Word made me a designer
Microsoft, I owe you one. If Word hadn’t been so annoying and inconvenient, I may never have found graphic design.
In college, I was an undeclared major for the first two years. I took the liberal arts base, scanning the course catalog for ways to fulfill those requirements and learn what seemed most interesting. So I found myself in advertising courses, marketing courses, and any course I could find with a literary spin. I read a lot, wrote a lot, and used Microsoft Word a lot.
Ugh. What a ridiculous pain it was. Changing the margins of a document was always a gamble, because on each side there were three or so things to adjust, and I never chose the correct one, or I could never get them aligned again. Using tables or images created odd gaps. Paragraphs and bulleted lists always tried to guess at what I wanted. Stuff was shifting around haphazardly.
Some programs have a snap feature. Word had snap-to-ugly.
It was as if the document was fighting against me. Messing with my mind. It could adjust itself in an infinite number of clunky and garish ways, as if that should satisfy me.
I could not understand why it was so complicated, or why I had never heard of a simpler, friendlier competitor. Spacing, alignment, and indentation were fundamental issues, I thought. There’s got to be a better way.
For me, the better way was graphic design.
I wonder if Word is similarly frustrating these days, or whether it is easier for folks to find an alternative. And if there isn’t any reason to be dissatisfied with one’s page layout program, I wonder what’s prompting kids these days to seek a better way.
Wow! Great story.
HTML did the same thing for me.
What do you use in place of Word?
In place of Word I use a variety of applications that are common today, but that didn’t exist a few years ago (or I couldn’t find them – and at that point I was a Windows user).
I use Backpack very often. Yojimbo some. BBEdit more often than I realize (my go-to program for no-nonsense text editing, but not as good as the others for archiving). Simplenote on my phone. These applications let me write and edit without getting in the way.
When I want precise control over margins and other layout-related measurements, my graphic design education (as well as several years of experience, valuable books, and handy web resources) have shown me, and taught me to be comfortable with, programs like InDesign and Illustrator.
And when I want such precise control in web typesetting, I hand-code HTML and CSS just as Jeffrey showed me how to do.