Sometimes, when those co-workers won’t leave you the heck alone, you just gotta be like. “whatever, bitches.”
Have you ever just had a rotten day at work and literally curse to yourself in a string like Jason Schwartzman’s character, Albert Markovski, does in the very beginning of I <3 Huckabees? Maybe you’ve mentally given the finger to Karen after she, for the third time this week, told you all about her shih tzu’s vacation at the Tropical Dog Paradise Resort, then accused you of wasting her time when she realized you weren’t listening because you had a report due in seventeen minutes?
You’re not alone.
This isn’t to say I was like this every day at work. Just some days when people wouldn’t leave me alone, despite having the “snooze” icon next to my name on Google Hangouts, or when the phone would ring non-stop, having 3-4 calls in a row, 30 minutes a pop. Only when there were fires (and there were a LOT of fires at my last two jobs) that needed to get put out and I was the only one who could. Those times.
That moment when you finally get Microsoft Word to do that thing you need it to do for the 2:00 meeting that’s in…well, it actually started five minutes ago.
As one of my daily design quickies, I decided to take these frustrations (and honestly, they can even be used during moments of triumph—if you’re that type of person) and my newfound skill of using Adobe Illustrator to recreate neon to make a short series of things that cross people’s minds that aren’t safe for work.
Although the concept is simple (layering colors, stroke weights and filters), it gets tedious (layering colors, stroke weights and filters) to “design” neon. I had to learn this in order to properly do drawings for projects that involved neon so the client would have a better idea of what the final product would look like.
The backgrounds I used in these pieces were images I had taken myself. I was inspired by neon on brick walls—the dingier the better. Gave it character. Although my walls aren’t dingy (I only had an hour and a half or so to do these), I tried to make them dark enough to have an ominous feel while light enough so you can have an idea of what the surface is.
So the next time you want to cuss someone out for being themselves, before you type a “fuck-you-esque” message to someone in an email out of anger and accidentally send it—just use your skills to let it out in a creative way.
Sit down, Karen—I don’t care about your dog’s trip to the Tropical Dog Paradise Resort.