An experienced website designer can look at a website and instantly pick out the flaws down to pixel perfect alignment issues. Today looking at the newly printed Perspective magazines, I was disappointed.

It had something to do with the fact that there were unwanted grey borders around our gradiented background boxes (they should’ve been borderless!) which clashed horribly with the text. It also had to do with the stunning TWO editions which turned out instead of the lovely red one I was expecting. We now have Perspective: Bromine Edition and Perspective: Dirty-Swamp-Green Edition. Well, arguably the colours do look quite nice, but THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ONE COLOUR.  Not a clear difference between half the issues. “Hey there, how come yours looks a strange colour compared to mine?” Not to mention STUNNING visual effects such as blur, smudge, ink-splatter, and shadow being applied on the text, making it look visually rich and appealing . With these new additions, you will surely be a professional at answering CAPTCHA questions. (those “please enter the text in the photo” things on websites to check whether or not you’re a robot – normally featuring distorted text). Oh, and did I forget about the modern 3D technology used to produce anagliffs for random photos? (Anagliffs are those generated images such that if you look at them through red-green 3D glasses they look 3D) That’s right, but we don’t ship with the glasses. Conclusion? The printer has made nothing short of vandalism of our hard work.

Skimming very -very- quickly through the booklet you might not notice these defects enhancements, but will notice several mysterious visual apparitions artistically misaligned double sets of pages, with an obvious difference in colour between the left and right pages.

I quite liked the front page and the upgrades I did to the inner page templates (including fashionably fake curled up pages where the page number and category could be displayed – but these printing issues have truly cast a dark shadow over these improvements. The printers have done a fine job of coming a stunning 5-6 hours late on their promised delivery time both times we’ve worked with them, and their annoying ringtone (take me into your heart!) does little to appease the humour as we try to predict their true arrival time and next creative excuse.

I also want to take this opportunity that I have a newfound resentment to being called the Layout Editor. I didn’t sign up to be a Layout Editor. From here on out, I shall be referred to as The Layout Designer, or any title which has the word “Designer” in it. The reason? The job of a Layout Editor is to edit the freaking layout – that is to position boxes of text and images so that they fit on a page. I’m sorry, but last time I checked, I’ve seen this done by a 3 year old. Heck, we all do it when writing our essays (which have pictures). Before I came to this position, the magazine was quite literally just arranged boxes of text with some boxes that had another colour to differentiate articles from one another. I don’t blame the Layout Editor then- I don’t think he was well known for creativity (not really an insult, he was exceptional in other areas and still is). However this time, I’m sure people have noticed the big differences – though they are limited to the front page template and the inner page template.  To me, out of the 28 pages in this issue, I actually designed 2. That’s 7%. Wow, I didn’t even hit double digits. There is so much that can be done to visually enhance (now not in the sarcastic sense of the phrase) each and every single page, and this is simply not being done at the moment.

You see, currently the process is that every single “meeting” we in general don’t get anything done, then we wait for everybody to submit their articles late, then we cram in the “designing” stage at the very end. For this issue, the “designing” stage lasted 1 day. For 28 pages. Like mentioned before, all it consisted of was two slightly edited page templates and stacked boxes of text. I’m sorry – but how about this: we actually make designing part of the creation process, and not just shove it to a shoddy job done at the very end of the production line when the release date is in a weeks time.

Ask another designer to accomplish this feat and they will say  flat out “screw you”. It’s impossible to do. They are not going to waste their time stressing over such crappy time schedules. No matter how much money you offer them, they will not do it. It’s almost as bad as the time I got asked to do a 10 minute animation in 2 days. Those 2 days can take a running jump for all I care.

Oh wait, I forgot to mention that we don’t really want you to design during that time. We just want you to put boxes on a page.

“Sure”, says the designer. I’ll do it. Except might I quickly correct something? That is NOT design.

The excuse we’re using is that “we don’t have time”. Screw time. If it’s going to take a long time, then it will – but it should NOT go out looking just like an arranged list of articles. I’ve known enough about website creation to know that you can create just another website, or you can take time and create a masterpiece. Believe me, any other web developer will know the difference between a polished website and a shoddily done one. Oh, so will hackers. Even decent web users can notice the difference.

If you so as respect my ideas on design and layouting, please drop me a comment on this post so I may persuade my stiff necked “lead editor” to allow me to rebel on the next issue – hopefully making something truly worth printing.

Edit: the grumpy looking picture was added because some people complained that this post was a “wall of text”. It was among the first results in Google images for “grumpy looking guy”.