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New Curious timing
For some reason I can’t begin to imagine, several of BrainDead Systems’ most exalted poobahs from around the country have discovered that pressing business requires their attention and their physical presence in the Bay Area during the first week of February, and their local minions and flunkies (senior management when the poobahs aren’t in town; cringing lickspittle toadies when they are) are scrambling to line up the limos, hookers, drinks and cigars.

My services, rarely invoked for anything interesting these days, have been summoned forth. For the purpose of coordinating the dozens of underlings who will be spending that week squiring the muckety mucks between plutocratic venues, my masters gave me an error-ridden spreadsheet listing five dozen such venues, facilities and events covering downtown San Francisco, downtown Santa Clara/San Jose and points between, from which I was directed to create two large wall maps (three feet by three feet) for the (guffaw!) “situation room.” This project I have this morning provisionally completed, after working on it since last weekend, and while it’s an ignoble use for my training, I have to confess that it felt good to take my Illustrator chops out on the track and put the spurs to ’em.

My first thought was just to purchase some maps and adapt them to save time, but at the quality I wanted, such maps are startlingly (but understandably) expensive, and since the employer does not compensate me for these outlays, I was not prepared to shell out €700, or even US $40 for this purpose (there are some free maps available online as well. They did not meet my standards). For each map I accordingly stitched together a dozen or so close-in screen dumps from Google Maps so as to use the gigantic consolidated image as an Illustrator template, and drew the landforms in painstaking detail from these.

I didn’t have to do this. I could have delivered a much more superficially rendered product, and management wouldn’t have known the difference. Come to that, I was ultimately less meticulous than I could have been, but they’re still damn good renderings, including basic terrain (lakes, reservoirs, parks, other greenswards), major surface streets and thoroughfares, freeways, transit routes, airfields, landmarks and so forth. Also: legends setting forth the 60+ locations. Owing to the extent of the geographical areas to be addressed and the clustering of the venues in downtowns Santa Clara and San Jose, I was obliged to break out the centers of those municipalities in separate upscaled “insets,” which raised some interestingly knotty issues of practical design that I think I addressed rather deftly.

My masters wanted maps that were attractive, detailed, functional and delivered (as PDFs, not as physical output, but I’ve found them a service bureau that can handle oversize jobs) this week. I feared for a while that at least one of those elements would have to be noticeably compromised, but the evening and weekend work paid off. It would have gone a little faster had the manager who passed the spreadsheet on to me taken more than fifteen seconds to review it for errors, omissions, ambiguities, inconsistencies, contradictions &c, but we don’t call the outfit “BrainDead Systems” for nuttin’. Measured against your real graphic designers I’m a pretty small fish, but at BDS San Francisco I’m the only trout in the toilet: there’s absolutely no one else on the payroll who could have done the job remotely as well, if at all. It is disheartening that I am seldom called upon anymore to provide this sort of thing.

cordially,
New And you had fun too!
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done.
Thanks for the entertaining post. I'm sure it will be appreciated.

Best of luck.

Cheers,
Scott.
     Curious timing - (rcareaga) - (2)
         And you had fun too! -NT - (a6l6e6x)
         Enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done. - (Another Scott)

The thing about the explosive diarrhea excuse is you can really only use it once.
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