kradeelav

i was a senior designer that basically had to reclass to a manager/senior manager role just to keep a job that didn't touch AI as much.

the wild thing is, i liked my job 3 years ago. i liked the satisfaction of creating for sales. they could be annoying, but it was minor normal (human) corporate squabbles. now, when they're explicitly bragging about getting rid of designers and treating us as sub-human, it's creating resentment and misery. personally job satisfaction sharply decreased in the last 6 months let alone the last 3 years - i'd say from 80% happy to 20%.

personally, i think suicides are probably going to be on the rise in a big way specifically due to this; and that's just the people who can hang onto a job right now; cannot tell you how many designers and animators are out of jobs and desperate.

Talk to career artists in real life (like animators); a majority of them have already lost their jobs due to AI layoffs.

The AI Workforce Training Act is closer to what OP was mentioning; the last paragraph of this article suggests more. https://fedscoop.com/ai-workforce-tax-credit-house-bill/

What level are you/years of experience do you have? Advice for Manager+ is pretty different from somebody with 2 years of being an independent contributor, or none.

I've heard from several people the one somewhat reliable in is knowing somebody on the inside of the place you're applying to. At this point having somebody being able to vouch for you is helpful to separate your resume from the slosh pile.

It's rough out there. Wishing you luck.

just a sampling of my rss reader this morning:

marginalia's blog for interesting tech problems building a search engine "specifically" for indie/small/old-web sites. (the search engine itself is a gold mine for exactly what you're looking for). https://www.marginalia.nu/log/

feuilleton for thoughtful posts on recent niche art history - http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/feed/

the spatial heritage review for advances in 3D models from an educational context https://nebulousflynn.substack.com/

that physical/mental pain in the process (much like more severe surgeries) is a thing - especially if it's something you retain any amount of consciousness with.

there's also the elephant in the room of coming back as a vegetable. whether due to biological damage or the brain simply not being able to recalibrate.

also somebody who's worked remote for the last 5 years partially due to disabilities; there's lots of us out there. like somebody else said, go to the linkedin profiles of the fortune 500 (maybe 1000?) companies and start applying to the ones that filter out only-in-office.

also honestly sometimes even if the profile doesn't explicitly say 100% remote, it can be if they want you bad enough. i got an exemption in my current place that's technically "hybrid only" ... wishing you best of luck.

my dayjob (design manager at an international company) just had the mother of all adobe bugs/crashes/forcibly quits around 4pm EST. wonder if it's related to this.

makes me extremely thankful I do all of my creative print projects under this handle purely in OSS; ubuntu + krita + libreoffice. it's tricky sometimes but it's genuinely doable.

The legion of folks who learned to code via geocities/neocities websites/tumblr themes are a fantastic example of this. :)

I think we may be talking about two different concepts regarding creation of art.

Absolutely humans (and myself, I'm a professional illustrator) use a mental patterns to come up with ideas.

The physical difference in AI generation is the lack of butt-in-chair time of the flow state. Painting/drawing/rendering art is not just mindless time to be compressed; it's a mental/physical/emotional/(and some would say spiritual) flow state with a lot of "input" abstractions beyond the patterns. Things like the creative's personal mood, personal past experiences, recent discussions with friends, recent texts they read ... those all fold into it. I wouldn't trade that flow state for the world, and it absolutely leaves fingerprints in my creations.

generated images =/= created

AI generated images have the potential to be art in the eyes of the beholder, but let's not pretend that generation is the same as the mental, physical, and spiritual flow state that goes into painting or drawing a piece.

May I ask where you're seeing this?

No? Last time I understood from my artist friends who do kinky NSFW art (as do I), they use SubscribeStar's NSFW version, right over here if you missed it - (https://subscribestar.adult/)

Do note that the site the article is on does seem to be a bit agenda driven, regardless of the sources. Little grain of salt is always a good thing when messy situations like this arise.

Subscribestar, which I'm much more of a fan of since they have more common sense rules around NSFW art.

Will absolutely look into the Staff Engineer book; personally prefer dead tree books to anything digital if there's the option. Thank you sincerely for giving me the heads up!

Not an engineer, but I find this translates well over to design.

Seniority in a lot of ways feels like the acknowledgement of being able to utilize people/soft skills in order to build things. I find at least 1/3 to 1/2 of my time, a roadblock in the project is caused by accidental miscommunication from top down, and the faster you can debug those, the happier everyone will be.

Personally I rather enjoy that hybrid of people and "hard" design, but it's definitely not for everyone.

Hey there! I think you mentioned this site in a reply to me a while back, just saw the link.

The site's lovely and has a warmth and non-sterility to it that I find most early-startup websites don't, so kudos on the presentation there.

My thought is I can't see it immediately applying to me if I were a random Sam in the workforce, but maybe if you took the angle of marketing as a 'intentional corporate bonding exercise' that HR and people managers quite often like. They'll often schedule little 1-hr sessions of video tours, MBTI personality discovery, etc, and this strikes me as a much less offensive version of the latter. ;)

Perhaps being able to show that employees can match up with other coworkers in a set time (eg 30 min, 1hr may help? Looking at how personality tests sell themselves to corporate may give some other subtler marketing clues.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

This is an excellent article on the nuances of corporate politics without assigning judgement to it - it's simply the nature of the beast with corporate and has some very clear laws to it when viewed at the right angle.

Nice one -- will look at some of the author's other posts. :)

Wow, thank you for letting me know! 2004, that's much earlier than I expected...

The real information would be what version of PS this was implemented in (my guess is CC) and to make sure you have the version right before it. :)

Hello! professional design manager and illustrator here. :)

So glad you added the example of the scientific illustration - funnily enough, I strongly suspect that was made using vector illustrations which is a slightly different method than your vanilla 'draw in ink, color the shapes' mindset for mediums.

It almost feels like you're asking two separate questions here - (a) how best to improve your observational skills, and (b) what medium/tools should you optimize for. The good news - yes, absolutely you can learn the observation skills digitally; that was pretty much my path (you can see my work on the profile link) - it's rare when I touch a physical piece of paper for drawing.

(b) tools-wise, it sounds like you already have a good idea of where you want to go there, whether it be a tablet or ipad. There's pros and cons to both and it wholly lies on what you are most comfortable with as well what works best for your setting. rule of thumb is if you're spending most of your time at a desk, it doesn't hurt to invest in a larger tablet, but if you're spending most of your drawing time on the go, ipads are invaluable.

(a) to beef up on the observation skills, there's more than a few youtube series of videos that'll walk you through the basics of shape, form, color, line. Proko's series may work well with you given he also uses digital art -- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClM2LuQ1q5WEc23462tQzBg

If you're long on cash and short on time, mentorship with other artists is also a thing to level up much faster and in a more focused manner. I've invested some time with Jayd (https://www.jaydaitkaci.com/services.html) which was an investment I'd do all over again.

Happy to answer any follow up questions!

Writing notes from this amazing 11 part series on anime layouts/storyboarding > https://note.com/masuyama56/m/m94192fe5c85e

even run through google translate it's better than some courses I've paid for. that 2x2 grid is a game changer alone.

Would unironically use twitter if it looked like that, ngl. looking rad! :)