Today: a frustrating day

It's never fun to end a work day without having achieved anything. But more frustrating than that is having nothing to show for a day of hard work, when all your efforts seem to disappear into a vacuum, and you end the day back at square one.

Today I've been working from home on the design of materials for our workplace's annual charity dinner. This job falls to me each year because, though I'm no artist (having neither the qualifications nor the skills nor the experience), I'm kind of the office web designer and this makes me less of a non-artist than anyone else. And I'm game — it's a nice change of pace.

The main bit of design work for this event is the creation of a programme that gets handed out to attendees containing the night's schedule, background on the charities, and information on items to be auctioned on the night. And a programme needs a cover (which is, essentially, a mini-poster. actually last year we did some framed copies for the walls too).

I enjoy this kind of challenge because it lets me stretch creative muscles that programming doesn't. I was pretty proud of the last two years' covers, although they were quite basic (they're not online, sorry, but I'll see about rectifying that), so the plan this year is to make something that's at least as good and preferably better. This was my task for the day.

I spent all morning brainstorming ideas and looking at old posters online, trying to come up with something colourful, thematic, and not too reminiscent of previous covers. I'd already done a ticket design, but that wasn't much help, since the stylised artwork on it wouldn't scale up, and because it was monochromatic with no real possibility of adding colour.

But eventually I came up with an idea, and refined it in my head a bit, then dusted off my old Wacom tablet and set about making a really rough digital sketch of it, to work out colours and proportions, and to see if the composition was likely to work as an image. The idea: as the sun is setting, a guest in a tuxedo has parked his flashy sports car (or maybe just got out of a limo) and is heading to the entrance of our event's venue, the Marriott in Leicester, where the party is beginning. Title text to be overlaid in white at the top right of the page.

Two hours later...

Understand that I'm really quite proud of this. Rough though it is, it's more art than I've done in years, and I successfully translated an image that was in my head into something in pixels, which was something I wasn't sure I could do.

Here's the problem though: I realised about halfway through drawing this in Photoshop that there was absolutely no chance that I could ever do this as a proper vector illustration, suitable for the cover. I really wish I could, but I have a couple of days at the most to create a cover, and this could take me months. It's way too ambitious — number of elements, tricky perspective, reflective glass — and I have next to no Illustrator skills. So I have to throw it away, even though I would like it a lot as a cover design were it done by a professional illustrator.

So I've nothing to show for the day, and tomorrow I have to start again, but hopefully come up with something a lot simpler this time.

Ah well. A frustrating day. Sorry for being so verbose. The blog post is my attempt to salvage something from it.