Call Me Tuts

Yesterday morning I went into work feeling pretty bummed out. You know the feeling, when your job pays you well to sit and do nothing, and you feel sort of useless and listless... you spend a lot of time looking at YouTube videos that people send you or reading blogs about cupcakes or chatting on AIM about Battlestar Galactica. Right?

Thank goodness for AIM chat with Jean. Two days into her new job and she is already full of great wisdom and advice (even moreso than before). She reminded me that the benefit of a freelance gig is in flexibility. My hours are, after all, *my* hours. If there's anything Beth is good at, it's using the internet, and within a few minutes I had discovered a new way to charge value into my day, in the form of Photoshop Tutorials!

I had completely forgotten about online tutorials and the inherent bliss of learning something new. I had forgotten that along with baking blogs, Battlestar Wikis and Movie Spoiler Websites (which have saved me from many an M. Night Shyamalan Crappening) the internet is full of new somethings to learn that actually pertain to my job. Because while it's great to be able to keep up hours long conversation on why there's no 7th Cylon (Yeah, why?!), no one is gonna pay me for that skill.

My new goal for building a better Beth-brain is to complete one PSD tutorial per day from the PSDTUTs site, until I've completed every single one. The site has some pretty amazing tutorials that actually showcase things you would really want to learn, along with links to articles and inspiration. Also good are Computer Arts Magazine, Tutorial 9, and abduzeedo.

Having attended a few Photoshop seminars through Adobe, I find I only learn from doing, regardless of how great my notes are, so it's key to actually follow step by step. The tutorials on this blog are also great because the beautiful end product is taunting you at the top of the page like a carrot on a string. Here's what I've done so far. Not amazing, but I learned a few tricks here and there.

Watercolor Seattle: this is actually a fairly simple layer masking process, which I got from the Viget design blog.


Windows Vista-style light-rings using layering masks & gradients: Fairly simple, just time consuming, but you learn a bit about layer styles


Grassy type: Very very time consuming, but a cool effect to know, and easy to reproduce using any texture you'd like.

Unemployed Again, Naturally

Today I woke up at 10am and for a while I just lay in bed and stared at the hair on my knee and then I got up and sent job application emails and looked at Facebook and then I went and had lunch with Andy and Andre at the Pyramid brewery, where none of us drank any beer. We talked about our positions in society as the supper-bell-ringers, signaling the world that it was "Time to consume!" and thus, of course, causing the downfall of civilization. I had chicken chili though, which is better than beef chili and so it all balances out.

Not having a freelance job to currently attend to means that I am free to do all sorts of fun/meaningless things. After lunch I went to the bookstore and bought a book about user interface design for my web design class and then came home and learned how to play the world's slowest online scrabble game.

I should be really excited about all this free time, but I think work brings me meaning. Work equals producing, and at its best, producing in my job means creating, and I somehow value creating above all else as the meaning and purpose of life.

All I am creating right now is a lot of emails in my friends' mailboxes and a lot of scribble on their walls and nonsense on their voicemails.

I really must stop whining and get off my butt and do something. Creativity doesn't need employment to be employed. I have a million ideas and now is the time to implement. But first, more whining...

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When people talk about milestones growing up they never mention the fact that the first time you get really truly all out bed-ridden green-snotted low-grade-feverishly sick without access to your family or readily available healthcare, you will certainly panic and think you are going to die.

I'm sure they mostly don't mention it because afterwards it seems silly, but I'm sure if everyone thinks back to the worst and first time they were sick and out on their own, they will recall that they were a little freaked out.

Last week Andy was stuck on a presentation meeting and worked all weekend, and I had no one to call because as I've already mentioned I have no friends here, and since my COBRA health insurance is Aetna of California, I could only really count on coverage if I went to the emergency room. And my paycheck hadn't come yet, and I had a fever and blood in my snot and cramps from my period. And it was 11pm and there was no Tylenol in the house and I didn't know what to do.

I called my mom in tears and told her I had a fever and that I was scared of getting brain damage. I'm sure she must have wondered how she raised her daughter to be 27 years old and worried about brain damage, but luckily I have a wonderful mother so she was only supportive and loving and offered to send money or fly me home.

Hearing my mother's voice seemed to calm me down somewhat, and Andy came home for a break to bring me hugs and Tylenol, good sweet boy that he is. Five days later I woke up one morning and felt all better. The end!

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I have been reading up on typography because I find that typography is the easy way out for some people when they are assessing your design portfolio. Like when someone is giving an ad critique in class and they say "But that ad could be for any product, it's not differentiated enough." Sometimes that's true, and sometimes they are just blowing bloody green snot out their nose, but if you don't know enough to know when they're wrong, you'll fall prey to their all-purpose nitpicking.

Same thing goes for typography. Typography is such a complex art form that involves so many practices and so much fine-tuning, that to look at a portfolio and say "your typography could be better" is like reading a book and saying "your grammar could be stronger." More importantly, it drives at a general skill level and not at a specific piece or issue.

So studying type seems like the best way to call their bluff, and I've been reading typography books until the wee hours, and having typography dreams as a result. The other morning I woke up with what I was sure was the best new idea for a video game ever based on the Gutenberg Bible where the point would be to decide a character's path by deciphering between printed pages and identifying key glyphs and character-space to determine which ones were fake. Each fake page would take you to a dangerous world full of intricate type-puzzles and each real page would transport you to a reward level.

I thought it all brilliant and was ready to start making up keyframes or something when I realized that this was basically the idea behind the computer game Myst, and then I went back to sleep.

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city

I have a new job! Or rather a new freelance assignment. It will last through the first week of March and pays me enough to keep me in all the $1 Starbucks coffee my little heart desires. Best yet, it is at a design firm whose work I have long admired and I am learning a great deal from some really talented creative people. I was unemployed in Seattle for a total of 5 days, for which I feel very fortunate. Of course when the assignment ends I might have weeks and weeks of unemployment, but for right now it is helping me adjust and meet new people.

Parking downtown costs about $16/day, so I have been riding the bus to work. It's a short 15 minute ride and costs about $1.50 each way. I think the experience of taking the bus makes me feel like a real grown up in a real city, but I suspect the novelty will wear off soon. It is comfortable to come home and make a little dinner for me and my roommate, chat with a few friends, and close out the evening with the Colbert Report. I feel all domesticated. But it's only been a week.

Weekends have been spent adventuring in such places as the landmark Seattle Central Library and the giant retail city of Tukwila. Poor Tukwila seems to exist purely as a location on the outskirts of metropolitan Seattle where cityfolks can drive a short distance to the giant Ikea, Ross, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, Guitar Center and Westfield Shoppingtown, a shoppingtown within a shoppingtown. It's as though the city of Seattle has taken the garish landscaping that embodies the suburban strip mall and swept it under the carpet that is Tukwila. That way the neighborhoods of Belltown, Magnolia, Fremont, Queen Anne and Pioneer Square can stay as charming as their names might imply.

The best thing so far really has been our location within Lower Queen Anne and down the street from the Seattle Center. This is my first experience of living in the heart of a metropolitan area. I enjoy hearing the shouts of drunk people down the street. It's sort of similar to the feeling of being all cozy inside when it's raining outside, which I've also been enjoying a lot. We are like a 5 minute walk from two grocery stores, a really good thai food place, the local indie movie theater, a used book store, a pottery studio, a record store, the Key Area, Seattle International Film Festival Theater, the Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Experience Music Project, some crazy looking big top circus dinner theater place called Teatro ZinZanni and a bunch of bars and restaurants. It reminds me of visiting friends at Berkeley in that everything is walking distance and I am excited to go out and try it all.

The only drawback is that with so much to do, it's been difficult to find time to blog...

Bethy the Brave

Today Beth made a brave and bold move. She made the decision to resign from her post as resident Art Director at Motta in order to pursue her Seattle life. Even though it's something she wants to do, it's still a difficult thing leaving a place that she still likes and has many friends and family.

The good thing is that friends stay friends, and we all know you can't get rid of family no matter how far you travel. So it made me very happy that Beth took a chance and chose the opportunity to try a new life adventure.

So let's all wish Beth the best of luck on her new journey. Fun will be had, regrets pummeled and anything resembling an ass will be kicked.