Category Archives: Art and Craft

The Quintessence

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I seem to be more interested in pictures these days… so not much writing and a lot of faffing in a nice way. But [and that’s a ‘capital but’] I need to get things done too unfortunately. Got a phone call in from a client about his/her website. I will be busy designing it next couple of days. It means I will have to install software on my server, front-end and back-end, make sure it all runs without bugs and then design the actual website using CSS and some images.

Hopefully it won’t take me too long so I can show it to him/her asap, I have a feeling this might become a drag… I’ve asked him/her to do some work for me and so far I haven’t heard anything from him/her, no replies to emails either until today when I received a phone call. I haven’t called back because I want to confront him/her with just one design and push it from there otherwise it is going to take forever. Normally I don’t mind but I need to be busy getting an interview and preparing for it.

I was supposed to meet up with a friend this weekend but she cancelled so I’ll finally have a weekend of relaxing, if I get that website done before Friday that is… Why am I always getting myself into impossible situations when it comes to deadlines. I shouldn’t be such a softy but this time I’m playing with the rules a bit so I will get it the easy way in the end. There are certain things that need to be done in order to make your client feel like he/she’s in control while he/she’s not. Paul E. [Update 2012: unfortunately Paul has stopped blogging] has written a very interesting post on that which left me wondering why designers all seem to have the same problems with clients…

Well I’d better go and start installing [although I’m slightly distracted by this song in my head: ‘…I’m filled with the essence of, The quintessence of joy…’]…

Bold Print

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I received the wedding announcement a while ago but forgot to put it online. I have designed it, created the artwork and send it off to the Lowlands to have it printed there. I’m happy with the result in general, there’s just one thing that’s bugging me which I noticed straight away when the card came in. I wanted a bright shiny varnish on the front. It’s a porthole and I wanted the ‘glass’ to be shiny. Also on the inside, I wanted the heart shape of the tattoo shiny.
Unfortunately the printer chose the wrong type of paper [that’s what you get for not being able to be there to sort things out] and ended up applying about 5 coats of varnish without getting the result that I wanted. I must admit I was disappointed but I reckon due to circumstances I wasn’t able to correct this, there was simply not enough time. Although I had left plenty of time to have it printed, the printer probably didn’t see this coming until the last moment. Which clearly states ‘no professional’ to me.
I don’t know this printer, he wasn’t my choice, the one that I used to work with for years never replied to my questions when I sent him an email about the assignment. So I gave up on him too. A shame because I know he would’ve done it perfectly fine. It frustrates me at times that people tend to ignore emails, they just don’t respond to them, what’s the point then in having a website and email address available for enquiries? I don’t know any good printer in London yet, I should look into this. But I couldn’t have done it here anyway since it needed to be send from the Lowlands.
I chose for the theme of a porthole and old school tattoo design because T. works and lives on a river barge. Even though I wasn’t happy with the varnish, the fact that they received so many responses -each and every one of them very positive- made it all worth it. After all if they are happy with the announcement and if others are too then that’s the biggest compliment I could get…