A Day (or a Week) in the Life

If you’re like most people, you have no idea what it really means when someone says, “I’m a Designer.” (Or Graphic Artist, or Art Director, or Overworked Peon… or any other industry term for a professional artist.

So today, we’ll correct some misconceptions and remove that blank stare from your face when someone tells you that after you innocently ask “So what do you do?”

A day in the life of a typical graphic designer goes something like this:

The alarm blaring its cacophony to the heavens, you throw your sketch book at it…
And either A) stumble out of bed just in time to see the sun rise… if you’re lucky enough to have even gone to bed the night before… or

B) saw the sunrise already before you dropped, still fully clothed, onto the covers for an entire ten minutes before the alarm went off. If you’re lucky enough to have gotten three or four hours of sleep, then it’s a miracle of epic proportions and worth noting in the margins of your notepad next to last night’s project sketches.

Or C) never left the office, and wake up to the imprint of the keyboard on your cheek (which will stay with you through your first few meetings of the day), and try to find a napkin to soak up enough drool from the same keyboard so that you can actually get some work done without electrocuting yourself.

You stumble to the kitchen in hopes that someone else has already brewed a gigantic pot of coffee strong enough to cut slices off and eat with a fork.

After a few slugs of coffee and whatever you can pry out of the bottom row of the vending machine because you used your last bit of change for dinner out of the same vending machine last night, you’re back to your desk and working.

This commute could be twelve feet from your bed to the desk in the other room, still in your pj’s and hair sticking in every direction, or across town to your cubicle, realizing after you arrive that you have a dress shirt on over your pj’s , mismatched shoes and your hair sticking in every direction. But since you’re an artist, you claim the eccentricity of the true creative and so no one really even looks twice in your direction. They’ve obviously seen you this way before…

After sitting down, turning on the computer and staring blankly at the brilliant idea for your client’s new ad campaign that you came up with last night at 3am… and realizing now, in the harsh morning sunlight, that it’s the worst idea you’ve ever come up with in your entire career and if you presented this is the 10am meeting, you will most likely be fired very quickly after the clients (or your bosses) walk out the door in a huff.

So now you have two hours to come up with a brand new idea to show your clients how you’re going to create the biggest load of: junk mail that will be thrown away as soon as it arrives in a mailbox, web clutter, billboard eyesores and television noise that will be skipped over as the customers fast-forward through their Tivo’s... and more importantly, how this version of the completely mind-numbing and generally ignored advertising glut will earn them enough money to make it worth paying you for the idea. (Because the bottom line is the most important thing, and if this glut of ads won’t make them more money, it will never ever fly, and you’ll find yourself just as unemployed as if you’d given them that 3am proposal.)

If you work for an in-house marketing group, this talk is usually given in front of the CEO, who you have to convince you are worth keeping on the payroll because you are not bleeding the company dry with your outlandish ideas… because after all, marketing is the first group to be cut when finances are slim, despite the fact that its when a company needs it the most.

Now… imagining that your client (or your CEO), loves the idea you finally threw together five minutes before the presentation, you now have the task of actually putting it into production. So you sit down for a few days and hash out the details, putting their logo on everything under the sun, making enough mailers to completely overflow the local landfill, and coming up with a TV jingle that’s annoying enough that people will NEVER forget it… and which will finally end up with an angry mob picketing the TV station to pull it because it’s making them insane after hearing it during every single commercial break.

So now all of your works starts going through the Dreaded Approval Process. If you’re very, very, VERY lucky, you’ll have a few minor revisions, the projects will go to print, get sent out to the unsuspecting public, and you can sit back and wait for the client’s check and the local Ad Awards so you can collect a few more guilty accolades when your five minute project wins over someone else’s months of slaving.

If it’s a more normal project, it will go to the client, who begins to second guess everything you’ve done and everything they told you they want. They make revisions, which you correct and send back to them. They make more revisions, but this time it’s not just wording. They’ve decided they don’t like the cool blue you picked and want to go with fuchsia. More changes… This time they decided that they want a photo of the CEO at the last company party, because it will “humanize” the corporation. More changes… THIS time, they want to pull the photo because they were threatened with their jobs if they ran it, but they want to have custom photography done instead. So you hire a professional photographer, all the models, get a dozen releases signed and cleared by Legal… and the day of the shoot, they decide it’s out of their budget and cancel.

Now they start calling you on your cell phone at midnight to make changes, and by this time you understand why the windows in an office building don’t open.

The project is now overdue because they keep making changes… the printer is calling you up every day asking where the project files are because they can no longer meet the deadline to have it in the mail, and the clients are yelling at YOU because they’ve missed the deadlines and they want to know where their project is, even though they haven’t provided you with the missing information yet.

And finally, at the point when you’ve started crying every half hour, the client calls up with the final change… they want it to look just like it did the first time. And they approve it within five minutes of the reversion.

And since you’ve been up for the last 72 hours but the project is done, you finally get released to go home, crash on the covers with your clothes still on… and wake up ten minutes later when the alarm goes off.