Illustrator woes

This project is proving to be more difficult than I had anticipated. People often warn you that you will become trapped within the computer... (think TRON). So it always is a good idea to start out on paper. Keep your ideas fresh and just get them down on paper, refine them to the point where you're happy with them and then scan and import them. However the catch is that it's much easier to move things around once you get into Illustrator, so you may want to start out there... and this can be your downfall. You can spend hours moving things around and still be no further ahead at the end of the day. I read an interesting section in Foote's The Business Side of Creativity: The Complete Guide to Running a Small Graphic Design or Communications Business. If you're looking to read it, check out chapter 7: Dodging the Ten Pitfalls of Preparing Estimates. I'll save the rest of you the read and summarize for you. Basically one pitfall that any artist (illustrator, fine artist, or graphic designer) can fall into is trying to achieve perfection. Welcome to the downside of being a perfectionist! I'll include a quote here cause this guy knows what he's talking about: "The closer we get to perfection, the more time and expense is involved in attempting to achieve it, and the more elusive it becomes... As an example, let's say that giving a client a creative solution that's 90 percent of "perfection" (your definition) will take ninety hours. To go from 90 to 95 percent won't take a proportional five more hours; it will probably take ten. And to go from 95 to 97 percent of perfection will probably take an additional twenty hours! And so forth."

Notice how throwing mathematics in the mix makes for a more compelling argument? Let's remember that when we're writing up project proposals and job estimates... we'll get into that more later. For now it's back to the drawing board for me... let's see if I can figure out some sort of creative solution on paper and give this laptop a bit of a rest.