You watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials and then critique the CG and cinematography.
Your friends and family won’t watch movies or TV with you because you make too many comments about the poor lighting or bad composition.
You are pro-Facebook because 95% of the MySpace pages burn your retinas.
You are completely immune to subliminal advertising.
You refuse to purchase products that have poorly designed packaging.
You buy dog food based on the bag’s use of color and typography.
You critique every piece of design you see without realizing it (ex: “That is a horrible Photoshop mask!” or “I wouldn’t use that color scheme. A softer blue would do just nicely.”)
You look upon a well-designed project with either sympathy or extreme jealousy.
Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse.
You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride.
You have an appreciation for everything unique.
You buy a CD, DVD or book for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music, film or story is like. Even worse, you don’t actually watch, listen or read it, you just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration.
Forget the Boy-Wonder and the Man of Steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.
You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.
You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
You can’t stand having photos in your albums that are not color corrected.
Seeing someone use Lens Flare and Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure.
You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.
You look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think ‘I’ll go to bed now’… and you actually go to bed about 2 am.
You’re up ’til 5 am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.
You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.
You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s satin.
You can spot bad typography from 100 yards away.
You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes.
You can identify fonts used by major companies in less than 10 seconds.
You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.
Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash.
When you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.
You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
You know that rivers and lakes are more than just water.
Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.
Your significant other and/or friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.
If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy the creators of Comic Sans and Papyrus.
Looking at a restaurant menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture.
Cmd+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you break something.
The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: “Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!”)
You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.
You know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.
Deciding on the right crop doesn’t involve a choice between corn or wheat.
You’ve considered naming your children things like ‘Kern’, ‘Pica’, ‘Bézier’, and ‘Serif’.
You can understand everything on this list and relate to almost all of it.
I didn’t write this entire list, but I modified a few and added some of my own. Hope you got a laugh! Anything else you would add?
Watch out for the digg effect..
Haha. These are great!
My friends have definitely caught onto the fact that I don’t like seeing Comic Sans or Papyrus and love to find new ways to drive me insane.
I do this one all of the time! I used to feel bad about doing it, but now I’m glad I’m not the only one!
Now watch of the StumbleUpon effect
I will add:
Send to the electric chair clients that think they logo made in word art is pretty cool and you are just trying to rob him.
Favorite:
I had to laugh at myself when I redesigned the label for our shower spray cleaner in my bathroom because of their terrible use of white space.
Ho-ho-ho-ho…….
What a list…I can’t stop laughing Lauren!
“You should better put them in an so that others can count and add to them easily!!”
sorry i gulped a word! That’s “…in an ‘ordered list’…”.
If I had fridge magnets, I’d normally use a grid system for arranging them. Perhaps on special occassions I’d break the rules and go a little crazy.
The title should read, “You Know You’re a FUSSY Graphic Designer When”
Hehe, I’m enjoying laughing with you guys!
Esben,
I thought that’s what happened yesterday when my site went down but it looks like it may have been more due to Mao submitting this post to SU…
Jacob,
Hehe, yes, I fit into those two categories, too (hating Papyrus and critiquing bad design). Funny isn’t it?
Mao,
Thanks for the submission to SU! Got a bit of traffic from them yesterday! Yes… those clients and their logos can be a pain sometimes!
Dylan,
Wow… that’s pretty bad. I’ve never had to redesign the labels of my shower cleaner…
grafic7,
So how many could you identify with?? I’d say almost all! Let’s see… Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…
David,
Hahaha, oh silly! You know, though, I could totally see Johno doing that!
Jerrol,
Just because it totally describes me doesn’t mean you have to add “fussy” in there!
I thought someone had already done this but I guess not. So go digg it.
http://www.digg.com/design/You_Know_You_re_a_Graphic_Designer_Whenh_2
very funny, can’t understand how come in 12 hours it received only 3 diggs, we’ve got less than 12 hours to get this to the front page, so hurry up everyone
share the laughter with others 
“You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
I’m afraid I’m about to do this myself, though looking for the right capital B
Thanks for the Diggs, though I must admit, I’m a bit afraid of Digg…
Vivien,
John would be so proud of you!
hahaha – I bet he would
hmm pro-facebook? Must be a mistake
Like Esben says, the pro-Facebook one is a little odd, but I do agree with the poor MySpace design.
I’ve heard from people who are strongly pro-Facebook, raving about how it helps networking, but personally I’ve not had a lot of time for it. How about you Lauren? Do you use it much?
I have done a little bit of networking on facebook, but it’s hard when every middle school girl from your hometown keeps adding you and flooding you with messages and zombie invites. I am very thankful for the much cleaner design by facebook rather than myspace, though.
Esben,
I think that’s just because of its contrast with MySpace. I didn’t write that one.
David,
I have an account on Facebook, but I hardly ever sign on. Keeping up with my blog and trying to get over to others’ to comment has most of my attention these days.
Dylan,
I usually don’t pay attention to all those invites/requests.
I suppose you would feel worse if everyone was ignoring you
Abso-comicsans-lutely perfect!
Nubloo,
Glad you enjoyed it
I’m not currently a graphic designer, but if I laughed at the majority of these… does that mean I’m in the closet?
I’ll even add some:
I will pay more to buy the book with the nice cover, and
I often check the name of the person who designed the jacket cover for a novel or even textbook.
mightymouse,
You are a closet graphic designer if you can relate to them and seeing as you added a couple, I’d say you qualify!
Hehe, I loved that cartoon when I was little
You know you’re a graphic designer when:
You see Stefan Sagmeister naked in a book, and it doesn’t surprise you anymore
Samuel,
What an honor!
Yeah… that guy is strange. Hehe, you tagged this teh_funnay on your blog
Some of this was LOL funny. Thanks for the day-brightener.
Samuel,
Glad you enjoyed it!! Hope to see you in comments more often!
And much of it was groan-I-can-so-relate funny
Lauren:
I’ve certainly RSS subscribed to you, and put a link in my blogroll so I can refer people to you. You have a ton of good stuff here …
Samuel,
If you ever have any questions or suggestions for content, feel free to email me!
Wow, thanks
Lauren,
yup you pretty much described me with this post. So fun and insightful. I really really wish there was a “Cmd+Z” in real life!
Thanks again I get so much out of all your posts.
Tanya
Tanya Gagnon´s last blog post: What Does Your Business Card Say Behind Your Back?
You wish your 2B pencil and sketchbook came with a Ctrl-Z function.
I live in a part of the world which sits under a giant hole in the ozone layer, so that Drop Shadow had better have >75% opacity!
Tanya,
Hehehe, yes! Cmd+Z! Or at least an option to save and then reload if you screw up ;P
Tracey,
Love the opacity part! Hehe
I love these!
I’ll add:
“You memorize the hex values of all your favorite colors.”
“Seeing someone use Lens Flare and Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure.”
That’s me.
I can’t read anything that has bad type. The hardest part of designing for web is dealing with the fonts.
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