I must be an idiot!

[elfs]

So, I spoke with my manager earlier this week. Isilon is growing and we're implementing a formal education reimbursement plan and all that goes with it. I have a very strong grasp of the entire stack of C/Python/Ruby/Perl/Appservers/Webservers/Databases on the server side side and HTML/DOM/ECMA(Javascript)/CSS on the client side. But I told him that I was never quite happy with my grasp of visual design. I can do it, but mostly without much inspiration. It's not something that comes naturally to me, and it takes a lot of practice to wake it up. He thought my graphic design sensibilities were fine for the industrial applications I wrote for Isilon (and F5, and Carbonwave, and all the contracts I did for CompuServe), but agreed that if I thought that was a skill I need to improve then, by all means, I should take a class and submit expenses and all that.

I am an idiot because today, while I was playing with my wacom pad, I figured out what layers are for.

I mean, if you're a graphic designer, let that sink in. I've been doing this for ten years and only today did I figure out just how useful layers could be. I've always done all my prototyping on paper and then just scribbled it into photoshop all at once.

Bleah. All that wasted time.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

For a long time, the only references I saw to layers were about processing an existing image. I didn't really catch on to their use in image creation until I was compositing some stuff.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The reason I've had so much trouble with layers is because of the concept of the 'floating layer,' which is what you get when you paste something from another image during composition. It always seemed to just merge with whatever you were working with. I didn't think that was very useful. I had to figure out, on my own, because for some reason the words just didn't stick when people tried to explain it to me, that you had to create a new, transparent, "real" layer, then paste the floater on top of it, then merge the floater down onto the layer, and then you could handle the layer and its pasted contents independently and persistently without having to 'freeze' it to the existing image.