Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Give me space

Published on Wednesday, October 7, 2009

I love pho­tos from outer space. They make the best in­spi­ra­tional images.

Blue Marble

They re­mind us that our prob­lems are small and insignificant.

Untethered

And that we are ca­pa­ble of achiev­ing the impossible.

For Sale

And some­times they re­mind us to have a sense of humor.

See more here and here.

Looking for sane designer

Published on Thursday, October 1, 2009

InDesign layoutPart of my job is to look for free­lance de­sign­ers and ju­nior de­sign­ers for some of my company’s up­com­ing pub­li­ca­tions. The cri­te­ria are sim­ple: great with Adobe InDesign and can com­mu­ni­cate in English.

Some re­sponses to my help wanted ads are just bizarre, and I’m not talk­ing about their funny English. Here’s an email con­ver­sa­tion with a girl who I asked to come in for an interview:

Me: Can you come in to­mor­row af­ter­noon at 2:30 to dis­cuss the de­signer po­si­tion in more de­tail?
Girl A: I am sorry, your com­pany can not come to­mor­row. I have to work in other places, thank you to let me know. I’m happy, hope to have this op­por­tu­nity to work with!
Me: What about Wednesday, 2:00? Otherwise let me know a time that you’re avail­able Tuesday or Wednesday.
Girl A: I am sorry, I can not come! I have to find a job, thank you

Right.

Here’s a girl who claimed to know InDesign but didn’t have any lay­out sam­ples in her port­fo­lio. I gave her ma­te­ri­als to cre­ate some­thing that I could look at, but the crap she sent back clearly wasn’t made with InDesign or any page lay­out software.

Me: It was ap­par­ent from the PDF you sent that you did not use InDesign for that lay­out.
Girl B: the pur­pose of you com­pany is to make your mag­a­zine beau­ti­ful or some­thing else. No mat­ter which soft­ware I choose to do the mag­a­zines, I can give you com­pany a sat­is­fac­tory re­sult I think this is the most im­por­tant thing.Why you com­pany must choose the only soft­ware. To be hon­est, I ac­tu­ally do not know the soft­ware. I just get know it dur­ing those days, but I can use it to com­pose mag­a­zines. The Indesign file which I sent you ta­day is made by me last night.I rec­og­nize that the Indesign file which I used in in­de­sign is not good, but I can quickly learn it and know how to use its ba­sic func­tion. And I will fa­mil­iar it af­ter sev­eral try. Ok, If you com­pany not hire me, i have no choice,but give up.

But that’s not all!

Girl B: And Finally, I want to tell you that I have not chance to try again forever,since I have to work in my home­town in Changsha HUNAN province which is far away from here.For my uni­ver­sity life is draw­ing to end this month. And the com­pany that I will work is a tex­tile company.

Boohoo. If you’re in Shanghai and are avail­able for pub­li­ca­tion de­sign work, and are not crazy, show me your port­fo­lio. Thanks.