Tandaan

This week, I didn’t do anything new. I was just working, or editing my sites, or planning my little zombie comic.

Since my very first time making digital art, I’ve been an Adobe Suite girl; drawing in Photoshop on my Wacom tablet, using Illustrator for freelance projects, and slowly learning InDesign through uni. And now, like a true adult, I pay for the full Adobe suite.

Yet for the past few weeks at work, I’ve been FORCED, gun to my HEAD, family’s lives on the LINE.

Made to re-create my carefully crafted InDesign designs as Canva templates for office normies to use. No, I’m not twelve, and yes, I mean it. For the norMIES?? WHY. I’m the designer. You paid me to make the layouts so why are you letting other people mess with them? 🤬

Look. I get why people use Canva. It’s accessible. It’s quick. It’s drag and drop. It has ai media makers now that make custom visuals for you. But as a designer, using Canva for actual design work feels like having your hands tied behind your back while being asked to paint a mural with a broom. Fonts are limited. Kerning is a myth. The paragraph styles make me cry. You think I spent years of my life learning every Adobe shortcut just to make pages on Canva??? I’m not ok.

So, it was a great change of pace when my brother, describing his war-time-level bread situation from lack of funds [just the average university student experience], prompted a trip to Costco for some bulk meat. With a pocket full of meat money from our parents, off we went. I didn’t realise how much I needed a change of scenery until I was standing in the middle of that signal-less, people-filled, label-lacking warehouse. Industrial-scale everything. Whole families shopping like they’re preparing for the apocalypse. Trolleys bigger than my future. It’s a bit of a fever dream.

Also, those Costco pizzas are HUGE. This was my first time trying them, and yeah, they’re definitely super yum, but I could only manage one piece. When I had the leftovers, I had to cut a single slice in half just to fit it in my air fryer. Loved it.