In article ,
tacit wrote:
In article ,
(Stephen Edwards) wrote:
Five minutes? Are you sure you’re not talking about "bullet time". 😀
Assuming the image is the size of the one on the Web page, and not larger, then yes, five minutes should be about enough time. Of course, I’ve been using the Pen tool since about 1994 or so… 🙂
True story: Back when I was working prepress at the second trade shop I was at, I had a project (a catalog) that required putting clipping paths on a large number of images. One of those images was a photograph of a pile of bolts, about 80 MB in size, full-page. I had to put a path around all the bolts, carefully outlining all the threads on each bolt; took, all in all, about seven hours.
AUGH! Flashbacks! Unclean! Unclean! Make it go away!
I had to do something similar to a large poster sized picture of a bunch of coins scattered across a desk. The picture was for a brochure for an insurance company’s local office.
At the time, I was using a Macintosh Centris 650, with 32MB of RAM, and System 7.1, which loved making my applications quit at just the right time. Not fun. It was, as I like to say, like kicking dead elephants uphill… barefoot… in the snow… while having rabid ferrets snap at my heels.
But it was, by no means, the worst thing that I’d faced in those days.
No, the worst time I think I ever had was when I was tasked with laying out a bunch of attachment cards for some chintzy line of jewelery a client wanted to market. Now, for you newcomers to the industry:
RULE NO. 1) Never agree to work with an associate of your client’s on any project(s) unless they are proven to be knowledgable and reliable.
It seems that our client already had someone on their end create some artwork for us to use. "Sure", says I, thinking that it would save me time. Of course, it ended up costing me about two weeks of wasted time. For starters, this said someone had absolutely no experience with graphic design. She sent her artwork to us on CD (because she had no idea how to use her internet account), which I promptly had a look at upon reciept. When I attempted to open it in Illustrator, I saw the damnedest thing: random parts of the image were vector data, and other parts were raster data… I’d never seen anything like it. During the numerous times that I had spoken to her, from what I could gather, she was creating some portions of the "artwork" in Corel Paint, and importing it into Corel Draw, adding some vector art to it, *CUTTING* it, and then *PASTING* it into Illustrator. I kept telling her that this was a Very Bad Idea(tm), and that she should create the artwork in Illustrator, but she would simply pretend to agree to my comments, and just do the same thing (or just send the same exact file to me) over and over again.
For two weeks, this is pretty much how my days went:
1.) Get another CD in the mail.
2.) Open the file in Illustrator, only to find that it’s still wrong.
3.) Call client’s "artist", and sit on the phone with her for two hours in
an attempt to explain to her for the billionth time how to create and properly export artwork for me to use, as well as ask her to send it on CD when she’s finished.
4.) Hang up the phone, go outside to the parking lot, and scream at the top of my lungs.
5.) Come back inside and explain to boss why the project isn’t getting done.
6.) Call client and explain to him why the project isn’t getting done.
7.) Wait for boss to finish talking to client on phone, knowing that client’s clueless "artist" is blaming me, and yet again, explain to my boss why the project isn’t getting done.
And I would repeat this ad nauseum every day for fifteen days. No, I’m not kidding.
To make matters worse, we were using Illustrator 6 at the time, whereas they were using version 7, and so it was very easy for them to point their fingers at me as the cause of the problem. So, what did we end up doing? I told my boss:
"Okay, fine. I’m tired of playing games. If they want this utter crap in print, they’ll get it."
So, we ran it. It looked like shit. The client didn’t like it, and after I had sternly talked some sense into the client, and told him that normally, the kind of time his project took would have cost him thousands of dollars anywhere else, he agreed that someone else should do the artwork. Of course, it wasn’t us… it was some half-assed outfit that charged him about twice the amount that we would have… and they didn’t do a very good job either, but by that point, I was so over that job, that I just didn’t give a flying fuck about any quality in the product whatsoever.
By far, my worst experience ever in graphics design.