I cant represent 'intellectual' without using 4-color

Amazingly enough, I was the primary candidate for the Graphic Designer position at ICE and I got the title without having to go through a multitude of interviews. Finally, some sense in all this madness!  Apparently, even Carol thought I was competent enough to do the job I already do. It’s really a miracle. Really.

However, I shan’t let this brief shining ray of hope discourage my real goal of finding an actual job that doesn’t eat my soul. It’s always a good thing, finding that type of job—and having it with a company that isn’t going to belly-up on me.

After the holidays passed, Step-on-me decided that our workload was too much (yeah, thanks for pitching in right AFTER the rush season. Where were you then? Oh yeah, on vacation) and began picking up a few projects here and there.

Really, having Step-on-me pick up a few side projects does not help at all, because:

1. She’s never taken any design, advertising, or marketing classes.


2. Her spatial relations suck.


3. She hides things (words, graphics, lines) under white boxes instead of deleting them.


4. She doesn’t know squat about prepress.


5. My eyes bleed when I look at her final product.

This being said, she decided to pick-up a brochure I was working on and help me out by doing the draft changes. Nice? No. I spent about two days fixing her mistakes, lining up text and boxes and paragraphs, fixing typos and leading and kerning, and basically scrapping everything she did and repasting it all into a master page. What should have taken me two hours (if I had done the draft changes) ended up taking me two days.

If that wasn’t bad enough, she keeps picking up all the new/fun (or what could be best described as least-painful) projects and leaving us with all the data entry crap. Then, because she cannot (for the life of her) figure out how to represent “intellectual” as a theme for a brochure in 2-color, she persuades the CEO-lady to let her do it in 4-color. The worst part is, she’s using images that are more fitting with “technology” (ie, binary code, motherboards, computers). Not to say that technology doesn’t require intellect, but rather that intellect doesn’t require technology. You know if I tried pulling that shit, I wouldn't get a raise next year.

And don’t even get me started on how we now HAVE to use a certain process (that’s supposed to save us hours of work, but instead is creating hours MORE of work) because somebody spent time on that process to get it set up for us. Well, hell. I’d be more than happy to use that process if it DID work, but it doesn’t. So I’m not going to waste an extra 3 hours a day just because somebody wasted their time on a process that doesn’t work.

Ugh.