I'm not sure how much I want to go into the issue at hand, for fear of exposing myself. Let me just say that sometimes in life, things happen, and the best way to deal with them is to share them in three panels.

News of note: 36 Point is going comic-only for a few weeks here while we re-tool the site. We're looking into a lot of what Movable Type 4 offers and seeing what makes sense and what we think you guys would like to use around here (aside from timely comics, drew). I'm picturing an atom-bomb of total awesomeness that will probably amount to a water-balloon of "pretty-good" when it's all said and done, but regardless, we'll give it our best, promise.

So I asked her about it, and she told me "only when I drink on the weekends, and when I win silver medals."

So there. 

I feel like the homepage preview, our tiny little comic that lets new readers know there is, in fact, more content to their posts, kinda gives this one away. So either look at it, really close, or close your eyes and just start clicking like mad.

I've had a few local friends asking me where all the comics have been in 2010. They are here, residing in my brain, waiting to be unleashed. If you would like to help those along in their journey, I would wholeheartedly recommend a trip to our fabulous Zazzle store, to show your support in deep, meaningful ways. I would also like to point our our social-sharing functionality, at the top of this post, above the very words you are reading now. 

I know many of you already utilize these features to their full extent, and I shall thank you and continue shower you with all the gifts I have to give.

...wait. I've said too much. That actually sounds totally awesome.

Watching the accomplishments of these athletes that have trained, in some cases, their entire lives for these moments, it is easy to feel less accomplished. We don't have speed skating, or the the flaming tower of awesome that was Snowboard Cross, we have more complex, yet smaller victories. Yes, we have medals, though they are awarded after a lifetime of great moments, not after one. But it's what we have, so we must take it.

Naw, that's not really how I did it.

Or was it?

Naw. It wasn't.

OR WAS IT?!?!?

It wasn't.

Now, both me and my wife recognized this poster, and not because of out love of terrible movies. But the one point I couldn't grasp was, why on Earth would this poster, after being shunned on the apex of the Photoshop-shunning mountain, be allowed to be manufactured, produced, shipped and displayed near my home? Didn't someone see the post? Here it is again. Same link, but really, I want to be sure you see it. All I can tell you is, anytime I open Photoshop to make some beauty happen, I fear--fear--the results will appear on that site, because I can't imagine staying on somewhere once your boss or your client sees that.

And thus today's comic was born. Yup. That's how I do it, folks. Thaaaaaat's how it's done.

The game being run is specifically detailed here, and it was run like fast break. As much as I want to hold Adobe up as the bastion of great software design, there are far too many troubles and inconsistencies in it's "suite" of software to do so. It's little things, as it so often is, that are cause for concern. The way a window resizes when you zoom, the default direction of rotating objects. What "transparency" is called, or how to make a dotted line in different programs. I swear you need a Ph.D. in Illustrator to suss out how to make a dotted line if you were never explicitly taught how, and in InDesign you select from a drop-down menu that is always there.

These little inconsistencies between their programs, programs designed to be a family, are so minor that I can deduce not one reason besides apathy and/or hubris that they haven't streamlined the whole package. Illustrator is, of course, the worst offender, and Flash, still holding onto a lot from it's days as a Macromedia application, is a close second.

It's like they just need to put all these teams together in a room, or something. Have an office lunch to say "You know, Illustrator, when you resize a window or turn on your rulers, the page should re-size and re-center, the way it does in InDesign, Photoshop, and everything else." Until then I will always think of Illustrator as the dickhead jock of the group.

You may be asking why this strip has a certain pink-and-magenta-based holiday at its core, and I will tell you. If you are doing a Valentine's self promotion for your design business, now is the time of making. Not that I'm going to, necessarily. No, my efforts are being put into this contest for the Nebraska AIGA chapter. They do this sort of thing from time to time as a creative exercise and a fundraiser (free to enter, though). Since there's absolutely no rule stating that you must be a Nebraska resident to enter, I highly suggest rocking something out and entering it. I expect my entries to be full of ... character?

That is all. Voss Out.

I admit though, I am very turned-on by the idea of developing a typeface of my own at this point. Something to replace Anime Ace here on the comic would be good. I'm not guaranteeing anything here, but it's something Jeff Smith did for Bone a decade ago and it worked wonders for the lettering-to-art juxtaposition in his work. And based on what Newton's face looks like these days you can bet just about anything that man does is something I want to do.