Malfunctioning

I've always thought of design as a set of restraints and obstacles and it is the designer's responsibility to overcome these. When working with clients, you'll have color restraints, financial restraints, time restraints. And then of course, during the design process you will have composition obstacles, content obstacles, etc. On a normal day overcoming these restraints and obstacles is difficult enough. Today, my brain is malfunctioning, and I can't even get to the point where I can worry about these obstacles.

Here is one example. Today in Photoshop I had created a layer just to play around with. After ten minutes I decided that the layer wasn't adding anything to the design so I dragged the layer down to the trashcan in the layers toolbar. Then I noticed that I had another of the same layer. I thought to myself, "I don't remember copying this layer....oh well, I'll trash it, too". The same thing happened again, over and over again. I had about ten of these stupid layers built up.

If you know Photoshop at all, you are probably thinking, "Wow, Julie must have been dragging the layer to the "copy layer" button which is right next to the "trash" button. You would be correct in thinking this. I had copied this layer over and over and over and over again, all the while getting frustrated that I wasn't making any progress in trashing the layer.

Progress isn't happening today, unfortunately. I have been making stupid mistakes like this all day. Survival is key. Good design might have to wait. We'll see how I do after I finish my lunch break.