106 Signs That You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic Designer

Image Copyright: powerbooktrance [Flickr]

While the following signs (in no particular order) may be funny, I've got to admit that most of them are true. Keep reading and see for yourself. You know you're a graphic designer when...

1. You've almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard
2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You'd rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend's shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can't type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard
5. You've had “Software Nightmares”, when you've been working way too much
6. You consider meals interruptions
7. You've learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car
9. You've intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix
11. You'd rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer
12. When you heard that Adobe was aquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm
13. You've Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up
14. You've totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
15. The amount of words you've written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you've read in novels
16. You've had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn't part of the deal
17. You've kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it
18. You've nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately) spinning beachball o’ death
19. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town
20. You've intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away
21. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago
22. You have removed the arrows and cleaned up the fonts on a forwarded mail before forwarding on
23. You’ve had a client that thought they knew more about design than you
24. Your clients pay you for your professional expertise and skill, yet you’ve run into one of ‘those’ clients, that refuses to take the advice from the very person he/she is paying for advice (you)
25. You’ve had a client that insisted on using the font “Papyrus,” and you had to hold in your barf as you prepped it [the design] for printing
26. You’ve requested a vector logo from a client, and instead, they email you a 72 dpi image they grabbed from a website
27. You’ve used typography as a texture
28. You don’t have a favorite font because you love “Typography.” Not Fonts. Choosing a favorite font would be like choosing a favorite child, it’s just wrong
29. You collect as many free stuffs from the interwebs as you can on your hard
    drive, hoping that one day, that cool project will come along that you can
    actually use some cool shit on
30. You’d rather have a free font than a free gallon of gas
31. It’s hard to talk about frustrations at your job with a group of friends because they have no idea what “Vector” or “DPI” is, just to name a couple.
32. You’ve had a client ask you to “Make the logo bigger”
33. You’ve had a client that insists on “filling up the space”
34. You’ve learned to over-price web design projects because most clients are more picky about their websites than a high school girl picking out a prom dress
35. You feel like you’re “On Call” half of the time because clients procrastinate so much
36. You know keyboard shortcuts that require 4 fingers
37. You’ve lost hours of work because an application crashed, and you had to start over from scratch because you were in the “zone” and forgot to save. Basically, you were having so much fun being creative that saving was the last thing on your mind at the time
38. You’ve “Live-Traced” something
39. You spend more hours per week looking at CSS showcase sites than you do at the gym
40. The only thing that would make you happier than the demise of IE6 is world peace
41. You’ve done everything but give up a body part to talk a client out of a “Flash Intro.” Yeah. I said it. Flash Intro. Sad, so so sad. (goes along with #24)
42. You have enough fonts on your hard drive to last you for: 1 font per day for about a decade, give or take a year or two
43. You know, explicitly, what a “Flourish” is
44. You worry about negative space as much as the content area
45. You get phone calls from friends and family members on a regular, sometimes annoyingly-frequent basis, wanting your services for free or extremely cheap. (and the “portfolio” line makes you want to throw something across the room)
46. You’ve had a client that wants a website they can “update” on their own, but doesn’t know shit about websites
47. You’re never more than 99% happy with your final product because you believe that EVERYTHING can be improved upon. (especially with those tight-deadline projects)
48. You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at the airport
49. You watch the Superbowl just for the commercials
50. You can spot bad typography from 100 yards away
51. You are pro-facebook because 95% of the Myspace accounts burn your retinas
52. You are completely immune to subliminal advertising
53. You look upon a well-designed project with either: sympathy OR extreme jealousy
54. Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse
55. You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride
56. You practically take caffeine intravenously
57. You have an appreciation for everything unique
58. You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.
59. You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement
60. When you look at album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
61. You buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like (even worse, you don’t actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)
62. You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart
63. You look at the clock and see it’s about midnight and think 'I’ll go to bed now'… and you actually go to bed about 2-3am
64. You need someone else to point out that you’re sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven’t noticed
65. You know what "kerning" is and you really, really like it
66. You wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what the mean. To others its probably a band of sorts..
67. Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’
68. You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche
69. You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why
70. You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
71. You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under
72. You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos
73. Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
74. You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets
75. You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come
76. You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth
77. The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…
78. You know Lorem Ipsum by heart
79. Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart
80. The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet
81. You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it
82. You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin
83. You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes
84. Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash
85. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper
86. You've actually paid for a font
87. You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”
88. You can't go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design
89. Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”
90. And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…
91. You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers
92. Cmd+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something
93. You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed
94. You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”
95. You know that rivers are more than just water
96. Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop
97. The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an artist!)
98. Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that
99. Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half
100. You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt
101. Your significant other/friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them
102. You know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon
103. If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus
104. Deciding on the right crop doesn’t involve a choice between corn or wheat
105. You’ve considered naming your children things like ‘Kern’, ‘Pica’, ‘Bézier’, and ‘Serif’
106. You can understand everything on this list

Ripped off from Bittbox and Facebook. :D