50 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer

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Hard Core Web Designer
Photo via Envato Elements

It's that time again. I thought I'd let you peer into my head for a post, so I sat down with a notepad, a pen, and a 12 pack of Bud Light. After some deep thought, I came up with this list of signs that you might be a hardcore designer. A lot of these signs can overlap other professions too. From my experience, the following list contains mostly truths, mixed in with a little humor.

50 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer

(In no particular order)

  1. You've almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
  2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
  3. You'd rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend's shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
  4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can't type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
  5. You've had “Software Nightmares,” when you've been working way too much.
  6. You consider meals interruptions.
  7. You've learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
  8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
  9. You've intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
  10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
  11. You'd rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
  12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
  13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
  14. You've Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
  15. You've actually paid for a font.
  16. You've totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
  17. The amount of words you've written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you've read in novels.
  18. You've had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn't part of the deal.
  19. You've kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
  20. You've nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
  21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
  22. You've intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
  23. You can't go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
  24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
  25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.
  26. You've had a client that thought they knew more about design than you.
  27. Your clients pay you for your professional expertise and skill, yet you've run into one of ‘those' clients, that refuses to take the advice from the very person he/she is paying for advice (you).
  28. You've had a client that insisted on using the font “Papyrus,” and you had to hold in your barf as you prepped it [the design] for printing.
  29. You've requested a vector logo from a client, and instead, they email you a 72 dpi image they grabbed from a website.
  30. You've used typography as a texture.
  31. You don't have a favorite font because you love “Typography.” Not Fonts. Choosing a favorite font would be like choosing a favorite child, it's just wrong.
  32. You collect as many free stuffs from the interwebs as you can on your hard drive, hoping that one day, that cool project will come along that you can actually use some cool shit on.
  33. You'd rather have a free font than a free gallon of gas.
  34. It's hard to talk about frustrations at your job with a group of friends because they have no idea what “Vector” or “DPI” is, just to name a couple.
  35. You've had a client ask you to “Make the logo bigger.”
  36. You've had a client that insists on “filling up the space.”
  37. You've learned to over-price web design projects because most clients are more picky about their websites than a high school girl picking out a prom dress. Of you course you could always fake it and hire Shopify for some professional website design but then again, it is your call.
  38. You feel like you're “On Call” half of the time because clients procrastinate so much.
  39. You know keyboard shortcuts that require 4 fingers.
  40. You've lost hours of work because an application crashed, and you had to start over from scratch because you were in the “zone” and forgot to save. Basically, you were having so much fun being creative that saving was the last thing on your mind at the time.
  41. You've “Live-Traced” something.
  42. You spend more hours per week looking at CSS showcase sites than you do at the gym.
  43. The only thing that would make you happier than the demise of IE6 is world peace.
  44. You've done everything but give up a body part to talk a client out of a “Flash Intro.” Yeah. I said it. Flash Intro. Sad, so so sad. (goes along with #2)
  45. You have enough fonts on your hard drive to last you for: 1 font per day for about a decade, give or take a year or two.
  46. You know, explicitly, what a “Flourish” is.
  47. You worry about negative space as much as the content area.
  48. You get phone calls from friends and family members on a regular, sometimes annoyingly-frequent basis, wanting your services for free or extremely cheap. (and the “portfolio” line makes you want to throw something across the room)
  49. You've had a client that wants a website they can “update” on their own, but doesn't know shit about websites.
  50. You're never more than 99% happy with your final product because you believe that EVERYTHING can be improved upon. (especially with those tight-deadline projects)