Thanks to Amy for this link on how to figure both the name of my band and the title of my first album. Also, I get cover art out of the deal. I’m glad this is now taken care of because it was weighing on my mind.

Update: I didn’t realize I faved the photo in flickr: macrisbruse.

I am a compulsive reader. At breakfast I’ll read the backs of cereal boxes. I can’t not read a sign I pass, or even the warnings on the back of a car’s visor about le sac gonflable. That’s why I read the tag on the back of the new car:

In between was a fish symbol, just to make sure you got their message: hey, we’re Christians, and we want to sell to Christians because they’re good people.

Let’s slide past using religion as a tool to sell, much less sell cars, a profession that consistently is ranked at the bottom in terms of honesty. It’s the “…for good people” part that makes me grind my teeth so hard that I have to wipe enamel dust from my lips.

People aren’t simply good or bad, as if they pick an alignment off of a D&D table and never deviate from it. People are good or bad in the context of what’s going on, both in the world around them and inside their heads. Moreover, a person who’s a Christian is still a person. It’s not as if all of their flaws vanish, never to reappear. Even the ones who are trying their hardest to embody the best ideals of Christianity are going to slip up.

The idea that Christians are automatically good is poisonous. It flies in the face of everything we know about people, and is a yardstick that no one will measure up to, not always. It leaves no room for people to be human. It is an ideal that brooks no deviation, and grinds people flat. If you’re not a Christian, you’ll look at us Christians and say, huh, they say they’re good, but look at all the times when they aren’t. It doesn’t help that Christians have the bad habit of taking the already-flawed logical proposition and incorrectly reversing it, deciding that non-Christians can’t be good.

You want to sell nice cars to good people? Fine. Just don’t tie it to Christianity in an attempt to move more product.

I’ve been doing some form of customer service work my whole life.

My first job in high school was at the public library. It was a very cushy job in many respects. One of the best parts was the people. People who come to the public library want to be there. They are getting a free service and so are usually nice about that fact. In the three plus years I worked there, I can only remember a couple of annoying/crazy people and at least one of those worked behind the counter with me.

In college I worked several fast food jobs in the summers, one of them Sonic. Seriously, people, tip your car hops. Their job sucks and it’s about 110° out there. I went home exhausted from the heat, smelling of grease, and disappointed I’d only made $10-12 in tips for a six hour shift, all of it in quarters and dimes.

When I worked for Apple, I worked out of a CompUSA. A CompUSA. Yes, all the stories you can imagine are probably true, and frankly, I’ve been doing my best to forget that very creepy guy who would not leave me alone. I told him I’d already married one creepy guy who wouldn’t leave me alone.

Now I work freelance as a graphic designer. The up side of freelance work is that you can pick and choose who you work with. The down side is that sometimes you choose incorrectly and end up with a client that makes you want to take them by the ear and give them lessons on how to work with another adult. But those people are not who this post is about.

I have two excellent clients right now. The fact that they are recurring clients is only one facet of why they are excellent. Here’s my list about what makes these two people such good clients. Some of the things on my list pertain only to creative work and some of them apply to any client situation.

Understanding the Way the Process Works.
I don’t know any creative person who is a mind reader. Since none of us can actually read our clients’ minds, we are going to have to create a set of drafts, talk about what works and what doesn’t with our client, and then go back to the drawing board and do it again. We repeat this process until the client is happy. Sometimes it takes two revisions. Sometimes it takes twelve. Regardless, it’s going to take at least a little bit of time.

I like to work from the macro to the micro. At the beginning, I want to get an idea of what my client’s vision is and what they’d like the finished product to look like. If they have definite ideas of what they want, then I start showing them those ideas worked up in a rudimentary form. If they have no idea what they want, then I try to suggest avenues of where to go. If this is the case, I like to present them with a few very different ideas and try to zero in at the first proofing discussion. I’ve had some really nice products turn out from both starting points.

Ultimately, the goal is the best possible finished product for my client. Contrary to the way it looks in the movies, that doesn’t happen with a wave of a magic wand or with a rockin’ montage (although I am known to rock out pretty radically while I am slaving away on the above-mentioned drafts). Believe me when I say I want you to look good. If you are happy, then you are going to tell all of your friends, relatives and business associates that you like my work. Hopefully that translates into more good clients for me sometime down the road.

A small side note to understanding how the process works: since it is a creative endeavor, I might not be the best possible choice for your project. If you don’t like the style of the pieces in my portfolio then it’s best to shake hands and part ways now rather than being mad later because I’m not creating the thing that you need. Designers have their specialties just like doctors, so part of being a good client is shopping around for the right person to do the job you need done.

Trust.
Trust me to know my job and do it. Don’t art direct over my shoulder. There’s a huge difference between, “Hey, I’d like to see these three pieces of art worked up this way and if you think of anything else, I’d love to see that too!” and “Can you use Univers instead of Helvetica? And make it bigger? Then slide it over 3mm to the left…” I don’t work well when all I hear is another chorus of “make the logo bigger”.

A lot of this stems from the fact that everybody has a computer. “I have a computer, so, really, how hard can it be to slap a few sentences of text on the page and run a border around it?” or “My nephew is making my business cards!” If your nephew has taken some commercial art or design classes or possibly graduated from RISD, go for it (and also, introduce me to him so I can pick his brain about RISD). Otherwise, you might want to call a professional.

Pay the Bill on Time.
Do I really need to say this? Unfortunately, yeah, I do. Not paying your designer is a good way to rack up bad karma. We are creative people and we can think of insults like you wouldn’t believe. Also, we’ll put ugly mustaches on all of the photos you’ve given us to work with. Paying the bill ensures prompt service from us. I promise, it works.

I am glad that I have the two good clients. I just finished a lengthy project for one of them and am a bit sad that it’s over. The best of all compliments from me as a designer is that I want to work with you again on a different project.

One of Eli’s current favorite websites tells jokes. That, of course, means Eli then tells those jokes to us. A selection of his favorites:

Cinderella and her sports-playing ability
[audio:cinderella.mp3]

Giraffes and their nocturnal habits
[audio:giraffe.mp3]

Chimps and their ailments
[audio:monkeywrench.mp3]

Sadly, I wasn’t able to capture him saying, “Listen! Listen! I have a joke!” and then coughing to clear his throat before he tells it.

If you’re one of the many voters disenchanted with the current presidential choices, consider taking a look at Mitt Zombie. Mitt Zombie: reanimating America one voter at a time.

Now that Liza’s talking, we can inflict more audio on you!

First up, Liza’s favorite new word: “What’s that?” If I played the entire recording I made instead of carefully-selected bits, you’d hear the two of us saying “What’s that?” “That’s a microphone” over and over.
[audio:whatsthat.mp3]

It started when Liza saw Saber, the dog next door, panting. She panted right back at Saber. Now she pants all the time. The other day Misty asked Eli about his lightsaber, and Liza, hearing the magic syllables “say” and “ber”, panted.
[audio:panting.mp3]

Liza likes testing gravity by taking her food, throwing it on the floor, and then looking down at it and saying, “Uh-oh!”
[audio:uhoh.mp3]

Liza loves her some butterflies.
[audio:butterfly.mp3]

We’ve said “thank you!” to Liza enough that she now parrots it back. If you hand her some milk, she says, “Thank you!” If you take the phone away from her so she doesn’t dial people at random, she says, “Thank you!”
[audio:thankyou.mp3]

“Hello” is one of her newer words. You can barely hear her playing with her pig phone in this clip.
[audio:hello.mp3]

This is one of her earliest words. I can’t imagine why.
[audio:stinky.mp3]

From one of my craft blogs, I found a pattern on this page of a robot. I decided that it was cute and that I could certainly make it for Eli.

Eli picked out the colors from a stack of felt that I had. Purple and green are always favorites, but the orange in the mix was a bit of a shocker. I think he picked it because it was sitting on top of the pile. I started out using black thread to sew him together but I quickly discarded that arm and started over because he looked like a Tim Burton reject. I rummaged around and found some silver thread and that totally makes his look.

Notice between this photo and the next he went from having matching legs to having mismatching legs in the style of the arms. When I discarded the first black thread arm, I cut out a purple piece instead of a green one. I decided it would be cuter to make the legs match the arms. Opposite, of course.

I made the decision to put hair on him and now wish I hadn’t. Eli doesn’t like it either. One of the first things he asked me this morning when I gave him the finished product was could we take his hair off because he couldn’t see the robot’s green head with the hair in the way.

On the third limb I figured out how to attach the limbs attractively. Unfortunately, the two good ones are the legs. Ah, well, Eli doesn’t know or care.

In this photo you can see how uneven the arms ended up. I matched them on the piece of green felt from the bottom but then when I started sewing them onto the back, I ended up with about 1/2″ of fabric that I cut off. End result: wildly mismatching arms.

I didn’t stuff him super full. I didn’t want to strain the seams by putting 5 lbs. of stuffing in him. He’s just a wee bit squishy, which is what we all want in our robots, right?

Here he is finished up last. I think I spent around 10-12 hours making him and around $5. I believe I could probably make the next one a bit quicker. I’m thinking of trying to make Liza a butterfly in the same style since she is all about the butterflies!

Even though he didn’t like the hair, he ended up naming him Tentacle, because of the hair. Go figure.

Also, as with so many things, the joy seems to be in the making. He’s only played with him for about 5 minutes. While in contrast, yesterday after nap he insisted that we work on the robot and he sat in the office alternately watching me sew on robot legs and They Might Be Giants videos on youtube.

Liza had her year check up today and she got shots in both legs and a finger stick. The doctor said she is cutting four upper teeth. So that’s why she is grumpy.

The only odd thing was that her weight measurement was slightly below average. My girl that eats everything in her path is not in the upper percentile for weight. I was shocked. Hopefully, this means she got her dad’s metabolism.

I know, I know, what are we thinking, changing the design every three years or so. Nevertheless, have a new blog design.

The only real content change is the “Shrapnel” sidebar on the right. We’re going to be dumping links in there that we find interesting but don’t feel like writing a full blog post about. If you hover over them, the tooltip will tell you more about the link. Sometimes. I make no promises. There’s even an rss feed for the links if you’re one of those feed-reading people.