Windows and Mac

See a lot of jobs looking for people that use Macs and then seem to shy away from you when you say you use Windows.  As if Mac is harder to use when it’s actually created to be easier for regular people.  The big difference, click the option key instead of the alt key.  Other than that using Adobe programs is pretty much the same.  I worked on a Mac last year on a contract for Turner Sports.  Took me about 1 minute to get the hang of it.

I’ve used Macs enough to know they freeze and stutter as much as Windows so don’t see why paying more for the same problems.  An hour glass or color wheel is still the same thing, waiting.

The all in one designer

Seems whenever the economy goes in the bin, everyone is looking for the all in one designer / coder again.  In a perfect world you want a person that has spent years in design or coding.  Finding a flash animator / designer and an expert in Actionscript is very rare. (most people that are good at Actionscript are not designers at all but programmers that just moved to it from Javascript.)

Timing is another issue.  At DAVE Networks where I spent three years designing social sites for Hollywood studios, I had a development team behind me so I could focus all my time on meeting the clients goal with the design.  Rather than skimping it to meet deadlines where I would’ve had to if coding everything was included in my workload.  Developers spend all their time researching and learning new and better ways to code, designers do the same from their side.

With design alone I have spent a lot of years learning Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, Premiere, After Effects, HTML / CSS.  Even Sonar and Sound Forge for music and audio editing and composition.  I’ve dabbled with Poser, Swift 3D, InDesign, Quark and plenty of other programs.  From a design point I can offer companies a lot of skills but I wouldn’t want to dampen those skills focusing my efforts with programming.

Asking one person to do both is only hurting the company by not giving the time needed to really please the client.  Just my opinion anyway.