I heart Photoshop

On: October 11, 2010
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About Fei An Tjan
After finishing a Bachelor's in communications and Information I wasn't quite happy with, I decided to soak up some more life experience elsewhere before starting my Master. In Bolivia I worked for the newspaper of Santa Cruz (El Deber) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museo de arte contemporáneo). After six months, I changed location to Costa Rica to do a media internship with a volunteer travel agency. Here I gained more practical experience in the blogosphere, social media, and design which all laid the basis for my newly triggered interest in New Media. When I came back in the Netherlands, I signed up for the MA New Media and hope to finish this one happily ever after.

Website
http://cheeseandchina.wordpress.com    

The flyer I made below was the result of tedious work in Inkscape, Gimp and good old Photoshop. Although it seems like a simple flyer, it sure caused me a lot of headaches. I found myself caught in some sort of moral dilemma, where I wanted to use Inkscape and Gimp badly because of their ‘ open sourceness’, but I couldn’t help longing back badly to use the interface where I was already so used to.

In a weak moment, I again volunteered to take up another task for Kriterion and design the flyer for one of the upcoming events. I thought this would be a good way to pressure myself to make something nice of the assignment, instead, I was frustrated all over. After trying to figure out the so called powerful features of Inkscape for hours I gave up, though I refused to let Photoshop win so easily! So I downloaded Gimp in order to still be faithful to the Open Source ideology and not surrender to expensive Adobe. Having almost the same features, I had to sadly conclude that my patience was just pixels short and I had to beg Photoshop on my knees to take me back.

Though I did have one little victory, the one thing that I did manage to do well in Inkscape is the Tipi. This little accomplishment gives hope but it also became clear to me that our designing skills are dependent on the program we use; half an hour in Photoshop and the work was done! I am just not ready yet to separate myself from good old Adobe and you can’t say I didn’t try!

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