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

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I think what may have happened to you is getting caught in the gap between 'all done on paper' and Photoshop when you picked up your habits. I remember seeing and reading about the process for various types of rendering, with the various elements of the image done on onionskin (or, for example, in books on anatomy, transparency pages with the 'layers' of structure that you turn to expose deeper structures). If you didn't get exposed to it before you started using graphics editors, I expect you were accustomed to only having one layer to work on. What was more of an 'oooh' moment for me was seeing that, with layers of an electronic image, you could do more than simply laying one on top of the other -- that you could combine layers procedurally. I still have little actual artistic talent, but I think I use what I have fairly well.