Travelling by bus after driving a Ferrari
I have recently changed jobs and moved on to a more suitable, less designer-y role.
Today I needed to prepare some user interface mock-ups for a short presentation I must give, and of course I immediately looked to open Photoshop… which is of course not installed on my machine at work.
In a bit of a hurried panic, I searched for free alternatives that I could download and install, and I came across GIMP. It sounds like it can do all that Photoshop does, more or less, and for free. You can take it a step further and get GIMPShop, a hacked version where menus are renamed and reorganised to look and feel almost exactly like Photoshop, shortcuts and all.
I was running out of time though, and did not want to spend too long on it, so I used MS Paint. It ships with all computers that run Windows, and yet I had never used it before because there isn't much you can do with it. The images I produced might not be pixel-perfectly aligned, the fonts do not match exactly, but I am sure I will get my points across to my colleagues.
I'd never have thought that one day I would favour content over presentation. But you see, two women from Dr B.'s ju-jitsu club got partnered today, and there's no way I was going to be late for their drinks party tonight simply because I wanted perfection.
And no matter how much I like my job, at the end of the day I'd rather celebrate lesbian love than push pixels around.