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Another Day in a Designer’s Life

YouSendIt is having a contest on Facebook where participant's have to submit an essay about how the YouSendIt service saved their butts at one time or another. I decided to write up a short story of that I believe most designers can relate to.

Unfortunately, there's a 250 word limit so I wasn't able to send them the full-version.

Here's the essay in it's entirety for your enjoyment:

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It's warm summer’s night and I'm hunched over my computer desk working on my 24^th revision of a cyclist’s jersey design that I have been working on for a couple of weeks. The client, a big cycling team, had a huge race coming up and they were relying on my creative agency to deliver the team’s new designs for this season.

I continued to work until the late night hours became the early morning hours and after making the client’s logo as big as possible, I readied my design for the client. “Argh!” I shouted when I noticed that my .PDF file was a whopping 85MB. As if the client sensed my angst, my phone began to ring; I looked at my phone to see that it was them! Knowing that they were going to be asking where their designs were I picked up the phone and nervously said, “Hello? This is Jon.” My client shouted at me about the designs needing to be ready for the printer and I explained that my file was too big to email. They suggested that I overnight a CD with the designs on it, but I had been left penniless after my trip to the store to pick up a month’s worth of Top Ramen and energy drinks (a designers diet).

Feeling the pressure I had to think quick. I could teach the client how to log into my FTP, but there wasn’t enough time to find a free FTP program for them and then teach them how to use it. I could have posted the files on my website’s server, but I was worried about someone stumbling upon them and seeing the designs before they were ready for release.

Then it hit me! No, I wasn’t crashing from all the energy drinks – I remembered that I had a YouSendIt account and that I could simply send the file through them. I quickly went to the YouSendIt website, uploaded my files, and they were off! My client received them just in time and I didn’t even have to fork over the cash for FedEx to deliver them.