| objectified |
[23 Nov 2009|11:42pm] |
finally found the time to watch objectified.
enjoyed it. as a film, it is quite well done, i think.
it brought back many questions that i stopped thinking about – whether for better or for worse, i'm unsure, though i'd think it's likely for worse.
also, it brought me through a memory lane.
i remember when i got my first computer when i was eight, one thing that bothered me was why it had to be so inhuman in the way it was presented to the user.
fast forward to seven years later and i was just starting to make websites out of curiosity.
the person who taught me the basics was this managing director of an IT company, and he gave me web space on his company's server for me to fool around with, which would have otherwise been unaffordable for an idle student.
one goal i had was to make the website usable by anybody, even by my parents. that means that not only does it have to have that emotional connection, it should only have visual cues that matter.
eventually, i started making spare money doing odd design jobs like that. a few years later, the kind of design that i was doing became known as interactive design in the real world – in other words, design of interfaces.
unknowingly then, i had channeled that little inclination into my presentations in school at that time. i had utmost confidence in communicating any idea in a presentation – as long as i had powerpoint.
in fact, i was almost always disgusted by my own lecturers' slides, which are often non-emotive and are often losing too many ideas with every slide that followed.
out of arrogance, i'd make sure my own presentations would make theirs look like shit, just to show that i am better than they are – yes, i am cringing deeply now.
eventually, it got to a point where i was making money preparing powerpoint presentations for people who need to impress but just do not have what it takes – time, learning, IT, etc. don't get me wrong though, i wasn't making money off my schoolmates. if you were ever my schoolmate, you'd know i'll never ever do anyone's school work for money.
instead, the people who were willing to pay were CEOs and directors of companies – the folks with more money than time. i was also sometimes asked to read their notes and rewrite them. eventually, through word of mouth, i got passed around.
some of the gigs were really fun. one of my favourites was for the director of walt disney asia, and it was a presentation that involved a lot of visuals of cartoon characters – anime ones included. with that kind of material to work with, who wouldn't be in bliss?
thinking back, i find it funny that their requests were secondary to my mood and my desire to make money. if i got bored and wanted to play instead of staying home after school to do their presentation, i'd say that i'd prefer to do my thing instead. delightfully, i got a pay bump once to override my laziness. tempting, i know, but i had never misused that!
as life is, things got into a full circle, and i landed an internship at a web design company.
yay, i thought.
what i liked about the company was that it was very design-oriented. before, i would contemplate working with others to get some freelance money flowing, but almost always, my ideology on web design differed with theirs, so it was hard to convince myself to do it.
then there's the other school of kids, who believe that as long as it looks beautiful, it was good design. i wasn't humble enough to not laugh at their superficiality. i wanted nothing to do with them. their designs were simply self-centred ejaculation! nobody paid you to make flat braille! there has to be both form and meaning! how hard is that..?
wow. i actually got worked up. haha.
anyway, back at the web design company, i could work on flash content and actually had some creative control over them. flash was a pretty new thing at that time, and because i had meddled around with it at home before, i could get my hands pretty deep into it and my boss started to hand flash assignments to me.
however, i really hate flash now. the bloated piece of shit has lost its meaning. HTML 5 is the future!
on top of that, this company allowed me the freedom to come and go any time i liked, as long as i know the work was done for the day. i could work here for real, i thought.
alas, as with everything with me, i lost interest in interactive design. it wasn't fun anymore.
the projects started to feel like the same old thing. everybody wanted the same thing.
one of the last straws was this horrible movie poster that i had done as a freelancer. fun to work on, but there was just so much that was out of my control, and of course, i wasn't happy with the result.
it feels like no one cares about good design as long as the product can be sold.
yikes.
on top of that, i foresaw that this whole web stuff would be a cutthroat business. another kid like me will pop up somewhere and will do it for cheap. he doesn't have to be as good as i am – just cheaper.
still, i'm glad for that strand of exposure. i suspect i am not as vehement about things like that anymore though. if it sucks, i just won't bother to look or care. why fuss myself with it? unless it bears a meaning that i am dying to peruse – in other words, beta stuff.
although i say at the beginning of this post that it may be for worse that i stopped asking these questions, there is the better reason, or at least i hope it is. simply, harmony with others. i may lose some of what i used to stand for, but hey, people around me are happier.
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