I reorganized the sidebar links over on the left to read a little better; I got rid of the ‘picks of the month’ column because I wasn’t updating it and replaced it with some blogging links. This is all basically a futile exercise, as I’m going to begin a redesign of the log this month anyway. Today we should also welcome Todd to the fold of bloggers online.

A rant, directed at the general IT director mindset in corporate America:

You are probably a forty-something middle manager who has a lot of money invested in a MCSE or other accredited certification, which was expensive and time-consuming to earn. Your livelihood depends on your ability to oversee, manage, upgrade, and plan a computer network around this certification. Because, after all, if your company goes to something other than Wintel, your job is in jeopardy, and you have children to feed and a mortgage to pay for. I understand that.

Where you piss me off is when you decide arbitrarily that creative professionals (defined as print designers and to some degree web designers) MUST use Wintel machines because you say so. That’s bullshit, and I’ll tell you why:

1. Most designers have been trained on Macs. They know all the ins and outs of Quark (or now, InDesign) on the Mac, and they know the ins and outs of OS9 and what they have to do to get it to work with printers, removable media, outside vendors, and most importantly, their home machines, which they usually have a good deal of money invested in. This is called a specialty. It’s why your company hired them in the first place.
2. They have legacy applications and fonts they’ve been using for years, often totalling thousands of dollars, which they most likely own and often will bring with them to the company. When was the last time you priced out a font family at ITC or Adobe? Didn’t think so, slappy.
3. Font handling. Wintel fonts print and look like shit. End of fucking discussion.
4. Have you ever heard of workflow? Designers have a workflow they are comfortable with. Windows machines are totally different in the way they lay out everything. That translates to hours of time wasted.
5. Service bureaus, printers, and prepress shops hate PC’s. And will sometimes charge you more to service files created on them. How is that cost-effective?

Your job is to support your employees. If you don’t know how to support the machines, read a fucking book. Take a fucking class. Don’t outlaw a tool because you don’t know how to use it.

The argument that you are specifying PC’s for the creative department because you can rotate them out when the creative people leave is an argument that defeats itself. That’s a great way to piss off your designers and get them to leave. Happy now, jackass? You’re a genius.

This morning

Here you can see the difference between the old carpeting, and how it makes the whole world dark, and the sunny hardwood floor. Amazing!