Nearly three years ago, I was fired from my job; a casualty of the post-9/11 economic downturn. After 18 months of looking for work without success, I sat down to write a book, entitled, "Blown Job: an unemployment odyssey." Here's an excerpt from Chapter Three. (See "Past Posts of Note" for earlier chapters )
Chapter 3 - Look Ma, I Can Draw!
When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of school each day. The longest half-hour of my life was the one between 2:30 PM and 3:00 PM. I used to make myself nauseous, following the second-hand as it moved 1,800 times, Monday through Friday, September through June, kindergarten through college. And I was a good student, too. I was just restless.
As an adult, I took all sorts of continuing education classes, deluding myself that I could change careers based solely on one three-hour course taught by someone who was clearly so disgruntled with his own chosen field that he moonlighted to keep from going insane.
So, when I learned that I would be able to obtain up to $5,000 in grant money through the Career Center to attend classes to improve my skills and make myself more marketable, I was conflicted. This seemed like an offer too good to pass up, but in what direction should I point myself? And could I control my short attention span long enough to pass an adult version of a pop quiz? I decided that I’d be crazy not to try.
*
I’d long been curious about the field of desktop publishing. It seemed like a cool kind of a career; creating and printing newsletters, brochures, reports, ads, and all manner of publications right there on the desktop. Kind of like publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack on a Mac.
I did my research and found out that I could earn a certificate in computer graphics at one of the institutions approved by the program. I completed all of the necessary paperwork and was awarded my grant. Look out, Ben Franklin, here I come.
*
I signed up for QuarkXpress, a page layout program; Illustrator, a drawing program; and Photoshop, a photo manipulation program. If I could master these three courses, I would be well on my way to finding a job in the glamorous world of desktop publishing.
Each course consisted of six three-hour classes. I found out later that some schools offer each program over the length of an entire semester, or even two. And for good reason. The brochure neglected to mention that mastering the programs was analogous to learning Latin, Greek and Tagalog in three weeks. Each program had its own nomenclature, rules, and set of icons. A good sense of design is absolutely required to be a desktop publishing pro, though this was omitted from the course prerequisites.
This, I suppose is the nature of crash courses; to lure unsuspecting students with flashy brochures and the promise that they, too, will attain mastery of esoterica in no time at all. I gave it my best shot and I found that, though it was a struggle, I was able to absorb enough of the curriculum to actually enjoy putting my new-found knowledge into practice.
Once I got a handle on the icons and rules of page layout in QuarkXpress, it was on to Illustrator, with more icons and more rules. This is what I learned to do in Illustrator, after only three classes:
I'm a friggin' desktop Michelangelo!
It may not look like much to you, but I cannot begin to tell you how proud I was of myself for creating this. I was the kind of student who got my best friend to do all of my art projects in elementary school in exchange for me writing her term papers. I am the one you’ve heard so much about; the one who cannot draw a straight line with a ruler. I was an A student in everything except those classes that required some kind of manual dexterity, like art and cooking and sewing. (By the time I finished my 8th grade sewing project, a blouse, my bust had grown three sizes and the darts were up near my neck.)
So, when the instructor showed us this palm tree project, I nearly keeled over with the familiar fear I hadn’t felt in a hundred years. If he thinks I can do this, he’s crazy. But, once he broke it down for us, and showed us how to use the scissor tool and the knife tool and the swirl tool, and color it with gradients, and use the warp feature to make the flowers and the paintbrush for the butterflies, I was a frigging desktop Michelangelo.
I really fell in love with this program and labored far too long and unnecessarily on projects, because I went bananas over the zillion permutations of color and typography. All the while, I was thinking, am I ever going to get to use this in a job?
Illustrator was a kick, and then it was on to Photoshop, where fun went to die. I know there are lots of people who have wonderful and no doubt, well-paying jobs in digital imaging, but I will never be one of them. I just could not get the hang of it, though, believe me, I tried. I was not good at adjusting colors. I couldn’t crop photos without lopping off at least one important feature. I couldn’t outline an image. I’d forget step two of a procedure by the time we got to step five. I was working on a photo of Martha Stewart and I made her skin look like she’d been out of the sun for twenty years, which may have been a premonition, but at the time seemed to be merely an abject failure to grasp the fundamentals. The person sitting next to me, who seemed to be doing wonderfully well, confided that this was the second time she was taking the course. Somehow, I found this heartening.
I was able to practice what I learned in the school’s lab, which was outfitted with a half-dozen computers, a scanner and one printer. The lab was supervised by a boy genius, who seemed to know every single thing about every single program that was taught at the school. I was in awe of his knowledge, because I never once heard him lobbed a question that he couldn’t answer. Not only did he know everything about computer graphics, but also he was well-versed in Web design, video, and multimedia. While it was always necessary to endure his sarcasm whenever he answered a question, it was worth it in order to get through a sticky situation. The programs were anything but user-friendly. You’d be halfway through a procedure when you’d find that you didn’t have a clue as to what to do next. That’s when this fellow became your new best friend. Many was the time when I wanted to give him a big sloppy kiss for getting me out of a jam, but I didn’t want to traumatize him, Oedipus-wise.
I ran into difficulty with him when it came to the issue of printing. I like to print out my work, because when you’re working with lots of colors and fonts, what appears on the screen is not quite the same as what will appear on paper. As I didn’t own a Mac, I could either go to a commercial printer, where printing cost about a thousand dollars a page, or I could use the lab’s printer. Unfortunately, students were limited to printing four pages a session. (I didn’t understand the parsimonious attitude at the time, but I found out later that it was tied to the cost of color cartridges, which, for the price plus a little extra, you could buy a MINI Cooper.)
I changed my color and type combinations about 10 times a session, so the print limit didn’t work for me. Worse, I brought my own photo-quality paper to the lab, so it was obvious whenever I printed, because I had to walk over to the printer, feed the paper in manually, and stand there until the page printed. This seemed to eat at my lab maven. I’d try to print when he was busy with someone else, but the very last time I was there, he noticed that I had printed beyond my limit and cut me to the quick by sneering, “This isn’t Kinko’s, you know.”
*
I signed up for one last class, in prepress and production, because all of the foregoing would have been meaningless without it (though no one put me wise at the outset.) It means nothing to create newsletters, brochures, ads and the like if you don’t know how to print them. The course was very interesting and very involved and today, I remember very little about any of it.
And there is the miserable rub. I learned tons of things about hue, saturation and opacity; about gradients and layers and formats; about leading and tracking and trapping and overprinting and chokes and spreads; about calibrating and moirés and process colors, but, other than to amuse myself and my classmates, I haven’t been able to do a damned thing with any of it. Of course, I read the want ads with a religious fervor unseen since Mother Teresa. The problem is, there isn’t an employer alive who doesn’t want an applicant who already has years of desktop publishing experience by the time she walks through the door. I’d dearly love to meet a boss willing to take on a bright beginner. (Wouldn’t you?)
And so, I’m glad that I had the chance to acquire new skills and find out that I have some design talent. Going to class mitigated, for a while, the anguish of being out of work. And I absolutely know that my elementary school art teacher, Mrs. Barnett, is looking down on me from heaven (if she’s dead) (she’d be about 100 by now) with a mixture of surprise and pleasure.
Hey, if nothing happens soon, at least I can design my Last Will and Testament (but where, oh where, will I print it?)
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