Confessions of a Middle-Aged Design Diva*

[~a guest post by Zahava~]

Tap, tap, tap…… [blinks nervously].

Hi. Is this thing on? [gently pokes mic…. Yikes! Feedback!…..Hey! Who’s running the sound board?!].

[ahem].

Okay. First of all, I’d really like to thank everyone for stopping by today. I’d also like to thank my husband for sharing the stage with me today. You see…. I have a confession to make:

I Am.   A shameless.    Design.    Snob. 

There! I said it.

Hey, Trep! You’re so right! These public declarations are soooo liberating! Wow!

The thing is, not only am I a design snob, I am proud of it. My visual voice is my entire professional essence. Thanks to a wonderful design education at the Washington University School of Fine Arts, I have developed the skills to market my abilities and use my aesthetic sensibilities in a professional career in graphic design.

Thanks to my incredibly talented and devoted instructors, I learned that there is much involved in design problem-solving.  For example, I learned to be inspired by all the wonderful creative talent that exists in the world. I also learned to show hakaret hatov (giving credit where it is due) for those inspirations. I have been very lucky in that each of my professional opportunities provided exceptional opportunities to learn, explore and grow.

But I digress.

Back to the confession: I am rather opinionated. I am rather direct, and I am rather protective of my work product and my professional reputation. Why?! Because people pay me to be opinionated, direct and protective. It is part of my job description.  Not only that, but if I create something and someone else poops all over changes it ... and people viewing it think I did (or at least approved) the pooping changes. Bad, bad, bad!

Wanna call me a snob or even a diva? That’s okay… I can live with that.

I can also live with the fact that some of those involved with the 2007 JIB Awards think I am acting the spoiled child who can’t or won’t play nicely with the new guy on the design block.  Fair enough.

But what I can’t, and won’t tolerate are the following:

a) A logo I created for the JIBs (on a completely voluntary basis, mind you) which has been associated with my name since the inception of the awards being unceremoniously ‘ganked’ by a self-styled graphic designer and claimed as his own property/work (see the copyright disclaimer at the bottom of all the JIB site pages).

b) When I sent a private email to the three people listed on the JIB site who openly invited feedback and comments, one of them decided to make it public on his blog for the sole purpose of trying to publicly humiliate me.

c) When I take care to deal with a potentially touchy matter privately and someone decides not only to take it public… but then complains in this public forum (his blog) that I should have contacted him privately... Oy! can anyone spell hypocrite for me?

Trust me, this guy had ample opportunity to respond off-line. He didn’t. Rather than debate the merits of my point and/or application of copyright and intellectual property that I raised with him via the privacy of email, he chose to mount a public attack.

The irony is that in his post he claims:

a) … that he “didn’t know I claimed copyright of the design.”  Well duh, that’s why I wrote him a private email.  So now he knows.

b) … that he couldn’t understand why “any one would feel the need to 'own' the design on an individual level”.  Silly, one doesn’t have to understand my motives.  In fact the law doesn’t require that anyone understand or even agree with it… only that they obey it.

c) … that he had no idea “that anyone would care enough to want 'perpetual design credit' in the context of what it is for.”  Huh? And he claims to be a Graphic designer?  Oh my, this ‘designer’ must never have designed anything worth looking at if he didn’t want people to know he’d created it each and every time they saw it. As a point of fact I never asked Aussie Dave for credit for the design (perpetual or otherwise)…. that was just him being a perfect gentleman.  But once credit had been given and my name was publicly associated with the JIB design, I had a professional stake in making sure it remained something I would be proud of.  The graphic designers at the Jerusalem Post understood this last year when they wanted to adapt the logo.  It was a no-brainer.  Again, if this doesn’t make any sense to this guy I wonder how he can call himself a Graphic Designer.

This may be the Diva in me talking… but I feel strongly that this individual owes me a very sincere (and very public) apology. By dragging whatever ego/turf issues he had with the tone and/or content of my private email into a public forum, he lost whatever claim to moral high ground to which he might have been entitled.

I may be a diva and overly protective of my artistic reputation (to the point of being, er, somewhat less than diplomatic in my private communications), but there is stating an opinion, and then there is public defamation of character/Lashon Harah.

IMHO, this guy is guilty of the latter.

[gets down off of soapbox]

* title  of this post is a spoof on the title of the Linsay Lohan flik “Confessions of a Teenaged Drama Queen”