94GB left on the Pink Panther, I am finding that now is the time to archive! Yes, the dreaded ‘A’ word, archive. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I am currently organizing all files so that any one in the future can navigate through and find what they need pretty easily. No need to thank me.

I can’t wait to see how much space I can free up as I archive and back up all my files. So far I’ve only gained back 5GB…

When I tell people that I work 10 hour days, their eyes tend to get a little larger in disbelief. Of course I add that I work 4 days a week and that puts them more at ease, but they still usually have something to say about my 10 hour days. As an artist, I find nothing terribly wrong with 10 hour days because art, in general, is very demanding of time. (The 1.5-2 hours of commute is another story however.) I had 6 hour long classes in college and sometimes that wasn’t enough to really get into the assignments.

DDA’s design team usually creates 2-3 website comps that we show to the client. These 2-3 designs can take anywhere from 3-6 hours to lay out, depending on how involved the site is. And that time is not including the finished version of the site design, the time it takes to slice the custom tailored template specifically for web build out purposes, putting together an html version of the design with working roll overs and the final build out of the pages. And all of this isn’t including the writer’s content/optimization writing or proofing time, the video department’s time to create flash or video based work for the site (if any) and the programmer’s time to do all the coding for the site.

We at Dynamic Digital Advertising can have any number of websites, at various stages, being made at once. If you estimate each site at 25-30 hours, multiply that by (let’s just say) 4 sites you have 100-120 hours of just website work. (Not including the sell sheet, logo, brochure, newsletter and postcard designs we designers need to lay out within the same time frame.) And usually all of our clients want everything ‘yesterday’. So 10 hour days don’t sound bad at all. They tend to go pretty quickly and miraculously everything seems to always get done.

Mondays at DDA have always been the day when bagels are purchased for those who work here. Pre-me there were no asiago bagels; plain and everything were the choices for the prior year I worked at DDA. It just so happened one week that Debbie took an order for different kinds of bagels. I remembered eating an asiago bagel once and liking it, so I requested one. Now we get 6 asiago bagels each Monday and have to fight each other off for the opportunity to obtain these cheesy bagels of goodness. As a result, we now refer to Mondays as Asiago Day. Heh, well I lied. We really don’t refer to it as Asiago Day…just me.

It may sound silly to you, but there comes great satisfaction with a good meal to start the day. Perhaps a bagel isn’t the first choice of breakfast, but every time I sit back at my desk after eating the bagel of cheese, I am ready to work. There comes no grumble from my stomach as I design my Sell Sheets. No pang of great hunger as I prepare Print Newsletters for client preview. Not the slightest sound from her (my stomach) as I design a new Website template. Nope, nada. At least not until lunchtime…which is now.

This week has been pretty eventful at DDA. I was able to complete a priority trade show graphic, send out finished illustrations, start on two new sell sheet projects and a new website template and see two sites go live. We also put up the DDA sign yesterday. Yep, all in a week’s work. I have to admit that I am pretty happy with the trade show graphic. I love textures, layering and silhouetted figures, so when I got this job I knew what I wanted out of it. I was fortunate enough to find great vector based images on stock sites that would help bring the piece to life. I was also fortunate enough to have a client that loved the final product. I’d love to see it printed. I’m sure it will be impressive at 9 x 9 ft!

Sometimes I just can’t get it right. My flight was delayed 7 hours this past Monday and as I sat in the airport, waiting for either a new plane or for them to fix the old one, I decided it was a perfect opportunity to look at my upcoming schedule of events. I have long been putting off changing the dates on my tickets for future travel, and it seemed fitting to take care of it while sitting in an airport. While I played around with the changes to one of my tickets, I found that I would be charged an extra 130 dollars to simply change the date of departure, which did not include the price of the ticket. My thoughts were something along the lines of, “Oh great, and I was hoping to change another ticket too!” I pondered whether I REALLY needed to change my second flight so I could save some money and then I happened to see that my flight itinerary had an error in it. Apparently when I was trying to book it I accidentally chose to fly into the Las Vegas airport instead of the Los Angeles airport! Too bad for me because it looks like the ticket into Los Angeles will be almost double the price and now a fee will be added onto it as well. Yes, share in my humorous error. It’s OK, you can laugh; I did. This just goes to show the importance of double to triple checking what you’re doing. Obviously I didn’t read the information carefully enough because I assumed I had it right. Fortunately at DDA there are people who proof projects after completion and they are meticulous in doing so. Too bad I can’t hire them to proof my personal projects.

Sometimes you just can’t really think of any ‘blog worthy’ posts. Or at least, anything that you yourself find interesting enough to post about. Not everyone is aware that they are or their work is interesting to others. I don’t know how many out there are curious about me or what I do, but regardless of any outside inquiries I know I am interesting. I have had an unusual upbringing, whether it is good or bad I won’t say, and that judgment isn’t yours to make. Because of my beginnings I am a contradiction, or at least my life concepts sound like they should not or could not go together; but they do. I am at all times introverted and outgoing, I am 100% idealist and 100% realist, I have no hope for the foolishness of man yet I have endless hopes for a better future. Confused yet? Welcome to the club.

Throughout life, in all of its ups and downs, there has been one tangible constant; art. Art helped move me through the good and the bad. Of course now I sometimes feel I would rather be at home doing art than doing something else.

The thing I loved about art college was the fact that we lived art. There was not a second of the day that we were not thinking about, learning how to or making art. For 4 years I was in a very stressful, tiring heaven. I wish I could go back.

College didn’t prepare us well for life on the outside. They gave us a glimpse of life as a freelancer, but what about those who had no interest in freelancing? We were thrown to the wolves, left to fend for ourselves and find a ‘day’ job while we tried ‘making it’ with our art. “HAH!”

I was truly blessed to become a part of DDA.