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| skills n. proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience. | I design for print, web, multimedia, advertising – in fact there is not much I haven’t stuck a logo on. I am able to decypher even most cryptic of briefs and turn them into a workable design spec, while extracting quotations from a roster of suppliers. I’ve had to manage projects at short notice to keep them on track or drastically revise client expectations by walking they back through a process and highlight potential pitfalls. Over my twenty years in the business, I’ve sat on both sides of the artworking divide and have a profound for both sets of professionals. Artworking is a criminally underrated skill and provides an essential safety net for many designers – what’s the point of good design, if you can’t print it? Simple things like; remembering to include bleed, converting spot colours to cmyk, or even replacing low-res scans with their high-res counterparts are often missed by inexperienced designers and could lead to a reprint or a very awkward conversation with the boss. |
Web design has a similar split between designers and developers. However I would put myself firmly in the designer’s camp, even though I admit to dabbling with javascript and php when needed. I designed and coded a page to allow remote uploading from anywhere on the internet for Lothian Buses, a javascript form which greyed out certain sections according to set choices for XCalibre Communications, and rewrote php pages when I moved the Edinburgh Shuttle website from windows to linux. As a result of jumping between windows and mac machines, I’ve used all versions of packages such as Quark Xpress, Adobe Creative Suite, Macromedia Studio and Microsoft Office. Recently I got into tinkering with hardware and managed to fix a couple of imacs I had lying about the house. I had to replace a couple of logic boards and reinstall the system. Last year I traded in my old ibook after five years faithful service, a few new hard disks, and lots of ram. I had to admit defeat once firefox couldn’t show flash movies properly. Sigh! |
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