Design & Photography: March 2010 Archives
This week is d-day for my annual freelance project -- creating the program for the Miss Houston Pageant. Which means I won't be doing much of anything outside of working, designing, and sleeping this week.
This year we seem even further behind than usual. There are always girls who send their photos late, and advertisers who send their ads late. Lateness would not be quite as big an issue if what they sent was correct. But the ones who send late tend to be the ones who also don't follow the specs. There are the ones who send a 2x3 at 72 dpi photo they saved off the internet despite you specifically request a 5x7 at 300 dpi. And there are the ones who send lovely ads with photos that run right to the edge of the page, but their file is sized to 8.5x11, instead of the 8.75x11.25 I need to effectively print a full bleed, and their text is so close to the edge of the page that enlarging it slightly would mean that the text gets cut off. And there are the ones that insist on trying to fix the file themselves, instead of complying with my polite request to have their photographer or designer send the file directly to me.
It's not their fault, and I'm not blaming them. They're not designers or photographers, and I don't expect them to know exactly how to do things. But I do get tired of the endless polite emails saying "this file is not large enough, here are the requirements, please try again." Perhaps I should make a tutorial. But I doubt anyone would actually read it.
Jose's mom is visiting us for the week. Tickets from Corpus Christi to Houston get so cheap on Southwest that if you wait for the right time, you can fly round trip for $78. That's within a few bucks of what we pay for gas each time we drive down there -- one tank there, one tank back. Anyway, the cheap ticket prices let her come for a longer visit than usual, so she flew in on Saturday and leaves next Monday.
We can't take the week off work, so she's been hanging out at the house during the day. Yesterday I came home and she had made cupcakes. Yum! Then while I went for a run, she started making dinner and it was ready right when Jose got home from class at 7:00.
Just like I say whenever my own mom comes to visit and does my laundry: I could get used to this!
In other news, last night we finally went live with two websites I've been spending every free moment working on since mid-January. (They're paying me, so the comment about spending all my free time on it is not a complaint in any way, but merely a statement of fact.) After spending so much time on them, I find myself looking at them now and thinking that they don't look like they should have taken so much work. Hmph.
Anyway, if you are curious, here they are: misshoustonpageant.com and missbayareapageant.com. I've been working with the pageant producer for a couple years now; you may remember a mention here or there of creating the program book each year since early 2008. This time around they wanted a refresh of their very stale old site. They seem really happy with the result, so I'm happy too.
