hey there tildes—

the job i’ve had for the past year has included heavy graphic design. i’ve never really done graphic design before so i’ve just been winging it and learning as i go. as time has gone on and the projects have become more complicated, i wonder if there’s a standardized way of organizing complex (or complex to me at least) projects in Illustrator (or for me, Affinity Designer).

one example— i create labels with 3-9 slight variations to be printed and attached to physical items (jars, in my case). these variations of the same design are roughly 75% the same, with the 25% being the “flavor” and associated text/colors. i also have to export as a layered pdf for the printing company since we don’t have the necessary equipment in-house.

another example (more related to InDesign or in my case Affinity Publisher)— a product catalogue. there are something like 30 pages and it’s just a huge click-fest of layers and nested groups.

are there any graphic designers here that have any insight on best practices when organizing large files or even practical ways to split up files?

This morning I found a receipt in my kitchen. It was from my roommate, who had ordered pizza from Dominoes the night before. When I looked at it, I was shocked. There was a single line item on the order, two large pizzas for the sum of $75.98 USD. I thought, "what the hell is this? How is he spending so much on pizza? And the junk they sell at Dominos? They don't even make the crust there!"

But then I looked down to the actual amount paid and it had a discount: $54.00 off the price for buying two of them. So the effective price was a much more reasonable $10.99 each. That's less than a third of the sticker price. After tax and an in-house delivery fee, it was still under half of that price.

I don't eat out that often, and fast food is especially rare for me, so I've been fairly insulated from this, but it seems that this kind of thing is happening everywhere. One pizza place I do get food from occasionally is Pieology. Their pizzas were roughly $10 not too long ago, but in recent years those prices have ballooned, with some locations asking for $15 for the same pizza order. But the secret is that they are actually still selling pizzas for those prices if you use their app - it's just that instead of giving you the real price, you get free "perks", which is your choice of a drink, cookie, and things to that effect. I never go to McDonalds, but I've heard endless complaining about how expensive it is. The retort I hear is, "you better get the app". The app is a privacy nightmare that requires practically every permission it could ask for in order to function, so rather than actually getting deals you're just subsidizing the cost of your food with the sale of your personal data.

There's almost no way to definitively prove this, but one argument that I find compelling as to why restaurants are doing this is because of delivery apps. Delivery apps take omission from the purchase price, and people really don't like seeing that they're paying more for things on the apps than they would be in the stores, so shops are raising the base price of their food in order to make things seem more fair, while offering in-store discounts so that they don't lose out on revenue from lower-income people who wouldn't order from delivery apps. If that's the case, that would mean that people ordering from those delivery apps are not only paying more for the privilege, but they are actively pushing up the prices for everyone else as well. And that's just ridiculous.

As of July 1st, all articles are behind a paywall. This includes all historical articles (going back decades, apparently), including any and all InternetArchive copies -- so RIP every Wikipedia link that has ever referenced them as a source. A free-registration option gets you access to 3 articles per month. A proper subscription is $230/year.

A freelance journalist who has been published with them in the past had this to say about it, which I thought was enlightening and, well, thoughtful.

On SpaceNews going paywalled, and the broader disregard for archiving in journalism.

I reviewed his stuff a bit, and I like his writing, so I added his RSS link to my feed (while simultaneously deleting my SpaceNews link), and on a whim--because he has his email right there on his "About" page, I emailed him to tell him that I liked his article and I just replaced SpaceNews with him.

Like, an hour later, I received a response from him, reminding me that he focuses primarily on the Moon, and that he loves RSS and is happy to hear people still use it.

And it was so refreshing to connect--almost directly--with an actual human being writing news.

Just thought I'd share.

Oh, I also want to comment on that price ... $230/year is--IMHO--wildly overpriced. But almost immediately, it also occurred to me that they probably lost more readership going from $0/year to $1/year, than going from $1 to $230 so, you know, business-wise, I suppose it's not exactly a horrible decision.

But I'd like to hear other people's opinions on that price, too.

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask. IT and cybersecurity-focused communities over on Reddit aren't exactly the most welcoming places for such questions, and reading the r/ITCareerQuestions wiki has made me seriously question if I'm being sold false promises of working in a sector that actually has a low demand for workers. Then again, that wiki page seems more geared towards the US job market.

Two weeks ago, I responded to an Instagram ad advertising cybersecurity courses, because the job market is horrible here in the UK right now, and after some setbacks with my ACCA studies, I am seriously considering just giving up on trying to get into chartered accountancy because that path is closing many more doors for me. A course advisor rang me asking about the reasons I showed interest in the ad, then we had a long discussion about any questions I had, what the sector is apparently like, etc.

Some of the claims seem too good to be true, i.e. that it's an industry where you can afford to be picky, jobs outnumber people by almost 3 to 1, most jobs are remote, the provider boasts a 90%+ employment rate, I don't need programming experience, the most complex thing I'd be doing is running command prompt/powershell commands and scripts.

The firm itself seems legitimate. They offer CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, AWS and EC-Council certifications, have good review scores on Trustpilot, are a registered training provider and limited company in the UK, and are supposedly an assured service provider with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC.) The courses they mentioned to me in their syllabus supposedly come to £4k and would take about six months.

1. Am I right to be wary about what this training provider are offering?
2. Do you require extensive programming knowledge or a computer science background to work in cybersecurity in any capacity? A friend with an IT background has told me that Python is useful in his field.
3. Is the reality of IT and cybersecurity jobs in the UK (or in the West) far different from what has been painted to me?

Piano keys are familiar and easy enough to draw if you're not trying to be exact, but if you want label the dimensions with their exact measurements (like in a CAD drawing), it turns into a math puzzle. The problem comes from the groups of two and three black keys.

This article explains it like this:

If you've ever looked closely at a piano keyboard you may have
noticed that the widths of the white keys are not all the same
at the back ends (where they pass between the black keys). Of
course, if you think about it for a minute, it's clear they
couldn't possibly all be the same width, assuming the black keys
are all identical (with non-zero width) and the white keys all
have equal widths at the front ends, because the only simultaneous
solution of 3W=3w+2b and 4W=4w+3b is with b=0.

To unpack that a bit: in that equation, 'W' is the width of each white key at the front (which should all be the same), 'w' is the width of a white key at the back, and 'b' is the width of a black key.) The first equation is for the group of two black keys (separating C, D, and E) and the second equation is for the three black keys separating F through B.

Since it's mathematically impossible, a constraint needs to be relaxed. The article describes ways to make the white keys have slightly different widths at the back.

If we set c=e=(W-5B/8) and a=b=d=f=g=(W-3B/4) we have a maximum
discrepancy of only B/8, and quite a few actual pianos use this
pattern as well. However, the absolute optimum arrangement is to
set c=d=e=(W-2B/3) and f=g=a=b=(W-3B/4), which gives a maximum
discrepancy of just B/12. This pattern is used on many keyboards,
e.g. the Roland PC-100.

When actually building a musical instrument (instead of just drawing the keyboard), there is a further constraint, described in this article:

The black keys on a piano keyboard, instead of always being centered on the dividing line between the two white keys they lie between, are spaced so that the twelve keys which make up an octave are spaced equally as they enter the internal mechanism of the instrument.

But this means that the "key caps" for the white keys should be slightly off-center compared to whatever rod or lever they're attached to. The author speculates about how to divide this up using various units.

(They seem quite annoying to 3D print.)