surfing: brand x

1999 august 10

skill set

when it comes to doing new things, i have a habit of doing before reading how to do.

not so much for really important or dangerous or physical things, but definitely for computer type things. take photoshop. i received my copy of the program a few years ago, ignored it for quite a while, then opened it and started fiddling about. i knew there were ways to do some of the things i wanted to do, but could not for the life of me be bothered reading the tutorials, much less the book. i found some workarounds and some approximations and just lived without some of the effects i wanted to try and achieve.

at the office, we are contemplating a web based version of our product and we are making prototype pages left and right. surprisingly, few of the geeks there have a personal page of any sort and fewer still have any knowledge of even rudimentary html. that means i get to play with the boys, designing pages and even doing a little graphic design work.

i figured as long as i was getting paid to do it, i might as well try to do it correctly so i finally started reading some of the tutorials i found on the web. and what do you know! i can now do things, really basic things, that i couldn't do properly before. like drawing circles. i didn't know that if you hold the shift key down wile using the marquee tool, set on ellipse, you get a perfect circle; i'd been eyeballing it before. i didn't know you could choose a shape as a selection, and then contract it by how many pixels you want in order to get borders and things.

i know all you photoshop wizards are laughing at me now, but i don't care. i can make a pretty pearl without any bloody plugins at all.

gem of the web, claire

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