“robertwitchger.com” will, from now on, redirect to this site. I figured the main web address “rwitch.com” would be easier to spell and remember.

Obviously the look and feel of this site is different from past efforts, but the meat of it is much the same.

The major differences, other than the new layout and URL, are as follows:

1. There is no more “Links” section. Links that I find interesting will now be posted on my delicious.com account, the contents of which are then pulled onto the rwitch.com homepage, in that column to the right of us. If this seems horribly roundabout to you, you’re both absolutely right, and you have had no contact with the internet in the past three years.
2. This site is powered by WordPress, so it has permalinks, you can leave comments on posts by clicking the word “comments” at the end of said post, and you can instantly add a post to your Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, or Twitter account, or email it to a friend, via the icons below.
3. My “Search This Site” feature now works at least halfway decently.
4. Both my “Blog” and “Links” RSS feeds are functioning as intended. I had been trying to hand-code the XML for these previously, and I’m not sure I ever really got the hang of it.

All my posts and links from past sites are safe and secure on my hard drive and, while they’re not all represented here at the moment, I should have them assimilated within the month.

rwitch.com doesn’t represent every aspect of who I am, but, as the web presence for my career and my various online rantings and ravings, I’m very happy with it.

March 2007–February 2009

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After a few days of sporadic conversation and lunches together, however, I think she convinced herself that I wanted to date her (which I didn’t), something she decided to be clear about not being interested in. She became quiet and standoffish and soon we were going days without saying a word to each other.

The computer she worked on, unlike mine, had speakers connected to it, so she had full control over the music we listened to. She chose to play R.E.M. All day long. Every single day. Not a specific R.E.M. album or albums, either, but an hour-and-a-half long mix of songs she had made. On a continuous loop. Hearing this selection so relentlessly put only a temporary dent in my ability to appreciate R.E.M.’s catalog, except for one song — one I will never be able hear again without feeling depressed, angry, and probably a little queasy.

The “Boss from Hell” that I worked for that summer was about my dad’s age. He often wore bright Hawaiian shirts, yet always seemed to have a scowl on this face. Other than his wife, who wandered in and answered phones occasionally, he’d been the owner and solitary worker at his company for years. His place of business was a portion of his house that had been renovated into offices. Not exactly the normal burgeoning design firm set-up, but considering his chief exports were logos and brochures for computer repair places and industrial manufacturers, this made sense. None of his stuff was that exciting, or even that tastefully executed, but I knew I had to start somewhere.

During the interview, he was wholly indifferent to me and my work, but surprised me by ending our conversation with an “I’ll take you on for the summer, if you want.” The last thing I remember from that meeting was, after he’d gone out to smoke (he maintained something like a four-pack-a-day habit), his wife mentioning to me that they’d never been able to keep employees around and they couldn’t figure out why. Obviously this was not a shining attribute, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. It was already a few weeks into the summer and I had no other prospects, so I basically had to. I kept reminding myself that, even if this wasn’t the greatest work environment: 1) I was going to learn valuable job skills, 2) he had stated that he would pay me during my interview which meant I wouldn’t have to get a part-time job in addition to working there, and 3) this was only for the summer.

Longest summer of my life. When I showed up on the first day, the boss promptly stuck me in a small, dimly-lit room upstairs, crowded with the remnants of printers and computers past. I stayed there for four days, coming in at 8:30 and leaving at 5:30 without anyone saying a word to me. On the occasions when I did ventured down to his office to make an inquiry as to what I could be working on, he’d growl that he’d get to that, but he couldn’t right then. There were two relatively clear desks up there, both with working Macs on them, so I spent all that time sort of situating myself at one of them. On the fifth day I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. He exploded into the room, radiating cigarette breath, and barked out that he needed me to “crank out” some ideas for a logo for a new offset printing company. He wrote their name down for me and then he was gone. No asking how I was getting settled in. No discussing how much I was going to be paid for working there (which we hadn’t done yet). No mention of the fact that whenever he started up any of his Adobe software downstairs, it abruptly closed mine, because he only had one site license for it. All this to say nothing of the fact that I had no idea what an “offset printing” company was, and that the concept of just “cranking out” some logo ideas was completely foreign to me. A logo was something that had to be researched and discussed and developed. It took at least half a semester to do all that, didn’t it?

I was a few days into this fix when the full-time designer started and I was introduced to R.E.M.’s “All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star),” from their new album Reveal. From the first time I heard the vacuous, down-tempo intro the song seemed, to me, to be a sonic embodiment of that place.

It didn’t help that, I swear, I heard it four or five times as often as any of the other songs on this mix. It’s very possible that this particular DJ was going back and selecting it for airplay that often. (She clearly had no problem with repetition.) Or perhaps it just managed to capture my attention, when it did cue up, more effectively than the other tracks did. Maybe, in an alternate universe, this track would be one of my all-time favorite songs. In my current incarnation, however, it was that place, and I couldn’t stand it.

I’d sat through it at least fifteen times before I finally got up the guts to ask The Boss from Hell how much he was planning on paying me. This exchange went surprisingly well, with him offering seven dollars an hour and me accepting solely on the grounds that he was actually being civil to me at the moment. I tried to keep this momentum going the next day, but ended up interrupting a meeting with a client to ask him if he could get a separate software license for me. I have never been screamed at like that in my life. Especially not while standing on the bottom step of a staircase, with a total stranger sitting there, witnessing it all. The Boss from Hell flew off the handle at everyone, sooner or later. The other designer. Printers. Delivery people. I could sometimes hear he and his wife getting into shouting matches through the floor. Once his pre-teenaged daughter entered the offices and all three of them got into it. A few minutes later, she drove away in his truck which, judging by his reaction, he hadn’t anticipated her doing.

Whenever something bad happened, I was hearing, had just heard, or was about to hear Michael Stipe, crooning in his melodramatic affectation, “Humming / All the way to Reno / Blah-Blah-Blah-Blah Blah-Blah-Blah.”

“All the Way to Reno” was cued up when I came in after having erased some very important in-progress project files the previous afternoon. It was towards the end of the summer, but this was by far the worst mistake I’d made in my time there. So bad that The Boss from Hell had called me at my parents’ that night to yell at me over the phone and then promptly hung up on me before I even had a chance to apologize. I entered his house feeling quite nervous. He wasn’t in his office, so I headed upstairs. The song had kicked off before I even entered the room. I got to my desk and found my timesheet for the week had been ripped into pieces and scattered all over it. I took this to mean I was fired. I asked the other designer if she knew what was going on, but she just shook her head and looked at me suspiciously. The next person I encountered was the wife, who I asked the same thing. She chuckled at me and, in a sing-song voice, replied “Oh no, he’s not going to do that! You know, that’s just how he is.” Everyone at this place was certifiably insane.

As I waited in silence, in that crappy room, for The Boss from Hell to come in and continue yelling at me about my screw-up, I leered at the clock in the corner of my computer screen. I watched the seconds pass, each one getting me an immeasurably small amount closer to getting to clock out, go home for the night, and just go to bed. The song reached its chorus: “You know what you are. You’re gonna be a star,” Michael Stipe whined to me. “You know what you are. You’re gonna be a star.”

I’d never believed anyone less in my life.

6. “Harriet Beecher Stowe”
I admit, I can’t tell you what Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote, off the top of my head, but I do know who did this portrait of her: Mark Summers. The same illustrator who did all those renderings of authors and musicians for Barnes & Noble. Clearly the guy can draw like a mo-fo and, defying the trend of rushed vector art, he does so in a technique similar to the laborious wood engravings of previous centuries. The results, I think you’ll agree, are quite beautiful.

5. “Washington and Jackson”
A five-dollar stamp? I dunno if it’s worth five-dollars, but that’s a damned good stamp. I like the homage to that ornate, old-timey aesthetic. Bonus points for the unusual orientation.

4. “Circus Wagon”
Circus wagons are cool. Line-art depictions of circus wagons with type set above it in an obscure serif font, the whole layout then printed in dull red ink on white stock? Even cooler.

3. “DC Comics Super Heros”
Shows the USPS is not afraid of pop culture and can have a little fun. Nice move, guys.

2. “Star Wars”
What I said about the “DC Comics Super Heroes” goes double here.

1. “Marvel Comics Super Heros”
Imagine receiving an envelope, postage paid courtesy of Wolver-snikt!ing-rine! The coolness of this one stamp elevates this whole sheet to the number one slot.

So there’s actually some exciting postage out there. Almost makes me want to write someone a lette…. Whoa, gotta go. My iPhone’s blowing up.

Were it not for my lovely, antiquated wife, who has a thing for slow, obsolete forms of communication and their various elements, I wouldn’t even have had the idea to write this entry. But, having just witnessed her make an online stamp purchase, I feel compelled to ask: have you seen the current postage options at your disposal?

Of course you haven’t. Now that we have awesome capabilities like cellphones and IM and video-conferencing, that work completely seamlessly and just let you say whatever pops into your head without further consideration, why should we care about stamps? Judging by the suckfest I saw earlier this week, the US Postal Service isn’t losing any sleep over them.

Let’s go straight to the bottom of the barrel. Here are my candidates for six worst stamps currently available:

6. “USA First Class”
A piece of clip-art centered on a beige background? What a half-assed design. Not even. Quarter-assed. Eighth-assed maybe. It’s the USA’s First Class stamp. Get Michael Beirut on this.

5. “Wedding Hearts”
“For the couple who wants a government organization to assign them a stamp to use on the wedding invitations.”

4. “Mendez vs. Westminster School District”
I was not aware of this case prior to this blogging, but based on what Google has retrieved about it, it was clearly a very important decision in favor of civil rights. I, for one, would like to see this harrowing event lionized in a stamp that is non-ugly. Specifically something drawn post-1991 and not using the tacky typeface Lithos Pro.

3. “American Clock”/“Chippendale Chair”/“American Toleware”
Saying this subject matter is “boring” would be like saying the end of Requiem for a Dream was “a bummer.” I could not decide which common, lifeless object was the least interesting, so I’m declaring this a three way tie.

2. “Vintage Mahogany Speedboats”
Ok guys, way too specialized. Why not just “speedboats?” Or even just “vintage speedboats?” Is there really a huge demand for “vintage speedboats made exclusively from mahogany” in the postal world? I’d imagine two or three middle-aged men in the entire country felt strongly enough about these to stand in an endless line and get ahold of them. Not exactly a “crowd-pleaser.”

1. “Jury Duty”
Pure crap. The mere mention of this phrase will send any red-blooded American into groans of they-actually-expect-me-to-participate-in-the-
system?-wrenched agony. You’re going to commemorate that with a stamp? I can’t think of a single piece of mail I would attach this kind of psychological (and visual) drag to…. Other than maybe my student loan bills…. Or my credit card payments…. Or my income tax retur…. On second thought, I’ll take ten rolls.

So yeah. I totally just stuck it to the USPS! But, to be fair, I noticed there were a few surprisingly cool stamps to choose from. One can’t spend all one’s time being down on everything, so check back in a few days (or, putting it in terms those of you who still use stamps will understand: one changing of the moon) for part two of this series — my rundown of the six best stamps currently available!

Me as a Simpsons character:

In case you haven’t seen this, you can create your own Simpsons avatar at http://www.simpsonsmovie.com/main.html.

I have worked as a graphic designer in “the real world” for four and a half years, mostly in Raleigh (“the thinking man’s Portland”). I’ve now been doing this for the exact same amount of time it took me to get a BFA — and I am here to tell you: you are all going down. Seriously, you’re going to get destroyed. There are soooo many things they don’t tell you in here.

Allow me to offer you some incite into how your professional life will start:

I’m sure that you, class overachiever, already have a job lined up with that agency in Manhattan where you’ve been interning during the summers. That’s great. I think I speak for all of us when I say I hope you get run over by a taxi. For the rest of you, it’s time to pound the pavement. Go forth and gather the cream of your theoretically good yet completely impractically crop — type-less posters of randomly placed lines visually representing the fall of communism; packaging mock-ups that use elaborately-divised combinations of bailing twine, corrugated cardboard, and metallic calligraphy ink that has to be mail-ordered from England, etc. — and mount everything on 18×24″ pieces of foamcore and…bwah-ha-ha! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You just look so ridiculous at the interview, wrestling those giant black portfolios through the door! Rest assured, I’m laughing with, not at. I was doing the same thing four years ago.

Don’t get discouraged, my friends, if you can’t land a job right away. It will most likely take months of cold-calling, lead-following, and humiliating groveling before someone will agree to take you in. To them, as you are now, you’re mainly a liability. There’s so much you need to learn. You have no clue.

On your very first day in your newly acquired position, your boss will (in his mind) toss you something easy by asking you to come up with some ideas for a new client’s logo. You will go back to your desk and generate pages and pages of concepts, rendered in Sharpie on typing paper. He will check in on you about 4:30 and find you haven’t even turned your computer on yet. This is where things will start to go south. When you heard “ideas,” you were, of course, envisioning something you’d pin up on a bulletin board for a room full of 30 like-minded people to stare at for a few hours. Your new boss was envisioning something he could take, present to the client, and they would buy…tomorrow morning.

Shortly after the logo fiasco, you will be relegated to “production” (from the Latin, “prod-” meaning “re-,” and “uction” meaning “sizing stuff until you want to gouge your eyes out”) or possibly even web maintenance, where you will cut and paste paragraphs from Word documents onto web pages for a site that your company stole from the interactive firm that created it, by telling the client they’d keep it updated for less money. Either way, this begins a long period known as “paying your dues.”

You will make many glorious mistakes during this time. Attempting to email a nightmare client a 15 MB pdf without embedding the fonts, when they demand an on-screen proof of their brochure; delivering a four-color project to press with three active spot-colors and it’s linked images still in RGB mode; screwing up code in ways you can’t even comprehend while using a WYSIWG editor, like Dreamweaver, because you went to school to be a designer, for Christ’s sake. In the aftermath of each of these events, you will come out on the other end of a shitstorm, knowing not to do whatever it was you did, ever again. You will know it like you know your mother’s voice. And that’s real knowing.

Hold on long enough, and you will be called upon to “work up some comps” for a pitch. This will be both an exciting and a deeply sobering experience. There’s an old adage that people who have been in the industry for forever are fond of saying to clients. It goes: “Good, fast, and cheap. You can pick two.” The client always opts for “fast and cheap.”

Because of this, there is no time for pedantic process, much less original thought. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you have the time to 1) open up the most recent Communication Arts Design Annual, 2) find something with a “look and feel” that fits the project you are working on and 3) do a variation of it that is a) not ugly and b) far enough away from the starting point to not be recognized as the blatant plagiarism it is.

What I’m getting at is, yes, design is an art form, but — you’ll soon discover — it is also very much a trade, and, above all, a business.

In conclusion, fledgling designers of the world, I leave you with these words of advice:

• Keep you head down.
• Don’t sweat the small stuff.
• When you’re cranking out 20 versions of the same ad for different publications, take the time to double check your dimensions. Was that quarter-pager supposed to be 4.125×5.375 or 4.375×5.125?
• Also, mind the bleed, trim, and safety.
• Keep your chin up.
• Run spellcheck. Seems like it shouldn’t be your responsibility, I know, but the person who wrote the copy didn’t bother to do it before they sent it to you. Even if a typo is not actually your fault, you’ll be the one who gets blamed for it.
• Almost daily, someone will ask you, without giving you an adequate amount of information to formulate an answer, how long it will take you to design something. Each designer has his own ubiquitous answer to this question. (Personally, I always say “half a day.”) Find yours.
• Learn from the people who have been doing this longer than you.
• Reach for the stars.
• Could you make our logo bigger?
• Print is dead.
• For God’s sakes, use your key commands.

Thank you.

I kept a lot of the basic design that was here before, but the content — which hasn’t been changed much since early 2005 — needed an update. And I just couldn’t resist putting some of the new things I’ve learned about web design to use here.

I thought for my first entry on “version 2.0” of my site, I’d share the technical modifications I made, and describe how I did them.

Wait, don’t leave! I feel I am in an unique position right now, as I am relatively new to this world. It has only been a few months since I “bit the bullet,” took a new job, and made the transition from “print designer who vaguely understands Dreamweaver and Flash” to “someone who isn’t startled (noticeably, at least) when people refer to him as a ‘developer’.” I still feel a strong connection to those of you who are somewhat curious about — but mainly just confused and frightened by — how the web works. If this is you, read on. I think you’ll find my perspective on creating websites to be pretty interesting. Some of the things I report may even be factually correct (though I wouldn’t count on it). So here we go — I’ll be providing translations, 100%-free of geek-language, for everything I type for the rest of this entry….

Geek: Greetings!
My Translation: Hey.

Geek: Captain’s log, Stardate 917837248.
My Translation: It’s a Monday.

Geek: Stupendous, it’s working!
My Translation: Baller.

Geek: The new version of robertwitchger.com uses XHTML for content.
My Translation: Ok, so what this means is the information on each page of this site was created so it could be read in a web browser by coding it out in “Extensible Hypertext Markup Language” (XHTML). XHTML is, as far as basic web designers like me are concerned, the most recent version of HTML.

The information is written out in the code so it will appear in a linear, nearly text-only fashion (sort of like the way you could most clearly order the information if you had to write a term paper of the information on one of these pages) in a browser window.

Geek: CSS is used for the structure.
My Translation: The layout for every page on this site is being controlled by a single, completely separate document. Each XHTML page has a link to this document, which contains a list of rules for all its elements. (Example: h1 {font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; color: #336633;}. This means the largest heading on the page should appear in Verdana, at a size of 18px, and be green.) This document is called the “style sheet.” It is composed in a language called “Cascading Style Sheets” (CSS).

The name refers to the fact that generating a design in such an indirect, convoluted manner will make you want to send your computer cascading off a cliff…. Ha-ha! Just kidding! Mostly!

The “cascading” part means that, when those first rules are written for an element, they will automatically be counted into all other sets of rules written for that same element, later on in the document. The rules cascade down the page.

And why would you need to write multiple sets of rules for the same element? Well, it’s sort of hard to explain in words…but I’m going to try. Remember these are the elements of the content, which, remember, looks like a term paper. How many “elements” (“elements” here meaning “general areas that contain information”) does you average term paper have? A heading, paragraphs, a list or two, perhaps sectional dividers, some subheads, and supporting graphics…that’s pretty much it. And these are pretty much the same elements you can use in an XHTML page. And therefore they get used over and over and over again. While this approach results in properly organized information, the outcome is not very interesting to look at. (In fact, click here to see what the “naked” XHTML for this page looks like.) That’s why there’s a need to “style” different occurrences of the same elements in different ways, to create some variety in the design.

The “cascading” thing is a bit of a double-edged sword. Statistically, it will work for your design (with no need to work-around or hack a rule that has cascaded down) exactly 50% of the time. It will work against it 110% of the time.

Geek: This site adheres to the Web Standards created by the W3C.
My Translation: The way I’m using my XHTML and CSS is kosher with some of the guys who invented the World Wide Web…. More on these bastards later.

Geek: Each page is section 508 compliant.
My Translation: This means this site is “accessible.” It will allow people who are visually-impaired or with limited mobility to “turn off” the page’s design (by breaking the link with the style sheet) and receive the information on the page via a screen reader or by simply scrolling straight down the page. Most organizations that receive government funding are required, by law, to create their websites in this manner.

Geek: Text edits and updates can be made quickly and easily.
My Translation: Yes, as anyone who talked to me while I was first trying to learn this implementation process can tell you, it is not the most intuitive or frustration-free way to make a site, but a huge advantage of it is, even after the site is finished and launched, changes to text on the page are still very simple to make. No going-back-to-the-Photoshop-file-what-the-hell-
did-I-do-with-the-Photoshop-file?-is-this-the-final-or-a-working-file-I-just-
opened? needed.

In my experience, dyed-in-the-wool designers (like me), are resistant to join the XHTML/CSS movement. I’m sure we’ll continue to fight it for at least a few more years, but I think, after we truly grasping what we’re doing, we’ll admit to ourselves that, for dispersing information (which is what the web was originally intended for) this technique is the way to go.

As a quick aside/doomsday-prophecy, though, with there now being something of a single, approved “formula” for site creation, and it now being so easy to load one up with tons and tons of information, I often wonder where original and exciting page design will fit into the equation. I’m sure you’ve noticed that, recently, websites are starting to look more and more alike (like this one, for example). A good topic for another day….

Geek: To make site-wide changes to XHTML, all pages are built with Dreamweaver templates.
My Translation: Basically, if you have parts of your site that are supposed to be the same on every page, you can created a file in Dreamweaver containing only those parts, then create as many individual pages as you want, based on this file, and then, when you need to modify something on one of the uniform parts, you need only do it one time, to this Dreamweaver template. Pretty awesome.

Geek: I must admit I’m still working out the bugs in IE.
My Translation: Ah, yes. The main problem with creating a site the way I did is your end product looks a little different in every browser. While it was nice of the W3C to publish their definitive “Web Standards” for the optimal way to write code, they have absolutely no control over the software manufacturers and how they let the browsers everyone uses interpret the code. This makes the almighty “web standards” really more like “web suggestions” or “web advice.”

For this site, the differences are minor enough to not bother me…except if you’re viewing it in Microsoft Internet Eck-friggin’-splorer. There, none of my rollovers work, weird spacing issues pop up all over the place, and my footer is forced way off to the right. Even on version 7. I am still trying like hell to fix this stuff.

This brings us to the last piece of wisdom I’d like to impart in my explanation of web design. If you’re planning to make a site in the near future, start memorizing this phrase: “Hopefully they’ll come around in Version 8.” You’ll be using it quite often.

August 2004–March 2007

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