Mountain Dewd said:
Yeah, its horrible to live in a world where you might be judged on your talent rather than the piece of paper you paid $40,000 for.
Your education isnt a one-way ticket to employment, you actually have to be good, and if you are good, you'll get hired.
Get it through your head that there are going to be people that didnt pay $40,000 dollars that are better than you.
Its a competitive world we live in, I'm sure making everyone pay $40,000 dollars to apply for a job would make sure that alot of talented people were put out of the running, thus making your life easier, but I'm afraid thats not how things work, deal with it.
I actually just got a new job, for a new start up paper in the heart of Boston, one of the hardest daily newspaper markets in the country. The company came to me--because they interviewed people from many other places I've worked and nearly all of them dropped my name, saying that I was the single most skilled page designer they'd worked with...ever. I am now the editor of three sections of this daily paper, and may even (god willing) be flown to other startups of the same type across the country to help get them running right. These people selected me because of my skill, talent, and knowledge of the industry.
They picked ME, out of hundreds of applicants, because they are trying to take down the hardest market in the country outside of New York. What we are doing is equivalent to starting a TV network that is supposed to beat the BBC, ABC, CNN, Fox, WGBH, and NBC all at the same time. We are stepping up to go against newspapers that have been here for literally since the dawn of print media's existence. And they chose me. Why?
Because I'm a bad mother****er in the news office and I can break my foot off in any enemy publication's ass, design-wise and content-wise. That's why.
My training...where to begin? I have been trained to present, write, and design news and print media (as well as news work for radio and TV). I can design advertisements that will make your stupid fat parents buy you crap that you'll strew throughout your house like it's worth half what I made you pay for it; I can make you believe in political candidates; I can make you go to the store when you don't really have the money; I can make you do whatever the hell I want, with colors, fonts, and images...and of course the power of suggestion.
When it comes to news I am an award winning (though uncredited) designer. Even though the plaque is on the editor's wall at Gatehouse Media, I am the one who made the pages and I am the one who, in a market of over 1600 papers, frequently achieved first honors for my papers that I worked on at my old job.
I am the most decorated paginator in the history of the Tab chain of papers, having achieved an unprecedented 14 award winning packages by various journalism associations throughout Massachusetts. 12 of said award-winning packages were designed solely by me.
So you need to get over yourself acting like you know some **** about publication and print media. There is a lot more to know about in order to do the job right then "oooh lol cool free filters." You don't know **** about dpi, you don't know **** about press runs, you don't know **** about CMYK color bleeds, you don't know jack about four-color press plating, you don't know worth a damn about CTP interfaces, Print media PDFs, You sure as **** weren't trained by people who revolutionized the industries of page design, and I know for damn sure you weren't taught photoshop by one of the people who actually MAKES photoshop. I also know for damn sure that you don't know jack and **** about ANY SORT of design conventions, you don't know any of the rules of competent layout, and you sure as hell couldn't pump out a vital cover package while being on the phone with one editor and having two others and the editor in chief look over your shoulder with less than 5 minutes till press deadline and two stories still out completely. I know for damn sure that you haven't the dimmest clue about RIPs, about
Seriously. You think because some punkass ****head kid with no computer and no talent downloads photoshop and does some tutorials off the web he is all of a sudden a designer? Get with the program. People like me are angry because we ARE good, both with design and decisions, but now there are so many millions of people to sift through in the design industry we get lost in the crowd. So good for you, you know how to make cool glowy energy blob effects and how to make a grungy-ass wall background. When it comes to making an actual piece of art for print media you and anyone else who didn't actually get trained the way I did would be a hopeless ****head--which is all I worked with at my job. You had web designers who thought they were awesome because they knew how to do some photoshop tricks but they were pretty clueless when it came to almost anything outside of said bag of tricks. They don't know the difference between photo resolutions, the differences between different methods of image compression, the way formatting is applied to pages in various programs, or how to work with four-ink color setups (which all publications have). How many of you can even tell me what CMYK means without googling it?
****, most people can't even use MS word's simple stylesheets, nevermind this stuff. You know what I did at one job? I made a script that allowed me to place up to 50 sheets of manual pages into a scanner, which then automatically scanned each page, cropped it, set its contrast to a universal levels, cut out any pen ink strokes of red or blue while never losing black typed ink, straightened the writing if it scanned in crooked, saved the file as a single page pdf in a much larger set of pdf documents, eventually resulting in a full 700 page compiled document. I barely had to lift a ****ing finger--because of my "useless" training.
I did that in two days because I rigged up that script. To top it off, that was for my father's agency's Council of Accreditation reports, the first time they'd ever submitted it electronically. I did it so well the COA people people actually used my work as an example of how it should be done ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.
So don't talk to me about people being better than me and my training being a waste of money. I've made a career out of showing up places and using my allegedly worthless training to utterly destroy everyone else there. I can do more work at a better quality faster than anybody you know or ever will know, I can promise you. I've yet to meet someone who I can't eventually supercede at anything as far as my work goes.
So don't tell me about talent. I didn't just pay $38k to get a piece of paper with my name on it. Hell, 10 grand of that cost had nothing to do with my diploma (which is in fact only an associate's); they were summer courses I took solely to better my craft. And for the record I worked my ass off. You act like I just rolled in with a check and went home same as I walked in.
Bottom line: you want to have anyone on this forum try to design an actual publication for print media, I'll be glad to step up and make them look stupid any day of the week.
Seriously. I don't know why I even bother. I shouldn't expect people advocating piracy to understand what it's like to work hard and spend a lot of money only to be indirectly robbed of it all.
