I feel as though I'm fighting an unwinnable battle by asking for more, not less intention in art. Most artists at least produce a statement to accompany their work, but I rarely find them substantive, despite their often turgid language.
What I find particularly distasteful about this is the presentation of "art" as interior design products. This seems to be a trend among independent creators looking to make a living outside of the traditional gallery/fair/buyer system. I of course understand why they're doing it, but I'm using those disparaging quotation marks because that commercial contextualization commercializes the work itself. And at that point, it escapes my own nebulous boundaries for art and becomes something else.
What exactly, I don't know. I'm not sure "design" qualifies here, even though we're being asked to appraise the work as we might a chair or credenza, because I'm not sure I believe "this wall feels empty" is a problem to be solved, in the design sense.
So what is it then? Stuff? Just more stuff for people to buy and feel good about owning? Okay.
(And no, I don't think this counts as me having a reaction to the art. I'm reacting to the creator, the marketing, and—sorry—the bullshit.)
Also a raw HTML writer, but I’ve been considering the SSG route to make site updates (global nav changes, redesigns, etc.) manageable. You seem to have some method of handling this on your site, given that I can view a page of posts from 10 years ago and still see links to this year’s posts. How are you doing that with raw HTML? (If this question doesn’t make it clear, I am quite amateur.)
I'm grateful to not have much of a problem with my smartphone usage, but I often find myself researching dumb phones in search of something somehow better because I quite dislike my phone (and all the others I've seen/heard of) as a device. It's too big, I hate touchscreens, and I hate Bluetooth.
I'd like to see someone develop a new smartphone platform with all the niceties like GPS, a decent camera, easy cloud (and/or manual) backups of my data, and either a lot of onboard storage or easy SD compatibility, but offer it in a completely different physical format that is more conducive to efficient, intermittent productive/tool-like use and less tuned for consumption. Small form factor, maybe a fold-out QWERTY keyboard (my LG Env3 is the only phone I've ever actually liked), headphone jack, etc. Something reasonably durable that can take a drop or be submerged and simply won't be "fun" enough to spend much passive time on.
As for apps, I like all my basics to be built by the same company that built the hardware, but combining that with an open platform for third-party options seems like an easy win, even if I don't end up using those other apps myself.
I recently got my old iPod up and running again because I loathe the touchscreen/Bluetooth headphone combination for listening to music. But it feels so stupid to be carrying an additional device. I now carry a camera with me too because I dislike smartphone image processing. This also feels stupid.
It's silly that we've concluded the only two options are pocket computers that can't do much at all, or pocket computers that can do anything, but only in this one way that many people find harmful.
Born in ‘88. Haven’t had Facebook since 2010; Instagram since 2012; Twitter since 2017. Not on Reddit, only use Discord for voice calls with a couple friends while gaming.
My few friends are more or less the same way, but I’ve felt very isolated from my peers for a long time due to their passive relationship maintenance and growth through social media. All the ways I used to meet new people seem to be ineffective these days. I have developed a Youtube consumption problem and I suspect it’s because it gives me the hit a better social life would.
I hear sentiments like yours every now and then, but I’m sure not seeing a change myself. Most people seem to agree the platforms are bad, but also seem more addicted than ever.
I'm inordinately irritated that this quiz is impossible to ace. I got every question right but for #6, which has an answer format that makes it impossible to answer correctly. "Sorry, trick question," it says when you put in "0 hours" as the best approximation of the correct "you can't park here at all" answer. Like, I knew that … you just … made it impossible to answer correctly? What?
This is a silly thing to be upset about, but just … why would they have done that? It's so stupid.
I have asked for feedback a few times—particularly on ones where I felt I got close to an offer. Unfortunately no one has even responded to these requests.
The remote thing definitely limits my options, but I have tried to be realistic about it. For the first few years of this struggle, I was primarily looking for local work in a big city with lots of options. Since I moved a couple years ago, I have been focused on remote-only or at least remote-first companies, as I am currently experiencing the sorta second-class-citizenship of being a remote employee at a company that still claims it isn’t remote, despite not having any offices since the pandemic.
I’m definitely open to local work and actually prefer working in an office, if it’s a decent place, so I do keep an eye out for it, but there aren’t many opportunities for my kind of work where I live.
This is the killer for me. I've never found tech work fulfilling, personally, and I never expected to. But what has burned me out is the sense of being perpetually behind because there's no finish line; infinitely marching onward without ever feeling you've accomplished something. Every morning I open the same files.
My friends outside tech often talk about the satisfaction and relief they feel after completing a big project, and the relatively peaceful lull between such projects, and it just sounds so nice. Doesn't matter whether it's a big event they planned, a tour they went on, or a structure they welded. When something is done it's done. They get to move on personally and professionally.
It used to feel like a job change would provide that sense of momentum, but even that's disappearing now that every product (at least from my designer's perspective) feels more or less identical these days.
I came to suggest exactly this, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it in the wild.
Set a flat minimum amount you need to collect for the software and allow your customer to either pay that out in subscription payments (and then continue paying if she wants to keep receiving updates) or, if she decides to cancel her subscription early, allow her to pay any remaining difference between the sum of her subscription payments and your flat price.
Image maps unlocked expression on the web for me when I was a kid. I enjoyed coding websites, but felt creatively limited by what I knew to be possible with simple HTML and CSS. When I realized I could turn any graphics I made into live web elements without having to fit adjacent pieces into a layout I could simulate with tables, I felt I could finally make a website that reflected my artistic self.
I think I published the last version of my personal website that I made with an image map in 2004 or so. I've been trying to think of a good use for one over the last couple years but haven't come up with anything yet.
The last really cool image map-based website I remember was Margot's Room by Emily Carroll [1]. Dunno if she coded it, but it's her comic.
I had the good fortune of visiting the Hopperstad stave church when it was getting a fresh coat of the traditional resinous mixture that preserves it and gives it its signature color. If I remember correctly (I probably don't), they said they give it a new coat every 26 years. The smell was heady.
The carvings throughout the building are as cool as the building itself: chimerical mashups of Christian and local pagan imagery, signatures from ancient travelers, and of course more runes than you can shake a stave at.
One of those places, like the Hagia Sophia, that overwhelms you with the depth of history. How tragic to only get one life; to only experience one era.
Yeah, I hear you. A CC subscription is not cheap, but it's pretty incredible what you get for ~$600/yr, especially compared to what's offered by other subscriptions people pay for without blinking an eye.
I'm as eager—if not more—to take on massive greedy corporations as the next person, but my guillotine would be dull well before I got to Adobe's neck.
Yeah, I hate the cloud saving too. Fortunately that's something you can customize: Preferences > File Handling > Default File Location.
There are a lot of other useful settings in that panel for people (like me) who don't like a lot of the changes that have come down with Creative Cloud file handling.
> The new save dialog is insane. No, I don't want to save a copy just because I want to save a jpeg. Why is this even a question?
I don't like the new save/load stuff either, and much prefer the old versions you can toggle, but that does bring up the fact that /you can toggle stuff/ and really customize the app to your preferences. I don't know any other visual creative tools with the depth of customization that Photoshop affords, between the fully modular GUI, actions, etc. A side note: jpgs saving as a copy has always been the default when you're working with a psd. There used to be a way to turn off the 'copy' appendage (like you can when duplicating layers), but I can't remember if it's still there.
> I know you can duplicate a layer - but not to a different document.
You can, actually! Been able to for a very long time. Right-click on the layer > Duplicate layer > Destination > Document. Pick another document you have open or create a new one with that layer. Pretty handy!
Appreciate your thoughts! The suicide bit was definitely a joke, so no worries there.
I hear what you're saying, and definitely get how the sharing bit that has helped Figma take off like it has is good for the browser. I'm a bit at odds with the industry, though, in that that's probably one of the things I like least about Figma. But a lot of that is because I'm not always the best team player :].
I won't pretend to know enough about what goes into building these programs to say whether the RAM cap or native app collaboration is the more difficult thing to overcome, but it's clear to me that I would prioritize these differently from others.
I haven't used any of the Affinity apps. But are we talking about the same Photoshop?
> I counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS installed
I don't check how many background processes are running when I use Photoshop because I don't notice them at all. Almost every feature I use in it feels responsive, especially compared to how it used to be. If you're talking about telemetry, yeah, I hate that too, but I've more or less resigned to it as a necessary evil in all my professional tooling.
> The apps all take forever to load
Photoshop opens nearly instantly on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, as it did on my M1. It was slower on Intel, but what wasn't. I can open and close Photoshop three times before Discord even loads an empty window.
> drain battery if working remotely
I've never tried a remote workflow with Photoshop, so can't speak to that at all. Definitely does not seem like what the program is optimized for, and I would think battery drain would be the fault of whatever tool you're using to remote in, no? Or do you mean just working on an unplugged laptop? In which case, I find Electron apps that do one task poorly tend to be less efficient than even heavier desktop apps that 100 things well, Adobe or otherwise.
> and are far more unstable than in the past.
Sorry, what? I haven't had an Adobe app crash on me in probably eight years. I of course count that as good luck, but to say the current builds are less stable than older versions is just … insane to me. Thinking back to, say, the CS2/3 days, half my time in the program was spent Cmd+S-ing for fear of the inevitable hourly crash and loss of work. Photoshop crashes were a legitimate part of creative culture from like 1999 to 2012.
Sorry if I sound like an Adobe shill. We've just clearly had very different experiences with their products of late.
Where we are in agreement is that Blender is cool! I'm too much of a neophyte in 3D workflows to assess whether I think it's ultimately well designed (some bits seem to be … others not so much?), but it seems to run very well on the various machines I've tried it on and I have a great deal of respect for the nature of the program and the people behind it.
I know everyone hates Adobe (I certainly share some of the grievances about their pricing structure) but I have been using Photoshop for something like 23 years, working across half that many creative disciplines, and cannot overstate how much I value the consistency, reliability, and neutron-star density of its feature set. You call it bloated, I call it a Swiss army knife. I don't want every tool to be that way, but I love that some are. (The problem with this analogy is that Photoshop actually /is/ the best tool for many of the things it can do, where the Swiss army knife is solidly in jack-of-all-trades territory.)
Given this, I am very concerned about Adobe's continued march into web apps. For most of my UI and web design work, I use Figma, and quite like its feature set, but that I cannot use it offline and that I cannot work in a file that requires over 2GB of RAM due to its browser RAM cap is infuriating to me when Photoshop (the supposedly worse program) enables me to manually allocate as much of my system's 64GB of RAM as I please. It's difficult to imagine any web app stably and efficiently growing to Swiss army knife-levels of capability. Not just in terms of performance and resource management, but also GUI, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
I've long assumed my CC subscription would die with me, unlike many (most?) of my peers, but if the web-based Photoshop somehow became the primary Photoshop, I may have to cancel my subscription, and then kill myself.
What I find particularly distasteful about this is the presentation of "art" as interior design products. This seems to be a trend among independent creators looking to make a living outside of the traditional gallery/fair/buyer system. I of course understand why they're doing it, but I'm using those disparaging quotation marks because that commercial contextualization commercializes the work itself. And at that point, it escapes my own nebulous boundaries for art and becomes something else.
What exactly, I don't know. I'm not sure "design" qualifies here, even though we're being asked to appraise the work as we might a chair or credenza, because I'm not sure I believe "this wall feels empty" is a problem to be solved, in the design sense.
So what is it then? Stuff? Just more stuff for people to buy and feel good about owning? Okay.
(And no, I don't think this counts as me having a reaction to the art. I'm reacting to the creator, the marketing, and—sorry—the bullshit.)