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editoRial
September 2008 In this month’s Viewpoint we’ve asked the
Caroline Roberts very timely question: How do you switch
Editorial off? Timely in the wake of the summer-
holiday season, when we try and pack a
year’s worth of fun into two short weeks
and place completely unrealistic expectations on our destination,
accommodation and long-suffering travelling companions.
There have been a lot of stories in the media about how people
get so stressed in the lead-up to holidays that they end up
working the equivalent of a day and a half extra before they go,
and a similar amount afterwards to catch up. We’ve all been there,
frantically composing your holiday auto-response twenty minutes
after you should have left for the airport. Has it always been like
this? Holidays should be something to look forward to, not to dread.
For an increasing number of people, there’s no need for that
holiday message as leaving their Crackberry at home would be
simply unthinkable. It’s easy to spot the blokes on holiday who have
a better relationship with their handsets than their long-suffering
wives and kids. They like to pretend they’re dealing with an urgent
email from the office, but it’s just one of their mates with something
amusing they’ve found on YouTube or the latest Premiership scores.
As a designer, you’re faced with a double whammy. There’s the
switching off that everyone else has to do—weaning yourself off
emails and MSN—but then there’s the other sort of switching off,
which is much more difficult. As a designer you’re praised for your
impeccable taste, your attention to detail and the ability to look at
a logo, layout or typeface and immediately work out what’s wrong
with it and say how it could be improved.
Unfortunately these qualities do not always sit well with other
(non-design-geek) holiday guests. All they want to do is find an
ice-cold beer, not listen to you wax on about the charms of Senor
del Toro’s quaint vernacular signage. They’re not interested in
the hand-drawn version of Comic Sans on the blackboard, and
amazingly enough they’re not mortally offended by the lo-res
images of the various appetising frozen desserts which appear
on the badly laminated menu.
It’s a double-edged sword. As a designer, you can bet your bottom
dollar that you have more fun and opportunities for self-expression
in your working hours than most of the people you know who work
outside of the creative industries. But it’s virtually impossible to switch
off the very things that make you excel at your job. As a couple of
our Viewpoint contributors point out, alcohol often helps, and you
wouldn’t be alone in taking the liquid anaesthetic route—in our
experience there don’t seem to be too many completely teetotal
designers out there (but maybe we’re just too drunk to notice them).
But even the purchasing of alcohol can be fraught with stressful
design decisions. Who out there can honestly admit that they have
never picked out a bottle of wine over another of similar origin and
price simply because it had a really well-designed label? Happy
holidays, cheers or, as they say in Catalonia, “Sant Hilari, Sant Hilari,
fill de puta qui no se l’acabi.”
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