Sunday, November 30, 2014

Scratch an itch

I want to blog so badly, but I want to offer value to a reader. With so many professionals out there with more experience and greater wisdom than myself, I whimper in my virtual space yet itch to play with the big dogs. Where do I start, where does it go? I figure the best thing I can do is start and improve along the way.
How does someone get here to the point of some undying desire to voice their opinion in public space yet maintain an awareness that it is just an exercise while building an honest reputation? Before I bore myself with rhetorical questions let me lay out the path that got me here..
Now I am not talking about simply saying to myself "I need a blog, everybody has one" but the fact that I have studied this for a while and have next to nothing for representation of my meek knowledge.
In 1987 I began designing business cards and some trifold brochures. Mostly mockery or prank cards with phone numbers like '1-800-who-cares' and brochures for fake evil dentists with hand drawn illustrations. When I reached high school I took this skill and my slightly improved quarkTM knowledge to support my friends' garage bands by making flyers for upcoming gigs. I had access to a macintosh II but a majority of my work was cut and paste. I mean literally 'cut and paste' with scissors and gluesticks. Beyond the immediacy of Xerox I also got to work on an ABDick offset press. I quickly grew weary of envelopes and letterheads and craved more color and graphics so I moved into screen printing. This shift changed how I worked with images. The hardware changed as did the software. Instead of creating negatives and type with software on a mac I was creating positives and geometries on a PC. Output was also quite different, instead of platemaking I was cutting ruby with plotters. This lead me to CAD and CAM. I found myself in opportunities to operate bigger and better machines. 20 years later and I thought web pages were just stored pages of rendered graphics and I should have plenty experience and knowledge to create a site, right? Those of you who know better know that I did not and here I am. Unable to finish an easy web page with simple posts about what ever the heck I feel like. 

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