Entrepreneurial Spirit

A very odd thought struck me today. I am a writer, and I am a graphic designer. I can come up with (reasonably) pithy commentary on the modern world, and I have a basic grasp of good design. I've been looking for other sources of revenue, especially considering my plans to leave the country at some point, and so I've been thinking about where I can apply my skills in my spare time to earn extra cash.

In retrospect, this should have been bloody obvious.

Cafepress style sites! T-shirt designs! It's perfect!

I've started up already with some feminist designs on Skreened. I have plans for some new sections on geeks, computers, gaming, and other stuff, and I'm considering setting up a second store on Zazzle or Printfection for stuff other than T-shirts. Skreened just happened to come highly recommended in quality vs. price.

If anyone has suggestions about what kind of T-shirts or merchandise they'd like to see, let me know! This is cash that's going to get me and my better half to Canada, by the way. Even if it's something silly, I want to know about it and do the design and sell it to you.

Promotion will have to be through the blog, Twitter, my site, and word of mouth. The challenge is how to do it without being tacky... ah, the joys of the sole trader business. Anyway - I added a few non-feminist designs to do some practice with branding and graphic styles. Enjoy!

My eyes, the goggles do nothing!

So, I was curious today to learn what jobs there are for graphic designers around Ireland. Now that I've had a chance to play around with CS5, I'm itching to do some design work - maybe do a little more with the blog, or just play around with illustration tutorials.

I love good design. I could be sold on something completely impractical if it has style. I've been subscribed to Yanko Design ever since I got my current job, and I have to say, I would happily throw whatever money they asked at some of their featured tea sets.

Anyway, back to the jobs. Employment in design seems to be thin on the ground all over; people balk at paying €30 an hour for a professional when one of their mates can knock something up for free. But the reality is that you get what you pay for, and amateur, inferior design is worthless to a business. The real shame is that I can work very quickly, and if I had some guidelines or ideas to work from, I can do a basic design in a matter of an hour or two. A friend paid me to design some stickers for his business, using the logo he supplied and a brief outline of what he wanted, and a mere €60 bought him exactly what he needed. Not so expensive, is it?

A bad design is forgettable, which is lethal in advertising. I see it all the time, and wonder how much they paid for it. But of course, a truly rotten design can go above and beyond that and reach agonising heights. Today, dear reader, I would like to introduce you to a terrible design that also happens to be terribly ironic.

Take a look at Prosperity.ie. It's a site that lists employment opportunities in Ireland in marketing, sales, design, and media. I happened across it by accident, and immediately regretted it. The colour was probably chosen to be striking, and might I say, it struck me so hard I got eye strain trying to read the listings.

The links at the top are not obviously links. The job headers are links, and are identical to the site links except in black instead of white, in defiance of the usual convention. The job listings are unformatted walls of text with no space between paragraphs. The search system doesn't allow basic keyword searches while browsing the listings, and the index page doesn't show categories.

Jobs.ie, by comparison, is a triumph of clean, usable design.

It's a shame, to be honest. I read a little about the company, and they seem to have a good philosophy. Their blog is up to date and interesting. The jobs are mostly for Dublin, but there's a wide range on offer and a few I'd be examining more closely if I were seeking gainful employment. But their site, good grief - all I can do is hope it's a work in progress, or something, and pray that they'll be changing the colour scheme.

Writing for a living

I've been looking around recently for a second, writing related job. It may surprise you to know, dear reader, that my daily grind does not include anything writing-related; I work for a very boring distribution company, and the kind of work I do involves anything from graphic design to database administration.

Writing has always been my first love, and I made a big mistake when I chose to do something other than writing in college. I did science, and then computer programming, and it got me nowhere. These days I think about returning to study journalism, but what can those courses teach me that I haven't already learned? The art of writing well is 10% talent and 90% practice and hard work, and little enough of either can be taught.

I like the idea of journalism as a career. There's skill in writing an interesting yet balanced article on current events, or conducting an interview and asking the questions you think your readers want answered. Unfortunately, I can't seem to turn up any information on writing for the local papers - for example, a quick google search for "writing for the Irish Times" lists a link to their contact page where people can send in letters to the paper as the first result. I can't find a single mention of careers for either the physical paper or the website.

I've been questioning the quality of Irish news media for a while now. Case in point: a friend of mine was interviewed by the Times over the phone, and his story (a day in the life style of thing) was written up and put on the site. If I remember right, it'll also go into the lifestyle section of the paper itself. But the article, good grief... I expect a journalist to be able to write without making obvious grammatical errors. It's clunky in places, the phrasing and word usage is in dire need of an editor, and it reads badly all over.

It reads like something that was thrown together without editorial oversight, in fact. I have read the Times on occasion, and its usual standard of writing is better than what I see there. I hope that the author will rewrite it for clarity and flow before the paper itself goes to print.

Anyway... I do know the interviewee in question here. Aidan had much to say about the story, and very little of it was flattering. There was a suggestion that some of the things in it were stretching the truth a lot, or - shall we say - there were certain liberties taken with the facts at hand. I have to wonder why, though. He works at a wildlife park filled with exotic animals; surely that's interesting enough without embellishment?

If anyone from the Irish Times is reading this: email me. Talk to me about journalism. I'll happily be a writer for hire, and I can guarantee I'll do a better job.

Time moves on

And there is drama. Excitement. Things that draw me away from my blog. The Novel, mostly; it's becoming what I originally envisioned, a whole and complete manuscript that will soon be on its way to various agents. Even as the thought of finally being published scares me, I'm happy that I'm getting closer to my ultimate goal of writing for a living.

It will not be in Ireland, though. I made my choice, and started arrangements to emigrate. Canada is the destination, if they will have me. I hope they will, because I have a lot to offer.

It's been hammered home recently just how different I am to most people. Pointless introspection aside, I can' t help but notice that there is a high price to being a genius - however clichéd that may sound. And a Mensa test when I was much younger confirmed that; I am what people call a genius, and more than that, I'm on a par with Einstein or Hawking.

No one knows, apart from the people who are closest to me. Everyone else can see that I am quite smart, and occasionally I act in a strange way, and it goes no further. It is so hard to explain to anyone that the reason I seem odd is because, from my point of view, everyone else is thinking in slow motion. I've spent my life learning how to fake normalcy, but sometimes all I really want is to know what it's like inside someone else's head.

Being intelligent has its perks, but it's mostly made my life harder. It's put a gulf between me and the people I care about, made me dissatisfied with jobs. It broke my religious faith a long time ago. It's embarrassed me or made me seem foolish or stupid, when I do something that makes sense to me but no one else. And it's made me hurt, deeply, that whatever perks I get from it are only for me. My understanding, my quickness of thought; a normal person can never know what it's like, and although you might question whether they're really missing anything, consider this: from where I stand, it's as if they are all blind, and I'm the only one who can see the sun.

I don't want to be elitist about being smart. I don't want to be ostracised either, though, and that has happened a few times. I'd settle for people being willing to accept that I'm strange, and let it go at that.

This doesn't really have much to do with Canada, but if they won't take me for my qualifications or experience, I might suggest they take me for my intelligence. Adding a genius to their gene pool would be a smart (hah) move.

Not to be emo, but...

I'm beginning to realise why so many office workers are suffering from stress. It's because of bosses that demotivate, patronise, devalue and otherwise destroy their employees' sense of well-being.

I have two bosses. One is a leader beyond compare; understanding, open, and driven to get the best out of people by viewing them as real individuals with their own quirks and preferences. The other... is not so nice.

They are patronising, unforgiving, unwilling to compromise. They have taken me apart with a single sentence; they view people as robots that should do only what they are told. I am torn down for making a mistake as if I did it maliciously, as if I intentionally didn't listen, as if, as if. And then I am ripped to pieces again for wanting to avoid them at every turn.

I sat in my office today and cried for twenty minutes because of them. I can't help feeling like a total failure, but still I wonder - can I do anything right? Should I keep trying? Or should I take what's left of my self-esteem and hand in my notice, knowing that there are loved ones relying on my money for food, shelter, bills?

There's no easy answer. I like my job, and the people I work with. I need the money. I don't know if I can give up all that because of one person making my day miserable. And then there's the Novel - it's a promise to myself, that someday I will walk away from this misery and spend my life doing what I really want to do.