Call meJeffrey

As a young graphic designer in the early 2000’s, there were certain career milestones that were the embodiment of making it – at least how I saw it. Sitting all day in a cubicle (though to their credit, it was pretty stylish Herman Miller cubicle) facilitated a nagging boredom that was not being quenched by the work I was being paid to do. One of my favorite ways to ignore the phantom pain that was everything that my job wasn’t, was to tune into Photoshop Tennis whenever a new match was being played.

I would sit and watch, anxiously awaiting the next volley – not so much rooting for a particular designer – but for design in general. Photoshop Tennis was to me, proof that the life of a graphic designer could be much, much better than I was currently living it. Of all of the back-of-my-mind career goals I’ve had, participating in Photoshop Tennis has always been one that I never stopped wanting to attain.

A lot has happened since those early days, and I’ve since come to understand graphic design and its community much better. I’ve even been lucky enough to meet and befriend some of the people I envied and admired back in those old-school Photoshop Tennis days, including the proprietor himself, Jim Coudal . Thus far, my career has had a healthy mix of incredibly lucky breaks as well as goals reached from an intense amount of hard work.

While it may seem small to the passerby, one of the biggest honors for me is that the work I’ve done that has gotten me from where I was then to where I am now scored me an invitation to participate in the very event that embodied my desire for something more all those years ago; I was invited to play Photoshop Tennis (though now it’s called Layer Tennis and sponsored by the fine folks at Adobe).

Now that all that sentimental bullshit is out of the way, let’s get down to brass tax. On Friday the 13th of February, I went head-to-head with the brilliant interactive designer Brendan Dawes. Sir Coudal informed me a few days prior to the match that Brendan had won the coin toss and that he’d be serving. I saw this as more of a win for me, because in this case I was certainly more comfortable riffing off of someone’s idea than originating – plus I got to have the final volley.

As the time approached to begin (1pm MST) I started to get really, really nervous. Luckily I wasn’t alone and in talking to Brendan, he had the same butterflies in his basket. I was literally running around my office trying to burn off some of the nervous energy I had. When that didn’t work, I enlisted the help of Plan B: my trusty prescription for Ativan to help with my regular basis anxiety. Once that kicked in, I sat down, cranked up some Darkest Hour and was ready to rock.

Below are all of my volleys as well as a short description of what was going on. I’ve scaled these down, so if you want to see the originals including Brendan’s volleys, check out the whole match here.

Volley 2

Brendan served with a beautiful image of abstract shapes, curved lines and Valentine’s themed colors. As a self-professed horror fanatic, I wasn’t about to let him short-cut my holiday (Friday the 13th) to celebrate VD a day early. Brendan is an interactive designer and he produced his first serve with code. My roots are in print design, so to begin I wanted to represent a battle of our roots. This is why there’s a half-tone hand holding a flat-color machete that has hacked his code-driven masterpiece into a bloody mess. Plus, I wanted to expose the design down to the “base layer” that you’d find in Photoshop to stay in theme with the battle. And anyway, it was Friday the 13th, so it was gonna be bloody.

Volley 4

This volley is all about Brendan. The images used are two 50’s style erotic images that we actually in the file that Brendan sent to me, but not used. I decided to apply the same half-tone style to the images to follow through on my print-theme. When I did this I realized that it kind of reminded me of being a kid and staring at the TV so close that you could see the RGB pixels. To keep the theme of using Brendan’s own work against him, I added the text “IF IT AIN’T BROKE, BREAK IT” – which is the title of one of his well-known presentations. To keep with the print vs. interactive theme (even though I haven’t done print in years), I decided to splash a little more blood in there to represent blood on the screen, not in the design. Maybe I’ve seen Natural Born Killers a few too many times.

Volley 6

This is when things got a little ugly. Let me first give a disclaimer: I can be a sarcastic asshole sometimes. This volley was a clear response to what Brendan sent over in volley number 5. Being an interactive designer, he made his volley an interactive piece. A few things happened when I saw it. The first was the thought “jeesh, I haven’t opened up Flash since 2002″ and the second was “I’ll never be able to compete in Flash, so I’ll have to match his skills as an interactive designer with my years of experience being a sarcastic asshole. In other words: when you can’t beat em, make fun.

I knew I was on thin ice in making a negative statement about Flash, seeing how the sponsor for this event is Adobe. But this is war, and if I’ve learned anything from the last 8 years of the Bush administration: shoot first first, ask questions last. So I put Brendan’s interactive piece in a frame, and hung that frame in the “Hall of Internet Antiquity.” (Note: for those really paying attention, I opted to pay homage to Flash’s hay-day and go for the “pixel stretch” to make the frame the size I needed. What’s up, Mike Young?)

Volley 8

Brendan’s response to being called out for using Flash was to whip out the WMD’s. Volleying with a simple interactive piece is one thing, but volley 7 was insane. While I was trying to figure out how to respond to his volley, there was a side conversation going on behind me about how Brendan’s Flash volleys weren’t showing up on the iPhone. Growing up a scrawny kid and being a late-bloomer (yeah, I can admit it) makes you learn one valuable lesson about confrontation: the low-blow is a dick move, but it’s also very effective. My response was in the form of a message speaking directly to the audience, apologizing on behalf of the match. Later on I felt that this one went too far, because it ended up being more a statement about Adobe than it did about Brendan. You can’t fault Brendan for using the application that got him to where he’s at. If I lose the match, I lose it for this volley. Poor form on my part.

Volley 10

I won’t lie, I had an idea for how I wanted to end the match long before the first volley. The concept was simple and it’s entirely self-explanatory. It was also a little self-serving, as it was a way to get my company in front of all the people watching. This volley existed for the same reason as whenever I go into the Apple store, I change all of the start pages in Safari to point to Threadless.com. In the immortal words of Chuck Forman doing an impression of the immortal words of Eric Cartman: whatever, I do what I want!

In the end, I had a blast. There was a back-channel discussion going on over Campfire between Brendan, Jim, John and myself that in-and-of-itself was such a good time. In fact, I wish we could make that discussion public to all of the people following along and making #lyt comments on Twitter. I was really surprised by the amount of negativity being shot around, directed at both me and Brendan. If there was any downside, I’d say that was it.

Overall, this was such a great experience. I was able to fulfill an early career pipe-dream goal and take part in something I held and hold so dear. Thanks so much much to Jim Coudal for the invitation to play, to my ridiculously awesome competitor Brendan Dawes, and to our hilarious and poignant commentator, John Gruber.