So you’ve nabbed yourself a designer and life is good. You inherently feel more creative and have a new found confidence wearing glasses. But before you dive headfirst into a world of logos, coffee and deadlines, there are a few quirks you ought to consider when dating designer folk.
Dating a designer – it ain’t easy
1) They are always right:
You may think it will be fun to re-decorate your living room with the help of your designer partner, but you’re wrong. It’s not fun. Not unless you are familiar with pantones, rules of aesthetics and tungsten lighting. Forget mixing your Mexicali rug with a French provincial coffee table, it’s just not going to happen. It goes against the theme, babe.
2) Ditch Microsoft Word, and Publisher, and PowerPoint:
They will scoff at your use of comic sans and appear frustrated when you don’t understand the importance of good kerning. They will take to the formatting of your resume with a hatchet, and the outcome will be spectacularly more professional than your best suit.
3) They don’t keep office hours:
Some days it may seem like they spend hours sourcing GoT memes and sending you links to puppies falling asleep, while other nights you go to bed alone and are woken at 12 am by cold computer hands. It all comes down to good versus evil clients and deadlines. But you can’t say they aren’t proud of their work, you’d be hard pressed to find a designer willing to hand in something sub-par just to make it home in time for Survivor.
4) They speak another language:
It’s called ‘Adobe’, and you will never understand it.
5) They freaking love fonts:
If your designer is unusually happy today it’s probably because they just stumbled across a bunch of boutique fonts. And they are freaking out. At one stage they may even try to make you watch a documentary on Helvetica. This is normally the point in the relationship where you re-evaluate your life choices.
6) You’re living with a geek:
You’re going to have to come to terms with this. They will geek out over the new iOS home screen and you will not understand why, especially when you’re yelling for them to come upstairs and help you update your laptop because for some reason all your contacts have disappeared.
7) Gift shopping sucks:
It truly sucks. Sometimes you may even resort to typing “stuff designers like” and “birthday presents for designers” into Google in the hope that something amazing and costing approximately $80 (with shipping included) will pop up on your screen. It never happens and nothing will ever be cool/clever enough.
8) Your wedding invites will be awesome:
Think of how amazing they will look. Think of how jealous your friends will be when they go to choose their own sucky wedding cards out of the catalogue at the printing store, or worse – order them online. Revel in your own, perfect, custom-made save-the-dates, invites and thank-you cards while you can.
9) Two is always better than one:
If you don’t have two computer screens, you’re an amateur. You don’t have a rechargeable mouse? You’re unprepared.
10) Form over function:
This fact mainly applies to buying groceries and choosing books. Who would buy that carton of milk when this carton of milk is matte with raised lettering. You think it feels like Braille, and are pretty certain it’s milk for a blind person, but they seem to dig it. Who cares that it costs an extra $4.50?
After all, a lot of people would consider you quite lucky to be dating a designer, they are a creative, imaginative and driven bunch of people. They will buy you the best Christmas gifts, shoot all your holiday photos on a good-looking camera, and save you from choosing a horrible, horrible bedspread. Plus, you will never have to learn the difference between CSS and HTML, and don’t even think about dealing with code.
Designers, they’ve got your back.