( ͡° ____ ͡°) Things designers do when bored

Geometrieva
3 min readDec 21, 2016
ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch OUCH

Apparently, boredom is useful — it pushes us to do cool new shit that occasionally changes the world. It’s the perfect excuse.

Also, being bored totally makes sense, like what’s so interesting about the universe anyway? It doesn’t even attempt to entertain us anymore. It’s just full of black holes and stars going supernova all the time, and diamond planets and sideways glass rains and binary star systems. You know, boring stuff.

So, if you have the luxury of being a living sentient matter capable of feeling boredom, and you happen to be a designer at the same time, you’re probably familiar with…

1. Content-aware scaling your own face

I mean, of course. You have time to kill, you have a face, and you have Photoshop, what are you supposed to do — not content-aware scale your own face? That’s an outrageous expectation.

Which Nina do you prefer? Long-neck Nina, Square Nina or Squished Nina?

2. Ruining lives by aligning ungrouped objects

With great power comes great irresponsibility. In Illustrator you are free to create and destroy things or people, and nobody knows or cares.

Well, except for the poor souls that were just brought into the wonderful state of existence, only to be wrecked apart a second later. Like this really sad dude who’s not even that happy to be alive in the first place, but somehow turned even more miserable at the click of a button.

“I’ll just hide inside myself, because nothing matters anymore.”

Yep, Illustration is a rad superpower to have.

You can also shave off a few seconds of boredom by uhh… center-aligning someone’s face. It’s awesome because you never know what to expect — will he turn happier? More worried? Unibrow? Cyclops? Faceless? A whole different undiscovered gender? It’s a surprise.

This unfortunate guy just fast-aged like 40 years

3. Embracing the fact that in Illustrator you’re god, and you can do whatever the fuck you please

As I demonstrated above, in Illustrator there’s no right or wrong. There’s only what you can come up with.

Layer after layer after layer after …wut

The ultimate level of boredom probably brought you to the discovery of BLEND ALL. Blend all is when you select all objects and obnoxiously blend everything together. No rules, no purpose, just pure chaos.

If I were god, I’d try blending nebulas with llamas with fried rice with the letter W with photons with black matte things with anything that’s not a car. So don’t ever let me become a god, pls.

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Geometrieva

Self-taught designer @ Google • Part-time cyborg dabbling in crypto art