I joined a gym, and for a while I went there. I worked out at their facil­i­ties and found them clean, and brim­ming with machines and weights in which to sculpt my body. I used their excep­tion­ally clean and well kept bath­rooms and facil­i­ties. The staff was always cour­te­ous, the light­ing great, the music well selected, and the food offered was healthy and scrump­tious. They even had a cloth­ing store where one could buy stuff 30% with the mem­ber­ship card, and a day car for those who dragged their chil­dren around.

All in all, a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence from a cus­tomer point of view. Every­thing scored 7/10 or higher (more often higher). So why am I angry with this chain? They dropped the ball in a key area: my leaving.

That’s right, I’m school-​bound once again. Two more years of weird sleep sched­ules, assign­ments, cliques, teach­ers, and too many people walk­ing around in pajama-​bottoms.

Joking aside, I’ve decided to go back to school for Graphic Design. Over the past two plus years, I’ve felt that though I’m rea­son­ably good at pro­gram­ming, it’s not really what I want to do for the rest of my life. I’ve had a good run at my cur­rent place of employ­ment, but I feel that it’s just not the direc­tion I want to go in the long-​run. You see, as I worked along side every­one I con­stantly felt myself obsess­ing over cer­tain points; namely UI design, usabil­ity, and common sense in design.

Finally got the new design up, though I will admit that there are still some tweeks that I’ve got to address. I’ve got the design stable enough that I’m com­fort­able releas­ing it now. I’ve lost enough sleep on this damned thing already, so some small things I’m not overly wor­ried about

This design has been in the works for at least a month now, though prob­a­bly longer. I made sure I didn’t rush into the markup, and so there was a lot of time spent in Fire­works tweak­ing things. Once I was finally happy with the design - which took a while - I finally moved every­thing into HTML which was …fun.

This is the sev­enth and final part in an ongo­ing series of arti­cles that depicts my process to becom­ing a graphic designer. I will reit­er­ate that this is not a sure-​fire guide on how to become one, but merely my process which I am shar­ing to the gen­eral public.

Though this is the last arti­cle of this par­tic­u­lar series, trust me when I say there will still be many more.

So I’m making this post while bla­tantly aware that some of my read­ers will prob­a­bly have no Idea what I’m talk­ing about. If you’re one of those people, just nod your head and pre­tend to listen.

Setting up the scene

A while back I came across a little web­site called 9rules. As it turned out 9rules was very much sim­i­lar to Digg.com, Design Float, Mixx, and so on. It was a social hub where ideas were exchanged, par­tic­i­pa­tion was rewarded, and all was well. Some­what of an oppor­tunist, I took advan­tage of 9rules and their con­tent sub­mis­sion to help my site gain some pop­u­lar­ity (I’m sure I gained noth­ing from it) by sub­mit­ting my design-​related posts to their ever-​flowing river of content.

I admit that this is a bit dubi­ous in nature, but it is a white hat way to get your name out there, and that’s some­thing I’m still work­ing on doing. Hate me if you want, but that’s what I used it for. I regret that a little in ret­ro­spect, because they had a good com­mu­nity, and I chose to throw my sto­ries into the pile instead of par­tic­i­pat­ing and making it better.

The lament­ing has a point, so stick with me.

So I’m near­ing the end of my first major project. Well alright I’ve had many projects in my life, but this was my first pro­fes­sional project. I was … many things in my project: Lead Devel­oper, Lead Archi­tect, Psudo-​Business Ana­lyst, Nego­tia­tor, Trainer, Medi­a­tor, Whip-​cracker. The list goes on.

As the project is finally wind­ing down, I feel it pru­dent that I write down some of the nuggets of infor­ma­tion that I have gleaned from the experience.

Follow along and learn with me as I half-​rant life tips.

I despise scope creep with every part of my being. To me, scope creep is com­pa­ra­ble to nails on a chalk board, or having my hand slammed in a door again and again and again. It is the ruiner of projects, prod­ucts, and I’m sure I could find some way to tie it into how Rock and/or Roll music is obvi­ously ruin­ing soci­ety. It takes what would in most cases be a solid project, a solid time line, and solid analy­sis, and tosses them all to the winds.

A quick, simple, and gen­er­al­ized def­i­n­i­tion: Scope Creep is when some­one (your­self or oth­er­wise) adds new func­tion­al­ity, fea­tures, or other addi­tions while still expect­ing your project/product/whatever to still be due by the same time.