Art Directors Club has their annual ADC Young Guns competition. The rule is, you have to be UNDER 30.

Every year, Print Magazine features 20 new designers under 30.

John Bielenburg’s Project M states that it is for “young graphic designers.” Though the application says all ages can apply, don’t get your hopes up. I saw John Bielenburg speak a few years ago, and he said—complete with a graph—that an artist’s most creative age is the early 20s.

The design community has a fetish for youth. And it needs to stop.

These competitions completely ignore the many people I met when I went back to school who emerged as amazing thirtysomething designers. In 2002, after years of working crappy office jobs to support my compulsive addiction to amateur theater, I realized that my favorite part of any production was to design the poster. I decided it was time to go back to school and become a graphic designer. Sadly, I soon realized that the opportunities for design students—competitions, internships, job leads—were skewed heavily toward brand new designers in their early 20s. When I graduated, I was 31, and it was already too late for me and many of my peers.

Therefore, I’ve started this tumblog to highlight those designers and artists, the brave people who decided that their passion was too important and took the risky move of switching gears. The people who, like a 21-year-old, are yearning to share their fresh, new ideas but also have a family to raise and a mortgage to pay.

I know I sound like a curmudgeon shaking my cane at a group of kids and bellowing, “Git off mah lawn!” That’s not true. I’m excited by young designers with their doe-eyes and new approaches. My argument here is that they aren’t the only ones excited by the prospect of interrupting culture long enough to make someone think or solving a once unsolvable problem. It’s time to reward the new designers over 29, even if it’s just a link on this little website.

I’m collecting links to portfolios now and would like to start featuring them at the end of April. (I have a kid on the way.) Send me your links either via email or Twitter. The designers must have found design (or web development or motion graphics or editing or any other visual communications endeavor) later in life. I’m also interested in the moment: what made you say, “It’s time to become a designer”?

Good wine has to age for a while before it’s perfect, before we can taste the artistry and skill that went into that bottle. Let’s raise a glass to the designers who took the time to age before sharing their ideas with us, too.

Case in point: Thomas Zaleski.

John Gruber retweeted this:

You can see it was retweeted 14 times as of this post.

So then I tweeted:

My short URL link pointed to Mr. Zaleski’s original tweet. No longer. (We’re getting to that.)

So Mr. Zaleski responded to me:

So I responded to him:

So he responded:

So stupid me decides to actually try and engage him in a civil debate:

I haven’t gotten an answer yet. His individual tweets are now protected, so I can no longer link to them:

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not the only person who hammered this guy. I don’t take credit for scaring him away, but it was fun to be a part of the herd.

So let’s review:

1. I called him out for insulting Roger Ebert, a man who can no longer speak or eat.
2. He says something that doesn’t make a lick of sense and asks me to be civil.
3. I accuse him of being less than civil.
4. He claims he didn’t insult Roger Ebert.
5. I ask him a serious question.
6. He runs away.

All in all, a good day.

site:clientdomain.com filetype:pdf

Try it.

I do it so much that I decided to make a quick bookmarklet. Drag the link below to your bookmarks. Then, next time you’re on a web site and think, “I wonder if they have any PDFs,” just click the bookmark.

Search Site for PDFs ← Drag to your bookmarks bar

There are plenty of other filetypes Google can search. If you want to find PowerPoint files, for example, change filetype:pdf to filetype:ppt.

*Yeah, I hate spec work, but it pays my mortgage.

It also has a place in my heart. The first time I visited Chicago, I stayed with friends on Belmont and took the Red Line from Belmont to North/Clybourn for my internship interview at Steppenwolf. And when I later moved in with those friends after accepting that internship, I made that exact same trip every day. I don’t get off at North/Clybourn very often any more, but despite it’s decrepit state, it still reminds me of when I first moved here 13 years ago.

Today, I read that Apple is planning to spend $4,000,000 to renovate the stop. This is great news. While my nostalgia for those creaking, oddly narrow escalators will never go away, my detest for the station’s appearance compared to the recent upgraded Brown Line stops will finally be erased.

But I’m not writing because I feel wistful. I’m writing because of one tiny part of Apple’s agreement with the city—Apple may get naming rights:

In the agreement approved at an August 19th Chicago Transit Board meeting, in exchange for the improvements the CTA will lease the bus turnaround [behind the stop] to Apple at no cost for 10 years, with options on four, five-year extensions. The CTA will also give Apple “first rights of refusal” for naming the station [my emphasis] and placing advertising within the station, if the CTA later decides to offer those rights.

I know the CTA needs the money. I know that it’s a good investment for Apple to have a shiny new CTA stop adjacent to a shiny new store. (It’s also generous of them to invest in a public project like this.) But naming rights gives me the willies. If the stop becomes something like “Apple Store/North Avenue”, then it will set a precedent. A new Target store is under construction on Broadway not too far from the Wilson Red Line stop. If Target renovates that stop (not a bad idea, really), should it then become the “Target/Wilson” stop? Will all of our stops soon become sponsored by a corporation?

There’s no indication that this is actually going to happen, but the potential is there. It’s a slippery slope:

“Excuse me, sir, how do I get to Chicago and Franklin?”
“Get on the McDonald’s Line at the AT&T stop and take it around the Sony loop. In about four stops, you’ll get off at Procter & Gamble.”

The only potentially untrue thing in that exchange: no one says “Excuse me, sir” anymore.

I’m willing to accept the good with the bad: corporate sponsorship of public works would inject cash in places we need it, like public transportation. But the effect I believe it would have on our already corporate-saturated culture is painful. Too often we express ourselves solely as our advertisers teach us to express ourselves. Sometimes, I’m not sure if I’m seeing a product placement in a movie; it’s more believable to hear an actor order a Heineken or a Pabst Blue Ribbon* than it is to see him belly up to the bar and ask for a “beer.” Such is our culture already. Corporate names for public works crosses the line, I believe.

I would certainly like to think that renaming the North/Clybourn stop “The Apple Store Stop” or, as TUAW put it, “iStop“, would cause an uproar. I, too, would email all my friends to oppose it.

I’d probably email them from my iPhone.

*Apologies to David Lynch.

Updated 10/28/09, 9:37 AM because I realized I used the expression “slippery slope” twice.

Les Lye was the adult male actor on You Can’t Do That on Television. The character I remember the most was Barth, the diner owner whose hygiene and culinary skills left much to be desired, a great opportunity for a young tween like myself to laugh and yell, “Eeew!” He was a funny, funny man to a lot of kids, including me.

Moment of silence for Les Lye.

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.

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.

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

Moment of silence for Dom DeLuise.

This will have to do:

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

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.)