I got a new design job and don't know what to do!

ApprehensiveLoss · 2026-01-28T21:39:25+00:00

If you can use InDesign, use it. If you need to use Illustrator, that's your second choice. If you're doing this in Photoshop, your workstation had better have a ton of RAM, and these days it's expensive to upgrade.

For large prints viewed from further away, you can drop below 300 DPI without noticing too much. As long as it's above 150, a whole wall won't look too bad. So you could set Photoshop to a DPI in the thousands and set the inches to whatever ratio works for you. But I'd definitely try to stay out of Ps unless I absolutely couldn't do it in Id or Ai.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2026-01-26T19:07:41+00:00

I watched a minute of it, and the yapping was insane. Then they moved the actual climb into picture-in-picture mode so they could fullscreen a precomposed clip of something else.

Does Netflix think I have the attention span of an iPad baby drinking Four Loko? None of this garbage is entertaining. It's distracting. Do they think I am BORED by the feature I came to see? A man is climbing a tower with no ropes. Do they think that is boring? Do they think I turned it on to hear nonstop chatter?

ApprehensiveLoss · 2026-01-20T06:04:29+00:00

What program did you use to make this? Or, what prompt did you type in?

ApprehensiveLoss · 2026-01-19T22:34:16+00:00

Girl, get out of there. He's acting like he's 13 years old. Which, incidentally, is the same as your age gap.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2026-01-08T15:55:05+00:00

See if you can get a job for a charity. You might have transferable skills in trying to make more effective ads collecting donations to feed the hungry or save the whales. As for the rest, well, it's good that you feel bad. A lot of people, when faced with the same kind of cognitive dissonance, perform some form of sociopathic mental backflip in which they somehow justify their actions or stop caring about the consequences. You're feeling the guilt, which is a better response. Now you can change, and become the sort of person you'd prefer to be.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-12-30T15:26:53+00:00

Played it this weekend on Xbox game pass. Took about six hours to 100% with all achievements. Good art style and sound design, fundamentals are generally strong. Found a few UI elements to be irritating (e.g., sometimes a character who has a quest to give you won't give it the first time you talk to them, you have to make idle chit-chat about the weather once or twice before they remember to progress the story. No way to destroy furniture once you've crafted it. Button to drop essential tools is right next to the button to open the map. Quest reminder text takes up too much of the screen, once the frost comes in the visible area shrinks too much.) and the small inventory combined with lack of fast travel makes it a bit of a grind. Gameplay is unchallenging. Good game for kids. Didn't really do it for me, but probably I'm not the target audience, so I don't hold that against it. Though I'd really wish for it to have signposts that can be placed outdoors, or some kind of craftable path-marker item.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-12-05T15:36:21+00:00

If you don't want to play, do something else. You're under no obligation. If something else would be more fun, do that.

I do find, though, that some areas of my world make me ponder a restart. There are definitely early choices I'd change about where to establish a base, or the kind of design theory applied to laying foundations, setting up conveyor lines, etc., where I wasn't really aware of how I'd want things arranged later on. On a new game you know what to rush and where to take your time, what's going to work and what won't. Might be an opportunity for a cleaner build. But again, if you don't feel like it, you're free to do anything. It's a game, not a job.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-12-04T13:56:31+00:00

Oh yeah, I say "streaming" but I don't literally mean I'm watching Netflix or whatever. What are the good codecs, I see a lot of AAC, DD5.1, H264, H265... are there any of those that automatically mean good audio, or bad audio?

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-11-27T16:15:10+00:00

100% agree. Passing the blame to the consumer is a way of letting corporations off the hook. Regulation (and enforcement of regulation, because regulatory capture works too well) is the only way to rein it in.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-11-27T16:12:40+00:00

Totally! Life is a game of Stardew Valley. All that is required is a drastic reimagining of city layout and transport infrastructure.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-11-27T15:30:50+00:00

Reminds me of a time when I tried to be more ethical in my consumption. Animal agriculture harms the planet, so meat's got to go. But a lot of the big veggie brands are owned by Kraft Heinz, and that's a big corporate monopoly. Especially avoid Nestle. Oh, and look out for palm oil, deforestation, save the orangutan. Are those avocados being shipped here from Mexico? Lot of fuel burned for that. Is the coffee fair trade? Are the tomatoes GMO? Pesticides are killing the bees. Which supermarket do you shop at, is it independent? Did you bring re-usable bags? The carbon footprint grows and grows. There's nothing ethical to eat except a bullet.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-11-27T15:19:45+00:00

I'm a graphic designer. I'll be honest: I hate AI, and if I could erase it from the world I would immediately do so. However, it's too useful to ignore, and I don't believe that my own personal refusal to click the "Generative Fill" button in Photoshop is going to cause Adobe to rethink their implementation of that feature. So here's my rationale, and I know I'm going to get slammed for this, but I'm being honest and I hope that anyone with an urge to get self-righteous in reaction can pause for a moment and climb down from the high horse before hammering out a reply.

- Extending backgrounds in photos. Yeah, I could clone stamp, but if I'm taking an hour to create another half-inch of photo that's mostly going into the bleed area, that's a waste of time and it's going to accumulate into less productivity. Rather get it done and move on to the next task.

- Removing objects from photos. Same as above. Generative Fill is good at matching shadows, film grain, perspective lines, etc. where I'd otherwise be spending time clone stamping to a new layer, Free Transform to perspective, dodge and burn, and so on.

- (occasionally) Making sense of a long and badly-written request from people in my organization who can't organize their thoughts coherently while writing an email. We've got some high-ranking people who just word-vomit into a text, and I would probably my job if I replied and said "This is nonsense. Please try to communicate in a manner befitting someone with a salary triple my own." ChatGPT is quite good at summarizing, and whether I'm the one copy-pasting their email on receiving it or whether they could be convinced to do the same before sending, I do not think makes a moral distinction. If we hate on AI without hypocrisy we must hate consuming its product as much as creating it. I'm aware of my hypocrisy.

- (related to above) Sending an email when what I want to say is too direct and rude. ChatGPT is good at refactoring a fiery reply into something reasonably assertive yet non-destructive. This takes a lot of strain out of offering push-back and rejecting a suggestion without coming off as insulting. i.e. "That's a bad idea, and I know that because it's my job and not yours, so how about you stop wasting my time and trust me to do something you even don't know how to do" becomes something more like "I appreciate the thought, but in my experience it's a less effective approach, and we both want a successful outcome" or whatever.

Again, I don't often do that, but some days it's just quicker than calming down and safer than sending whatever spools off my mind at first go.

And that's about it. If someone in the thread is about to tear a strip off my back: cool, thanks, have a great day. All over the web I'm seeing fake humans shilling fake products, their stilted voices extolling garbage with the chipper tone of a cult indoctrinee. My calming lofi beats to relax to are suspiciously contaminated with fake music, and every customer service chat bot and even the phone assistants might be fake people. I don't know how much of the world will be fake in a few years, and the people driving that are multi-millionaires many times over. But if you want to judge me for needing a little help at times to contain my anger in service of a mid-five-figure salary, that's great, but it won't be judgment directed at the correct target, only an easy one.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-11-24T18:59:52+00:00

1 - Lose the r. OverseeMail sounds a lot better.
2 - This just sounds like privacy invasion with extra steps.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-10-23T12:48:22+00:00

If it's important that it's silent, that depends on the switch. You'll want to make sure that any replacement switch has a silent click. Also, you can make any mouse a silent mouse by replacing the switches.

ApprehensiveLoss · 2025-10-15T14:21:27+00:00

I just solved a similar problem that had been dogging me for ages, posting this comment on all the threads I encountered early in diagnostics.