ARHGJHGA STUPID!!! (rant)

[unpopular]

So I have to rebuild my graphic arts portfolio from scratch. Due to personal issues, I have lost all my work product. I don't have Illustrator, so I have been kind of struggling through with Inkscape.

Just because it's easy and tedious, I decided to focus on the more practical part of my portfolio, such as logo rebuilding, separations and prepress. A lot of graphic artists out there have no idea what they are doing, they just make pretty pictures. So illustrating that not only are my designs aesthetically sound, they'll print, too, and not only that, but I am capable of making other's pretty but unprintable pictures printable is important in making me competitive - especially at places like print shops who tend to be weary of "creative" types. So this morning I looked around creative commons for media that I could use to illustrate that I can take my customer's crappy, low resolution garbage and turn it into a professional result. I found some nice stuff, even a few logos to my surprise that were perfect. I worked a bit on the Mona Lisa (from Wikipedia) to show separations and black plate generation in Photoline; not as nice a s Photoshop, but it will work once I get back into the swing of things. I got bored of that and went on to tracing a logo.

It took a while, Inkscape isn't the fastest program to use - but I knew this. Finally after an hour or so I had a perfect vector version of the logo. It looks great. Now for the seps. What's this, no spot color??! No trap? No overprint???

I love the idea of open source, I really, really do. I want to be able to use it and support it. But just like GIMP, everything looks great at first appearance, but then you start actually using it, and it becomes painfully obvious that it's missing some HUGE features. I guess what gets me even moreso is that these open source projects focus so much effort on the most superficial features ... like silly effects and filters, before taking on the less sexy stuff that makes programs like Illustrator and Photoshop useable for more than just web graphics and ink jet printers.

Oh well. My case manager mentioned something about using the computers at the college, and I can do 90% of what I need to here at home...

 

[CCericola]

When I was screening applicants for design positions we looked for a clean portfolio to show your design cpabilities and your prepress skills would be shown in the test we gave you. Actually, if you were padding your portfolio with vector recreations of other people's logos and color separations I would not be interested.

UNLESS you are applying for prepress jobs only, show your best designs.

 

[unpopular]

^^ you know. At first I was thinking that the only way to really illustrate that I could do this kind of work was to use other's stuff. But then I realized that the only task I couldn't do in another way was tracing - which seems like was 95% of what I always ended up doing, a customer would send an authorized corporate logo via e-mail that they hijacked off a website or scanned in themselves at screen resolution. Usually we could find something suitable, sometimes not. At any rate, this, while a pretty typical task isn't really something I need in my portfolio. I can always show seps and prepress features on my own work.

Thanks for your input.

Of course I'd make it absolutely clear what I was trying to communicate, though it would muddy the waters a bit.

 

[CCericola]

I feel you. I worked for a promotional products company for a few years. The companies hardly ever had clean vector art for printing on their mug or pens. 50% of the time I could hunt it down on a random PDF or brands of the world or begging their marketing dept. and 50% of the time I' was figuring out fonts and tracing.

I did find that a lot of designer had no prepress skills what so ever. I was lucky, I interned for printers. I think you do have the edge in that. Don't forget your adobe skills. Have you looked into the subscription option instead of buying them?

 

[unpopular]

I was unaware adobe had a subscription option. I wonder if Voc Rehab would be willing to pay for that. I'll look into it if all else fails.