In the many weeks since my last post, work has definitely gotten better. We had a new art director start a few weeks ago and he’s been pretty quick to pick up on how things roll. The long hours have tamed down finally and once again we’ve got a really great group of people working at Gams.

We’ve also been using the new version of Adobe’s creative suite. So far, the new apps kick some pretty serious ass. The new features in Photoshop and Indesign are useful, but Illustrator’s new features really take the cake.

LiveColor is delicious. So is the new UI. Being able to use alignment tools on individual anchors is heavenly. However, Adobe really took a few steps back when they added in isolation mode. It was touted as an exciting new feature, but all it’s done for me so far is suck. You can’t edit opacity masks, nor can you lock, hide, or switch to outline view (probably some other limitations). Real annoying.

We’ve been working on some cool projects and I’ve started to get some samples of the finished pieces. As they come in, I’m going to start posting some photos of them here.

Work has been miserable lately, but I’m coping.

We’re down one art director at the agency and our biggest client has been giving us more work than we can handle. The account executive on the account has been trying to dig us out of the situation, but with me being the only creative on the account it’s been a nightmare. Deadlines have been tight and I’ve been spending way too much time at the office.

We tried bringing in a few freelancers, but the majority of them have been limited to production work. Helpful, but not helpful enough. Further complicating problems, everyone at the agency is still working on refurbished/junk iMac G5s and mac minis that are constantly crashing, eating files and not fast enough to keep pace with the amount of work we have to turn around in a day’s time.

Hopefully things will take a turn for the better. However, in the meantime I’m going to start looking elsewhere for other opportunities in the area. We’ll see how things go.