Self Loathing Ahead…

I live to design, be a better designer and to make a career of communicating. I must be on life support. The bottom line is: I am a hack.

By examining my Bookmarks folder entitled Dailies, one can fully appreciate the sheer enormity of my failure, in comparison, as a designer. These are the sites I check at least once each and every day of my miserable attempts at being a designer:

Douglas, Todd, Cameron, Jeffrey, Shaun.

Now I know what you are saying: "Hey jerk! What makes you think you can refer to these esteemed gentlemen by their first names? Show some respect! That's Mr. (insert name here) to you, boy!"

And you’re right. I don’t deserve referring to them by their first name. However, those are my links as they are listed in my Dailies folder. I know that Mr. Dominey does whatdoiknow.org and rather than list out the site address and/or his name, I can simply refer to the link as "Todd". Trust me, I know their last names and so far feel blessed to see their respective pages pop up in my browser window.

I feel these gentlemen are recognized, more notably, in the web-design community, but I don't think the type of media excludes you from a genre of work. Photographers used film composed of this crazy combo of salts, gelatin and polymers (cellulose acetate). Now they use a neat little combo of silicons and plastics inserted into slots — digital technology boggles the mind. In the end, they are still photographers, they just use a newer media.

Mr. Moll has a tasty series on his “blog” (if you can call it such, as I consider most of these guys’ posts as articles related to industry with a peek into the everyday personal) concerning how to make your work look like it survived the “Duck 'n' Cover” days. This is more along the traditional design line, but regardless of his Photoshop savvy, one mustn’t overlook the beauty that is the website the tutorial resides. Clean, simple, easy on the eyes as well as a pleasurable means of attaining worthwhile information. I admit to seeing other sites sharing some basic aesthetics of this particular site (an older version of greasyskillet and Astigmatic come to mind), but there is enough here in content and visuals to differentiate.

Back on topic, I feel I am so far below these gentlemen that it is pathetic, nay, borderline mockery that I should call myself a designer at times. Even after deciding to look to these guys as a means of guidance and inspiration and -not- as an attainable goal in my career, I still feel unworthy to "open in tabs" every morning.

Jeez... that was rather self-deprecating.

Elsewhere: No more Ozarka in the office until the 9th. Crap.