[thelist] designer burnout?

[aardvark]

> From: "A. Erickson" <amanda at gawow.com>
>
> I was reading a book today ("A People's History of the United States" --
> highly readable just open up to any page and get lost in it) and it
> contained quoted passages in a differently sized and spaced font and I
> thought to myself, 'How nice that I can read that font.' Ugh.

i look at magazines i subscribe to and get mad when they try to 
look "webbish"... button-like images for headers, hyper-text like 
pull-quotes, crap like that... you can tell they want to be hip, but 
they've not seen many attractive sites...

i often wonder what are those elements that you can use, at the 
bare minumum, to make a print piece feel like the web?  and why 
do i see ads framed in web browsers? and does this mean we'll 
never get rid of underlines in print?

> How do you keep from getting web burnout? Designer burnout? I was never a
> print designer but I've been doing web design and dev for six years now. I'm
> starting to get... tired of looking at my computer. What's a web geek to do?
> How do you keep going? What inspires you?

i don't fight it... sometimes i throw the magazine on the floor, and in 
an atavistic monkey-fit, i fling poo...

and then i go look at stuff that existed before the web... before 
computer-kitsch (you know, with fonts that only appear in movies 
like Wargames)... i often go back to Constructivist stuff, or 
Bauhaus styles... i am fond of harder and sharper designs... 
sometimes i need to make a 'dirty' design for a client (i hate grunge 
fonts), and that's hard for me... but i often do somewhat well... i 
also try to do experimental stuff for myself (photo manipulation, 
flyers and crap for friends, etc)...

keep those old books and magazines... look at stuff from eras 
you've forgotten... set things on fire and throw them out the window 
for ideas... the pattern of burning passers-by can often be 
inspiring...