Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Designing Sausage

Since Sunday was An Historic Evening in America, Paul and I participated in the momentous occasion by watching it on CNN.

First of all, Wolf Blitzer and the entire CCN crew must be so limber from all the stretching they do. And by stretching, I mean "Absolutely nothing is happening right now, so let's spend 20 minutes exploring how many numerals can be evenly divided into 216. Do we have a chart of that? Let's go to the basic math chart."

Seriously, there was more filler than a Botox convention. If Wolf Blitzer was a president, he would be Millard Fillmore.

Anyway, I found the whole thing interesting because you got to see all the weird stuff that happened on the floor of the House. Like, before the vote took place, this representative stood up and was like "I appeal to the speaker on the grounds of Blah vs. Bhloo circa 1978 to request a vote by roll call, pursuant to article K statute 32" and the other guy who was in charge was like "In reference to Bleeb vs. Blob, please indicate approval of request with Yay or Nay" and then some people shouted Yay and some people shouted Nay and I was like "WHAT IS HAPPENING." Honestly this completely incomprehensible exchange took 10 minutes, and at the end something was rejected, I think. Or pizza had been ordered.

Once that happened, I was like Oh, this is why people say "Law and sausage are two things you do not want to see being made." We were seeing the law sausage being made!

That phrase also describes this video, except for "law sausage" read "design sausage." A designer from Orbit books, a science fiction and fantasy publisher, had screen capture on while she put together a cover for their latest title. It's pretty awsome, but it definitely exposes some of the drudgery of design (also a reliance on stock photography, and two little friends called Cut and Paste). My favorite part is when she has to erase the Eiffel Tower because it didn't exist when the book takes place. Good catch!

Observe the fastest Pen Tool in the West do her work:



Via Boingboing

1 comment:

Sandra Suzanne said...

they must have edited out the parts where she surfed facebook every 20 minutes