479 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 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. 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 is something that's hideously broken, but wears a thin, thin veneer of working properly at select resolutions. And off we ship! Classic story.

[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.

 

 

So this post got a little bit funnier. I've had a hectic last month prepping for my first job hop. It was horrible, but I did it. Well, I say it was horrible, but it took less effort than one might expect, being that I got snatched by the first company I interviewed at. Totally undeserved "Front-end Engineer" title, here we come. :thonking:

 

Learning some JavaScript and bamboozling your way into a well-paying job is a pretty solid backup plan if you need one

 

Moral of the story: ignore haters like TAHU

[Dopple]

Career Adventures Con't

 

I was about to lose my job! Wombo-combo of a COVID economy and being a late joiner at my company. In fact, one of my teammates has already been cut. Sad pandas. He's better than both our full-time peers (where one's great at the vanishing act, and the other tries really hard but regularly baffles me with their basic questions). It wasn't anything more than bad luck that Buddy got dropped instead. 'Tis the rule of the game for contractors like us.

 

So they gave us notice, and I went to re-live the trauma of interviewing, as you do. During one phone screen, my brain shut down in the middle of the initial "So, tell me about your professional experience" introduction. It was bad. I went to buy alcohol afterward, and I don't drink.

 

Somehow, I moved on to the second stage, a technical assessment, which I passed (this was less of a mystery). Next was a remote technical interview. By then, I had wisened about my drinking habits, and pounded alcohol beforehand rather than after. I still nearly collapsed into a black hole, but managed to bungle my way to the final HR round, where they picked at my design degree and unconventional background.

 

After that wild ride, I got a verbal offer. Pretty solid one, given the circumstances: 85K base + possibility of bonus, retirement matching, foosball tables and free beer (yeah... one of those places), cool but closed office located in a druggy nest.

 

While this was all going on, things got better at my company. And by better, I mean random. Manager Man asked if I was interested in doing UX. He'd asked me this in the past, at which time the answer had seemed obvious. No! 

 

As a profession, "UX" is almost always graphic design/UI beneath a veneer of tech hipsterhood. Too many people, including my peers from school, think UX design is about making things Le Pretty. It's not bloody "UX" without a research/statistics-driven process. For that matter, I always liked that my friend's company hired a cognitive scientist to be their UX designer: at least somebody knows what's up.

 

When Manager Man asked about the UX thing again, I decided to be frank about "UX" seeming more like graphic design, and that a lot of the interesting and important usability problems are solved on the dev level. I love the gritty details, that's my thing. So if I want to be a designer, I have to be a dev, because it's often hard to reach the granularity you need till you do the implementing yourself. I don't see myself ever detaching from that. It's not that I dislike UX -- I strongly dislike what the market has done to it.

 

Turned out Manager Man wanted to move me to a "UX Engineer" role. Surprise! He seemed confident enough that he presented the offer as something I could have as long as I wanted it, even though to them I was somewhat unproven in this area. Or, he added, I could continue being a front-end dev, because either way, they were trying to save my place at the company.

 

Well. I had a bad feeling about doing "UX" again, including (especially) "UX dev." Not to say that this position was necessarily a trainwreck, but UX dev jobs suffer from the same problem that plagues marketing jobs: people want ultra Swiss Army knife skills, including development, but don't want to pay dev prices. More cynically speaking, the pay tends to be closer to the lowest common denominator of your skill set. I saw a company post an "Intermediate UX Developer" role that had vastly more requirements than their Senior Front-End Developer role. The projected salary was $65,000 Canadiamonopoly money. Also, Glassdoor reviews said that the CEO screams at people. Just run away.

 

So given all that baggage that comes with "UX," it wasn't a great look for this UX Engineer role. I strongly considered rejecting it, and at some point, was quite sure that I would.

 

Plot twist: I accepted the position anyway. The trick was distinguishing whether my misgivings were because the path ahead was really no good, or because I'd gotten complacent. I decided it was the latter. I was sensing personal stagnation, and pushing myself to do something I had a bad feeling about might give me some kicks, who knows. :'D 

 

There was still the matter of the other offer. I thought about it for a few hot minutes, then I rang up Manager Man to explain that this deal I got was cutting it close in value to my current cold-hard-cash rates. Therefore, more money please. It wasn't that I wanted to leave to begin with, but negotiating would make my decision to stay a lot easier. Ngl I'm about as politically unsavvy as they get, and for me that was an audacious move, ask for a raise from a company who wasn't so long ago poised to boot me.

 

But I got it. 9%. Extra 10K a year. I'm staying.

 

And that's my horrible humblebrag post of the decade. See you next time, when I lose my job for real, or something.

 

PS I am really darn awful at basic addition/subtraction and want out of this business tax crap

[Dopple]

Fellow in a meeting: You're all professional designers here, you do this for a living...

 

Me:

 

 

 

pushing myself to do something [UX] I had a bad feeling about might give me some kicks, who knows. :'D 

 

Just kidding! I hate graphic design, I hate "UX," I hate the broadened responsibilities (design roles require some degree of leadership) bwahaha. After I push pixels for about half an hour, I want to get up and do something else, such as go downstairs and stare into my backyard. Like right now I'm supposed to be working, but I bodged off to write this useless post instead. Then I think of my peers from school and all the "Graphic Design Is My Passion" type people who would be over the moon if they were in my place. Feels not-good, man. Not that you necessarily need passion, though it surely helps make your day-to-day life a little more bearable.

 

Last year, I left my first job thinking I'd chase money for a while. Lo and behold, here I stand and I feel nothing.