476 replies to this topic

[Dopple]

My aunt bought me a T-shirt.

It says:

hello
instylefit girl's
WHAT WERE YOU THANKING BUT ME PLANE.
ARE YOU GETTING ALONG GO NOT MAKE ME NERVYOUS DOING MARE

I couldn't make this up if I tried.

[KabukimanNYPD]

10/10 best post on forum.

[Dopple]

I generally stopped giving a crap about grades because a large chunk of it doesn't involve learning anything useful or interesting.

[Dopple]

I met someone from MSN today. Nice fellow. He bought a deep fried Mars Bar, and ate it while I stared in horror.

 

Now I want to meet all of you!

[Dopple]

For once I met Therealtahu, even though we live in the same city. Hotpot was cool. Jamming on the Blazblue CS machine and laughing to tears was cool. (Hentai was there, too. He picked Iron Pubstomper, so I picked Pubstompumen, and we mashed keys until somebody died. It was stupid and great.)

 

But I realized why I don't hang out with my RL friends that often. If you're not hungry or interested in shopping, there's nothing to freaking do in Richmond. All the fun places are getting phased out by women's apparel stores. No more entertainment centres, just shops that sell purses and shoes. That Blazblue machine was part of an arcade area in a mall food court. If they could fit another clothing store there, they probably would've.

[Hobbes]

I havent met any MT members in person, though I'm sure there are a few that live close to Toronto. I think Fireboar lived closeby me, though.

[Dopple]

I'm at 3/3 cool people. Would recommend. Maybe we can meet up one day and make that four.

[Dopple]

"I'm not big on graphic design," I said, once upon a time.

 

Oh, how things have changed. Well, all design questions are interesting, so whatever keeps 'em coming, I guess.

[Paper]

There are people still on this forum?

[Dopple]

Yea? Why not?

[Therealtahu]

Some of us got Dopple a hammer and now we get to see an eldritch horror that sometimes resembles code. 

[Dopple]

Some of us got Dopple a hammer and now we get to see an eldritch horror that sometimes resembles code.

 

yUDoThis();

[Dopple]

Funny coming back two years to this...

 

Some of us got Dopple a hammer and now we get to see an eldritch horror that sometimes resembles code. 

 

Joke's on Tahu. I program for a living now.

[Dopple]

I've been trying to escape the gravitational orbit of graphic design. Well, the doing is alright, but that's as far as it goes. I've never really had a spark for graphic design -- I mean in the profession sense, not in the philosophical, "graphic design is everywhere is graphic design" sense that I sometimes talk about. Back when MapleTip still had the avatar and signature gallery subforum (whether it counts or not aside), you'd see a number of folks who enjoyed what they made, to the extent that they probably could've seen themselves pursuing graphic design further, if not professionally. I never did have a similar interest.

 

No, I don't hate it. I don't like it, either. And there are some reasons why graphic design (the profession, not the discipline) increasingly sucks.

 

1) People balk at paying you more than like... 40 bucks... for a piece of work. If you think that's pricey: exactly. Where I'm from, and maybe where you're from, too, $40 might let you live to see another day. $40 can also cover one month of your Adobe subscription (people do, in fact, pay for this, especially if they're going professional). What $40 ought to get is one hour of time from a freelancer -- the kind of worker with irregular income and no benefits. 

 

2) Following 1), this also means you compete with graphic designers from places where $40 can let them live for more than one day.

 

3) The bar to entry in graphic design is pretty much nonexistent, so any freelancer-apparent and their dog's mum can get in on it. The field becomes a combination of saturated and very noisy. Web design is going in a similar direction, with people selling other people's WordPress templates, and occasionally calling themselves 'web developers' while they're at it. Top hilarity.

 

4) Not so hilarious is when anything visual eventually becomes absorbed by the amorphic, ever-expanding blob that is the field of graphic design. Web design is about how the website looks, so that's graphic design, obviously. HTML/CSS is about presentation, which is web design, which is, naturally, also graphic design. UX design? Well it has 'design' in the name, so graphic design it is. (I have a friend who was hired on as a UX designer, got assigned random graphic design and marketing stuff. What's the word? "Jebaited"?) And if all these things are now graphic design, what happens to traditional, print and visual asset graphic design? Becoming less adequate, less relevant. Public perception is on a steady downward trend, and the collapse has a way of sucking in everything it touches. 

[Dopple]

At work, I built this feature where you can share an 'x' to online friends, and the system lets them make a copy (so whatever friends do, it only affects their own version, and you won't see the changes). I did the UI, front end, back end, whole wazoo. Happy ending, it didn't erupt in flames when it went to production. While reviewing the feature with marketing, they said, paraphrased, So you know how in Google docs, you can see what your collaborators are typing in real time? Why isn't [our feature] like that?

 

Um, well... if the feature were like real time Google docs, I'd be getting paid about 2-3x what I'm currently making, or maybe, we wouldn't have gotten the demi-graphic designer to do it to begin with.

[Dopple]

Essays would be in a better place if more people observed the single responsibility principle. Then we'd see less drivel like this course description that somebody was probably paid to write:

 

This course will help students develop and consolidate the skills required for and knowledge of different subjects and disciplines to solve problems, make decisions, create personal meaning, and present findings beyond the scope of a single subject or discipline. Students will apply the principles and processes of inquiry and research to effectively use a range of print, electronic, and mass media resources; to analyse historical innovations and exemplary research; and to investigate real-life situations and career opportunities in interdisciplinary endeavours. They will also assess their own cognitive and affective strategies, apply general skills in both familiar and new contexts, create innovative products, and communicate new knowledge. The paradox of living through times of great upheaval is that it offers tremendous creative opportunities for individual growth and collective change. Using an interdisciplinary approach (philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics, literature, wisdom, traditions and the arts), students will critically examine humanity’s creative possibilities and potential through an inquiry into historical and contemporary social/cultural movements.

 

> The paradox of living through times of great upheaval is that it offers tremendous creative opportunities for individual growth and collective change.

 

What's with all the unsubstantiated claims that it just takes for granted? Too busy trying to shovel more crap into the same sentence. Unfortunately, English classes tend to encourage donning these kinds of cute stilts. It's an epidemic.

[Dopple]

I enjoyed these

 

 

Inline styles should be an extreme sport. Especially homebrewing your own gradient with a solid wall of divs.

 

 

Who do you call when you need some quick spacing? brbrbrbrbr

 

Complements this treasure I have saved:

<div class="height: 10em;"><br><br><br><br><br></div>

 

HTML and CSS are like the frost death knight of 'things that can be considered coding.' Despite the spec being brain-dead (not my words), I rarely met any frost death knight who managed not to butcher their rotation. Well, HTML/CSS gets a similar dismissal--since, you know, they're not big-boy, Turing-complete like them real languages. (HTML/CSS being technically Turing-complete aside, lol.) One of our job requirements asks you to be proficient enough in HTML and CSS that "you don't even need to think about it." After putting thousands of our CSS properties to the torch, I have no confidence in our position to make that statement. :D

 

I think CSS is tricky. I think the trickiness comes from its long history of forcing people to hack things together. To this day, one can easily find themselves in a filth of hacks and 'cargo cult' practices, where that little change they thought fixed the layout isn't, in fact, doing anything at all. That's to let alone the many delightful ways one can get hooped by gotchas, and we all know gotchas are what makes code fun and intuitive to work with.

 

Still, a few hundred-odd extraneous properties is pretty harmless compared to the temptation of treating the screen like a piece of paper, as people did in ye good olde days. Layouts aware of their unresponsiveness might refuse to resize themselves. Others will quite literally fall apart. On the latter--the catastrophic collapse of a web page for the simple sin of resizing it is a thing of beauty.

 

Oh... and don't get me started on the vortex that is {position: absolute}. It sucks people in with allures of flexible positioning, but then, as folks discover, its behaviour isn't so easily tamed, and they become trapped in a sequence of thrashing and flailing to compensate. Finally, the result something that's hideously broken, but wears a thin, thin veneer of working properly at select resolutions. And off we ship! Classic story.