I always thought it made perfect sense that Ed McMahon hosted TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Like his co-host Dick Clark, Ed McMahon devoted his life to making other people look great, standing out of the way so folks like Johnny Carson could make the audience laugh or handing out giant checks to suckers or giving Britney Spears her big break. I’m sure the bloopers show offered Ed a compelling, anticipated opportunity to look better than the people he was introducing for once.

Okay, I kid. Ed McMahon was a professional and an iconic figure. Though he can no longer keep his feet on the ground, at least we can say he has successfully reached for the stars.

Moment of silence for Ed McMahon.

My (or rather our) accountant advised us to bill our clients for the PayPal transaction fee. While those PayPal fees could be a tax write-off, they can take a bite off your bottom line. Furthermore, clients get billed for incidentals all the time, like FedEx packages, and a PayPal transaction fee qualifies. Finally, I’m not inclined to argue with our accountant.

There’s a problem with billing the client for the fee, though: PayPal applies a fee the total, which includes the fee for which you need to be reimbursed. For example: You have an invoice for $1,000. The PayPal transaction fee is 2.9% plus $0.30, or $29.30 for our $1,000 invoice. So your client pays you $1,029.30 through PayPal. Problem is:

$1,029.30 + 2.9% + $0.30 = $30.15
$1,029.30 – $30.15 = $999.15

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, losing 85 cents on the deal isn’t the end of the world. But it got me thinking: how would I calculate the fee if I didn’t want to lose even a single penny on the deal?

Thinking back to high school algebra, I concocted this equation:

x = (x+y) – 0.029(x+y) – 0.30

In our equation, x is the amount of our invoice, and y is the fee I want to bill my client for using PayPal. In the formula, I’m applying the PayPay transaction to the total amount, not just the amount of my invoice. All I had to do was solve for y. And I won’t lie: it made my brain hurt. I like math, don’t get me wrong. I apply it to my design work all the time. And though this is a fairly simple algebraic equation, it’s not a muscle I’ve exercised in a long time. Besides, my phone is a gajillion times more powerful than my first computer; surely someone much smarter than I am has already programmed a computer to help me solve for y. Thank Google for AlgebraHelp.com. I simply entered the equation above and asked it to solve for y:

y = 0.3089598352 + 0.0298661174x

Mystery solved. From example above:

0.0298661174 * $1,000 + 0.3089598352 = $30.18
$1,000 + $30.18 = $1,030.18
$1,030.18 * 2.9% +0.30 = $30.18
$1,030.18 – $30.18 = $1,000

And I’ve saved 85 cents.

The nice thing about AlgebraHelp.com is that it showed all of the steps of the solution, which helped awaken the my dormant algebra synapse. Replacing the 2.9% in my original formula with a variable, I was able to create this final equation:

f

The client fee for using PayPal

p

The percentage PayPal charges according to your monthly PayPal income, which you can find on this chart

i

The original amount of your invoice

And here it is as an Excel formula with a corrected typo from when this was posted earlier today. I’m assuming here that A1 is your invoice amount and B1 is the percentage, so change those to your actual cell references:

=-(0.3/(B1-1))-((B1*A1)/(B1-1))

Sure, maybe 85 cents doesn’t seem like much, but on $100,000, it’s a difference of $36.11, and that could add up depending on what kind of business you operate. I don’t expect to be billing $100,000 per month—ever—but at least I know I’ve accounted for every last cent.

I’m sure someone else out there in the internets is looking for the solution to this problem, so I hope this friendly post is helpful. Of course, you should be upfront with your clients about how you are calculating this fee.

A friend pointed me in the direction of a new video game in the works that pits Mr. T versus Nazis. So I made a few calls to a few highly placed industry executives with whom I have a personal relationship. And I’m proud to announce that I have an early screenshot of the game to share! This is an EXCLUSIVE and you MUST CREDIT ARLO for this leak!

My source tells the game will require at least a 386 with a VGA graphics card and a SoundBlaster-16.

I wish I could find a YouTube clip of this: My favorite Dom DeLuise moment is from Cannonball Run. A police office is lecturing Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise, point at the two of them and sternly asks, “You got that?” Dom DeLuise gently grabs the the pointed finger in a subtle, feminine, completely emasculating and thoroughly dirty manner and replies, “We sure do.” I can’t do it justice, but it’s an example of the small quirks he would bring to even the broadest of roles.

Moment of silence for Dom DeLuise.

This will have to do:

(I still owe Bea Arthur a moment of silence, too.)

I created Gridelicious, a JavaScript clone of the incredibly overpriced Grid Calculator.

I’ve written this very long post about why I built it, most of which will only be interesting to me. (Hey, it’s my blog.) If you have an interest in how my brain works, go for it. But if you’re just going to play with the app and then skip to making comments, please note:

1. I have the utmost respect for the people and the methods behind Grid Calculator. I just think your software is ridiculously overpriced.
2. If you’re a programmer, please don’t belittle my admitted novice programming ability. Instead, know that I’m always eager to learn and can certainly benefit from your knowledge.

Version History

v0.4, 6/22/09

Pressing return or enter would clear the fields; added a “return FALSE;” to prevent that from happening

v0.3, 5/19/09

Fixed the math that calculates the Row space. Again. It should be right this time.

v0.2, 5/5/09

Fixed the math that calculates the Row height

v0.1, 5/1/09

Initial Launch

Some Background

While I might tweet a lot about the technical minutiae of web design (much to the chagrin of many friends on Facebook), the truth is, my share of the mortgage is primarily paid by art directing, designing, and typesetting large documents in short timelines. For the benefit of my non-designer friends: we’re not talking Word files, either; custom InDesign documents with tons of linked images, dozens of styles, a few master pages, and my obsessive attention to balancing out particularly strident rag-right paragraphs. And usually the turnaround is about five days, including juggling content coming from four different sources and simultaneously programming a matching “microsite” (a nonsense term I despise).

Therefore, I could not do my job without first creating a solid grid. Grids are the foundation of good design. Even the most avant garde of designs often have an underlying grid.

I thoroughly believe that my design education was sorely lacking in the fundamental study of grids, and I’ve spent the last year or so of my work secretly diving into a self-initiated boot camp. Sure, my bosses thought they got a great document, but they had no idea I was experimenting with proportions and creating baseline grid for maintaining vertical rhythm.

Grid Calculator

It was with some excitement that I saw the headline “Grid Calculator by Designers Bookshop.” Would this time-saving tool simplify my life? Around lunchtime, I nuked a Healthy Choice Mediterranean Pasta and watched the demo video of this (I hoped) revolutionary product. Sadly, it doesn’t do much of anything.

It has some definite pros. It does a lot of floating-point math for you. Also, the idea of basing your grid on the height of a lowercase “f” instead of the cap-height, which I had been doing, proved interesting.

But that’s where anything time-saving features end. There are no provisions for monkeying with the proportion of your text area, nor—perhaps most distressing—does it actually do any work within InDesign or Quark. You’re still left copying and pasting numbers back and forth between the calculator and your design app to create the grid. Oh, and incidentally, with the exchange rate as of this writing, this application costs $57.02. Let’s face it: Grid Calculator is nothing more than a simple spreadsheet.

That’s when the bug flew in my ass. After reading The Cult of Done Manifesto and watching Ze Frank rant about brain crack, I’ve committed myself to acting on as many reasonable impulses as possible. I set about to prove that Grid Calculator could be produced in an hour using a simple spreadsheet application.

Prototype One: The Spreadsheet

First order of business—did someone beat me to it? Perhaps not; Google produced nothing for me. The first comment from the blog at which I read about this product suggests that a free spreadsheet alternative is forthcoming, but I think the commenter was simply making the suggestion. So I fired up Numbers (not nearly as powerful as Excel but a hell of a lot prettier) and got started.

My spreadsheet skills are pretty good, I won’t lie, and I got pretty far within an hour. In fact, I had in front of me pretty much an exact feature-for-feature duplicate. It looked different, and it didn’t have every feature (more on that below), but I could follow along with the demo video and achieve the exact same results. I had achieved my goal. (Also of note: I didn’t save the file, otherwise I’d share it with you. That was stupid, wasn’t it?)

I would have stopped there, but I wanted to add another feature. Grid Calculator, a European product, seemingly only works in millimeters. I successfully added conversion ratios to allow the spreadsheet to work in inches, millimeters or pica. That’s when I ran into a snag. Pica measurements are typically written as “22p3,” or 22 picas and 3 points. I’m sure Numbers or Excel is capable of creating a formula to parse the “22″ out of that, multiply it by 12 (1 pica = 12 points), then add the “3″ to make 267.

A Simple Web App is Born

And that’s when the next bug flew in my ass—maybe I don’t know how to parse “27p3″ in Numbers or Excel, but I know exactly how to do it in JavaScript. And wouldn’t a link be easier to share and distribute? And wouldn’t it be easier to extend something written as a web application? I had already reverse engineered the math, so how hard could it be?

And so, with the formulas and a lightweight open source CSS library in hand, I committed my second hour to his project. Thus: Gridelicious.

I assure you that you can follow along with Designers Bookshop’s video demo and get the exact same results—just fill in the red boxes. Also, unlike Grid Calculator, you can work in inches, picas (including 0p0 notation), millimeters, and points.

Caveats

It doesn’t have every feature of Grid Calculator: I left out the quick conversion, though I can easily drop that in. I also left out the proportion feature and the top margin features because I’m not exactly sure what they do; they aren’t demonstrated in the video, and there is no downloadable demo of the application that I can toy with. (I’ll be happy to add those features if someone can explain to me what they do.) Also, Grid Calculator lets you save grid settings, but if you made a grid you like, wouldn’t you just save the InDesign file?

Also, if anyone views the source on this, you’ll see my shortcomings as a programmer. I’m sure if John Resig took one look at my .js file, he would feel shame for what has become of his creation.

In fairness…

According to the Grid Calculator webpage, a Pro edition of the software is on its way which will not only do the calculations but also build the grid for you. That, to me, is worth $57 or more, especially if it was built as an InDesign plug-in so I can watch how adjustments to the settings affect the layout. An application like that, indeed, would save me a lot of time, and I would gladly buy it

Also worth noting: the math used by Grid Calculator is based on a method developed by a designer named Marcus Gärde. His book looks to be very informative and classy. I would certainly like to get my hands on a copy. It’s also worth noting that I found this page detailing the math after building my app, but I’m glad it worked out that way. By reverse engineering Grid Calculator, I actually have more appreciation for it and the methods behind it.

However, there is really no sense in spending $57 on an application that does so little. I spent more time writing this blog post than I did building the app. ‘Nuff said.

I look forward to your feedback, and I will post changes at this here post.

(Incidentally, you have Mrs. Guthrie to thank for the name “Gridelicious.” It was one of dozens of names we threw out this afternoon as I drove her to the airport.)

It is with incredible pride and a stomach full of butterflies that I make this announcement.

This Friday, yours truly will participate in a qualifying match on the incredibly popular design competition Layer Tennis. Contestants have 15 minutes to exchange artwork, be it Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, collage, pencil drawings, whatevs, in 10 volleys. I imagine it will be the shortest three hours of my adult life.

No, it’s not the main event. The main event goes to well-established members of the designerati. In fact, one of the main event contestants this week is Tom Muller, whose work has been an inspiration to me for a while now. Just to know that my work—my dashed-off, half-assed, holy-crap-I-have-to-get-this-uploaded-in-45-seconds work—will share a domain name with his is humbling.

Once I know the actual link for the competition, I will update this post. UPDATE: If this default HTML index is to be believed, I’m pretty sure my match will be found at here. UPDATE UPDATE: Yes, that is the correct link. It will be live Wednesday afternoon. During the match, like most contestants, I will be twittering my ass off. I also hope to have some manner of webcam going so you can watch my frantic pixel pushing—more on that soon.

Also, the best way to follow the match is via Twitter. If you follow @layertennis, you’ll know immediately when volleys are posted.

Finally, I will need your help. Twitter users can comment on the match by including #lyt in their tweets, and they’ll appear on the Layer Tennis discussion page. The crowd is your opportunity to start a virtual wave for me, and I’ll be watching the discussion while I wait for the next volley. Tweet your cheers and help me make it through the competition; just don’t forget to put #lyt in your tweet.

I’d like right now to thank my boss now for allowing me to use precious PTO time at the office so I can take advantage of fiber-optic internet and a 30″ monitor. To my co-workers: thank you for staying out of my way.

I’ll see you on the internet on Friday.

Now, about learning Python in three days so I can use Nodebox…

You wouldn’t think I would offer up a Moment of Silence for a sports announcer, given that I am hardly a sports fan. Harry Kalas, though, had one of the most unmistakeable voices you’ve ever heard, and his was one of my favorites. His voice, to me, is synonymous with sports, like Howard Cosell’s. And I can only assume he was a humble man, willing to bring the voice of NFL Films to the Animal Planet Puppy Bowl, of all things. I rarely watch sports, but living in Chicago, I hear sports all the time. Sports will sound different to me now. (I hope Harry and Don LaFontaine are getting along wherever they are now.)

Moment of silence for Harry Kalas.

I looked all over for some online footage of an actual NFL Film narrated by Mr. Kalas, but instead, I’ll have to honor him with is shitty Coors ad:

I’ve seen a lot of posts and tweets the past few days about how to tell if you have the Conficker worm, how to get rid of it, etc.

I also ran a test today to make sure that I don’t have it. Here are the results of that test:

Yep, virus free.

UPDATE: This panel is going on as I write this. I want to share two updates.

First, I addressed this in the comments, but I want to be clear: those that do spec work are not evil, they are just doing themselves and their fellow designers a disservice. Those that try to convince you spec work is not bad for you or our industry are evil. They are lying to you and trying to convince you that the work you do is without value unless someone likes it.

Secondly, one of the evildoers linked to this post. My argument is made, but I want to disagree with him on one point. 99designs.com is in no way similar to iStockPhoto. iStockPhoto is a way to create products. There is no creative brief, just a place to sell your wares. iStockPhoto is a flea market for royalty-free media. 99designs.com, on the other hand, is unadulterated spec work, with clients presenting vague creative briefs and expecting specific, targeted work without the benefit of research and understanding.

Also, to Jeremiah: “evil” is a very strong word, but you are someone who is systematically trying to destroy and devalue an industry that still has a lot to offer even in this global economy. It’s the best word I could come up with.

ONE MORE UPDATE: I also recommend Andrew Hyde’s post comparing spec work to a ponzi scheme, which Jeremiah Owyang also linked to. It’s incredibly well written. Users of Adobe Creative Suite should should be required to read this post before they install the software.

___

At this year’s South By Southwest interactive festival, there is a provocative panel discussion called, “Is Spec Work Evil? The Online Creative Community Speaks.” I expect it will be a hour of monstrous bullshit, and I hope the design community will converge on it en masse.

Let me start by answering their question: yes, spec work is evil. You’re not going to ask three plumbers to come fix your a leaky drain and then pay the one who does the best job. It’s unfair, it’s unethical. And yet, designers are asked everyday to behave in exactly the same way. If you ask a designer to create a logo for you, you owe that designer money, plain and simple. Groups like AIGA and campaigns like NO!SPEC are trying to educate the public.

Crowdspring and 99designs don’t realize they are actually doing a disservice. What makes a good designer stand out is research and strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 corporation or a start-up restaurant around the corner—you pay a good designer for the discovery phase, which is essential to identifying business needs and developing solutions that will help you grow your business. If you slap a 50-word creative brief online, you may not get strategic work that is focused on your customers (but you’ll surely get what you paid for).

Thus, when I read that this panel was going to occur at the very influential SXSW, I thought, awesome! Someone is trying to make a difference, convincing not only companies but other designers that spec work cheapens our profession.

Then I looked at the panelists:

Mike Samson

The co-founder of the aforementioned Crowdspring, the leading website for trying to legitimizing spec work

Jeff Howe

The author of Crowdsourcing, which is a different concept—ad hoc online groups coming together to solve a particular problem. Crowdsourcing is not necessarily bad; it can be powerful when everyone who participates derives value, be it in the form of a micropayment like Mechanical Turk or helping a cause like finding aliens. Howe writes like he is more of an observer of the phenomenon, but I get the impression that he’s a fan.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff

Chief Creative Officer of Threadless. Don’t get me wrong—I love Threadless. I have a $25 gift card I’m looking forward to spending. In the case of Threadless, it’s not about solving business needs, it’s about promoting your art and possibly making money on it. Not exactly spec work, but it does live in a gray area. Nevertheless, in the context of the other panelists, Threadless sits as an enterprise that attained great success by asking site visitors to design artwork for free. And that example will certainly be lauded by…

Jeremiah Owyang

The one name I had to Google. Guess what? He’s pro-spec-work. One of his arguments is that it happens all the time, so let’s just get used to it. Well, corporate greed is unstoppable and happens all the time, so we should just get used to that, right? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?

Then there’s David Carson. What he’s doing on this panel, I certainly don’t know. I truly admire David Carson for his place in design history. Maybe he’s the one who will argue against the other four panelists. Or maybe Carson, who originally proclaimed the “end of print,” thinks all this crowdsourcing is a great idea. Either way, David Carson’s work hasn’t been relevant for over a decade. It’s like asking John Hughes to speak about the future of directing movies.

Essentially, what we have in this panel is a attempt at convincing designers that this unethical practice is the future of our profession and that we should stop whining. Whining is one thing; defending our ethics is another.

I won’t be at SXSW, but I know many of you out on the interwebs will. Please: show up at this panel and give these guys the what-for. We’re professionals, and we perform an important service. Long tail, schmlong tail: that’s what Craigslist is for. We need fewer people telling beginning designers it’s okay to give your work away for free and more explaining that the work we do has value and, when done properly, will bring value to our clients.

I feel like I need to spread the word, because dear Lord this has been bugging me.

If you use the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) network and you’ve been receiving random messages from usernames that end with “coho” or “trout,” you’re not alone. Apparently the “coho” bot targets Twitter users, and it’s only the most recent version. “Salmon” is an earlier versions of the bot. Learn more on Wikipedia.

The group currently behind this absolutely annoying spam-like scourge is Project Upstream. There is no opt-in for this, and they provide no instructions for opting out. What a bunch of douchebags. Sure, my AIM account name is out there on the internets—it’s arlodesign, by the way—so I’m asking for unknown people to contact me. But I did not ask to have my AIM account added to some service, and I certainly should be offered an easy way out.

The point of this bot is to pair up random people to have anonymous conversations around the world. If that floats your boat, go for it. It doesn’t float mine. A Google search produced these instructions, which I am happy to link to and copy and paste here for your convenience:

You can stop the messages by typing:

$optout

Then it will respond with:

OPERATOR: Are you sure you want to opt-out? If you do, you will *never* be contacted again on the account “<screenname>”. There is *no way* to opt back in and undo this.
If you are sure, type “$optout DADD”. Remember, this is permanent and irreversible!

Type what it asks:

$optout DADD

And you will recieve one final (hopefully) message:

OPERATOR: You have opted out. The account “<screnname>” will *never* be contacted again. Good bye!

The AIM bot confirming my opt-out also gave me an email address to write with complaints, which I considered, but given that they don’t care what they do with my AIM account, I certainly don’t want to give them my email address.

This has been an ARLOdesign® public service announcement.