How do you explain...

How do you explain it to an adult that everything takes space?
I've never thought that I needed to, until I became a designer.

I'm sure that every designer is annoyed by this day in and day out:
Your clients or co-workers have no clue about how much stuff
can fit in the space of an ad or a page. And by the way,
they have been doing this for years, you just don't know how.

You've got a sheet of letter-size paper full of paragraphs of text
cut and pasted onto it that looks like a ransom note. You check
the ad size, 1/4 page. You talk to yourself, "I'm a designer,
not a magician. How do they expect me to fit all this crap in this space?"
Don't people know that every single thing you want to put in an ad
takes space unless it's your love and soul?

I worked on this 1/6 page ad last month. The client was wondering
why the photo in the ad was much smaller than the same size ad that
ran next to it. WHY??? I almost couldn't believe my eyes when I read
that e-mail. Do you really need to ask why? Can you count?
And do you understand the concept of big and small?
The other ad only has 4 lines of text and you have 8.
Your logo is 3 times as big as their logo.
And you have an 8-point border around.
And, no, taking out 2 words in 3 point
won't help to fit in 10 words in 7 point.

I rest my case.

Print to Web 101

I went to an AIGA event last night, Print to Web 101.
It was an introduction for print designers who were interested
in web design. Four designers/web developers talked about basic
web design principles and personal experience on transition.
It was a pretty good introduction for my level.
I've been working on printer design professionally about 7 years.
I've had done some simple html ten years ago just for fun.
Of course, everything is different now.
I just sat through my first lesson of CSS two weeks ago
from my boyfriend who is mainly doing web design for living.
I made my first web page with CSS after 3 hours and actually
felt a little bit good. However, that tiny little comfort
was pretty much gone after 30 minutes into this introduction.

I'm not sure I want to become a web designer if I don't have to.
I became a graphic designer because I loved stuff in print.
I collected all kinds of stationary since I was a kid.
I loved a nice envelope, a pretty greeting card.
Loved to touch them, felt the texture of the paper.
For me, I almost always want something nice in print
rather than an electronic file. Web design is great,
but I just feel different about something I can't touch.

Also, web design is full of technical stuff that takes
way more time troubleshooting than designing.
I watched my bf spending 3 hours trying to fix one coding
problem all the time. I just don't feel like that's
the kind of design I signed up for.

I work at a publishing company doing local newspapers and magazines.
Watching much better magazines die, like Gourmet Magazine,
I can't help wondering how much longer can we hang on to this cliff?
What keeps our publications alive that Gourmet Magazine didn't have?
Apparently it's not the good design. As a designer, that bothers me.
It's like watching a bridge collapse before you try to cross it.
You are glad that you were not on the bridge
when it went down, but now how do you cross the river?

I think this Print to Web thing raised more questions to myself than
answered them. People showed me how it's done to make a transition,
but is that really what I want to do? If I stay in print business,
when will I lose my job eventually? Am I good enough to survive?
And will I be happy doing what I have to do to survive?
Questions...