“New” tricked-out Mac Pro 2012, user files uploading from a Time Machine Backup.

Shortly after the New Year, before Coronavirus – when tech folk were still considering the New Mac Pro, my hand was forced. My #2 Workstation, an older, used 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 was starting to show evidence of it’s advancing age. It would shut down or would randomly restart without prompting. Often it would not wake from sleep without a hard restart. Uh Oh. And so I went down the home IT checklist and Did All The Things. Repair permissions. Reset PRAM. Reset PMU. New PMU Battery. Reseat the graphics cards and RAM modules… Nope Nope Nope. Thankfully the hard drives seemed to be okay. And shortly after I posted the previous entry, I added the following comment—

I take a bit of time off from Facebook’s toxic noise.

Good gods, I really should posting more often. However, I might cast some of the blame to the topic of this very post. Facebook. Lately, I have been keeping Facebook at arms distance – with hazmat gloves. Other than my duties as an Admin or a Moderator on various Pages and Groups, including work for clients, I have largely been leaving Facebook the hell alone, or at the very least, trying to limit my dosage.

Over the past two years, especially since the Trump era, Facebook has descended from a somewhat weird and warped community space, to a terrifying echo chamber of screaming, flames, and snarky memes. It’s essentially devolved to two tribes of monkeys with different colored asses flinging monkey poo and shrieking at each other at the top of their lungs, and not noticing they’re in the same cage. I characterize myself somewhat left of center, like many art people, leaning liberal, but have some conservative views too. I suppose, I follow –  “Tax fairly. Spend wisely, Try to balance the budget. Defend the nation. Protect the people. Equality before the Law. Help people where we can. Show respect for others differences. Stay the hell out of my worship and my bedroom, and your liberty stops the moment you stretch your arms and put your finger in my eye.” For this, acquaintances on the F-list seem to lose their freakin’ minds – on the Right and the Left.

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Graphic Applications on my Mac Pro. – Yep, the Big Kahunas are there.

Recently I came across this post on the MacRumors Design and Graphics forums.

“Hello, Got a friend who’s interested in going back to school to become a graphic designer. Wondering what programs graphics pro’s are expected to know.”
– Chris7, Mar 10, 2010.

There were a lot of thoughtful replies over a few years, so it might be worth your time to visit the thread and read through them. A lot of good recommendations. It was also very interesting to see the trends in design and publishing software evolve over the multi-year span of the thread. What was common, even essential, even a decade ago falls by the wayside, and new entries rise in prominence and usage. However, I noticed my comments weighed in at article length, so felt they were worth sharing, with some clarifying edits. Hope you find them worthwhile.

If you look at some of the (few) job listings out there, the short answer is, apparently, ALL OF THEM. But the practical reality is: the software your Employer/Client uses in their shop. Which could be state of the art everything on cutting edge machines, to legacy dedicated-purpose applications from the 80s running on ancient Windows NT boxes they can’t update, as the software publisher went under in 1997.

As a battle-scarred veteran of the Desktop Publishing wars, I entered the field in 1980 B.C… Before Computers. When DTP came along in the 90s, it was heavily marketed as a way to eliminate entire art departments. Since then, it has been discovered that training, taste, the ability to draw, and understand principles of Design still makes a difference. This revelation lead to the the idea that giving Creative Pros robust tools and paying them was more effective than giving them to High School interns. However the ubiquity and strength – what nuclear missile guys would call “throw weight” – of our digital tools has put a LOT of talented people to pounding the floors in Walmart, if not on the street. A spectrum of design assistants and outside services I would have employed and used in the 90’s are now all contained within my workstation and software.

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