A good few years ago, I asked my wife’s friend’s husband (stay with me here) if he would countersign my passport application form. He was a lawyer who I had known for at least 2 years, and was a ‘person of good standing’. I popped over to visit him one evening after work with the form all filled out, hoping to save him some time, and expecting the task wouldn’t take him more than a couple of minutes. More fool me; he went through the form with a fine-toothed comb from front to back, continually picking the most microscopic of nits. “It says here you need to initial this box before I do”, “It says here that should be in block capitals”, “It says here I can’t counter-sign this if Mercury is in retrograde” etc and so forth. Of course, how could he help his pedantry if that was what he did all day? I had an open admiration for him, being a boring pedant for a living myself. We were work twins, merely separated by his £150,000 a year salary.
Personally, I don’t like being a boring pedant, but I know that many artworkers see it as an opportunity to take some power back in a process that requires their input, but doesn’t necessarily welcome it. I’m not even sure how much longer this part of the process is going to be permitted to take up any time at all. It will always be needed of course, but it will probably need to happen magically. Wands at the ready.
Regrettably, I once had to ask a freelancer to change the colour of some linked assets in a document from C0 M1 Y80 K0 to C0 M0 Y80 K0, to match the 80 yellow swatch used elsewhere. I’m sure most of you (well, all of you really) would fully support that request, but the freelancer was panicking that he was going to miss the job’s deadline. That’s the other thing: are you holding everyone else up? Some client services bods would think that, as they ask you how much longer you’re going to be, 30 minutes after they asked you the same question. A little like my pedantic lawyer chum, you might well miss something that could cost a lot more money later on, so you need to hold your nerve.
Being a boring pedant in what is frequently a boring, pedantic job, can occasionally bless you with an opportunity to practice something akin to meditation. Once, I was given the crushingly dull task of going through a page of ads in a copy of the Loot newspaper and changing all the phone numbers in it so they wouldn’t work if you tried to call them. It probably took me most of the day, and I imagine my line manager at the time, who was a creative director, was quietly seething that something would take so long. There’s that pressure again. Is he taking his time on that on purpose? Surely something like that can be done in an hour? If only. That job was for a press ad going in The Big Issue, so yes it was a print job, but the print production process wasn’t what was holding me up. Or, as we like to call it, artwork. Shouldn’t doing your actual job take at least some time?
It can often feel like the ‘preparing for print’ bit of a job is a guilty pleasure. The designer has finished their bit, client services have given it a good look through, the client’s happy. Just needs supplying now. A quote from a former colleague: “The PM will remain nameless but I just got asked to ‘give it a once over’ for a 100+pp print doc as the designer has already added the bleed”. Like everyone, we need to adapt and move with the times. I think it’s been at least 3 years since I took a completed design file and prepared it for print. Even then, I’d been working on the design myself for a week or so, under the guidance of a creative director so the job wasn’t alien to me. This meant I could take other colleagues on this boring, pedantic journey with me. Make them feel like they were boring and pedantic too. I appreciate this isn’t always possible, but come on designers, be honest with us. The best of you are just as boring and pedantic as we are.
you are not special 