The First Day of the Rest of My Illustrator Life and Cursing Photoshop

Today was the first day I’ve spent as a full-time illustrator. When I sat down at my desk this morning, I didn’t log in to my (former) job to check for problems. Instead I started Photoshop to continue the work of rebuilding my cover image. When I loaded the 280MB file and moved the cursor, the pretty OS X beach ball began to spin — and it’s been spinning all day. This no joke. That sucker drained several hours out of my day as I googled every possible combination of search terms to find a solution. Nothing worked.

Tonight I copied the file to a thumb drive and tried to edit the file on my wife’s small iMac which is running CC 2019…and there was no beach ball. It was zippy and painless, with not one beach ball. So, the problem is not with my computer — it’s with Adobe CC 2020. Tomorrow I’m going to revert back to CC 2019 to see if that works for me, too.

Despite the headwind, I’ve made some progress. Here’s what the cover looks like now. I still haven’t decided the font I’ll use for the title or the interior text. Here’s my thinking: When I see a comic book font, I think comic book, not children’s book. Yes, I said seriously. Even though my book is a comic-style children’s picture book, I don’t want to use childish fonts. As a former child who loved to read, I know that it’s important that the text have legible characters, not funny characters. Plain text is for kids. Style and cuteness in text is something adults appreciate, but as a child at heart, I want a readable font that will give all six of the books in this series a look that’s friendly to young readers.