What you see here is a common occurrence for me: I open my mailbox hoping for a fun letter or interesting magazine, only to find my mail crushed into a sad and twisted heap. It looks from my end as if the mail carrier throws some letters in the box, then crams some more, and then finishes off by stuffing a rolled up magazine down on top of all of them, ramming it all into the box until it fits and then slamming it shut. Yep.
When I worked at The UPS Store, which rents the retail equivalent of Post Office boxes, it was no different. Despite complaints from customers about expensive magazines being ripped or holiday cards with family photos being mangled and crushed, the employees would often just stuff handfuls of mail into their mailbox without a second thought for the state of the letters themselves. This always infuriated me. People are paying money to have the employees sort mail, so why aren’t we treating it with care? Often, it’s two reasons: the sorter doesn’t have the time to treat everything gently, and they also don’t really care.
This mentality that can creep into any job we do. If you have a client who’s not especially pleasant to deal with or you have seriously demanding deadlines, do you slap some stuff together, collect the check, and call it a day? Some people do. In practical terms, I’ve seen this manifest in design in many ways: non-uniform font sizing, irregular margins (or none at all), no reasonable size relationship among design elements, even stealing outright from other designers or using stock imagery without altering it at all. All of these problems (and there are many such transgression out there) are simple and easy to correct by taking your time and caring about what you do. A young designer can claim ignorance, but part of caring about what you do is seeking out design books and publications and reading them voraciously to be the best designer you can be.
If something takes time to do right, then make the time. If you really don’t care about what you are doing, then don’t do it, or find a way to make it something you do care about. Life is too short to be spent filling the world with carelessness and bad karma. I am reminded of this fact every afternoon when I pull the tangled remains of my mail out of my mailbox.
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