Deadlines can give you nightmares

I guess the title for the post is not surprising for a lot of people, but I was one of those people who didn’t used to get so stressed out when a deadline for a school project is coming. I’m one of those who probably finished everything in time and have some free time to waste. That, my friends, was in the past. At least in the real world and working on a real project. I had a really stressful experience the last couple of weeks. I began a new quarter with tons of school projects and with a lot of things to study. School is definitely getting more intense, but also I’m finally starting to get more freelance jobs, yay! You could say I am happy because I have no real job right now. The classes I was teaching on weekends got cancelled by the School Board of the county. Apparently they were loosing money. That left me in a very bad situation.

But anyways I’m back in business, sort of. Thanks to my school career services, I found a freelance job designing a few pages of a magazine issue. It was my first time doing something like that. Everything started pretty good, but complications came eventually. The articles never came in time, the pictures had the wrong size and resolution. The man who hired me, asked me to do pretty weird stuffs with the pages’ layout. The printer wanted to change some parts of some pages, but they work with InDesign CS3 and I work with CS5. I had to check the copy of the articles myself and they had tons of mistakes that I was not able to identify. Sorry, but English is not my native language. I am still struggling in my English Composition classes to write a decent essay and suddenly I have to edit a bunch of articles? I don’t know maybe I need some advice from my teachers on that matter. It was a miracle to finish everything in time.

I had a lot of limitations in terms of creativity and that made me feel a little down. I felt the pressure of everything two days before the deadline, mainly because I was still working on the job, but I had all my school projects unfinished. I really freaked out. I have never felt so desperate before. But I have to say that, despite all the troubles I went through, I enjoyed it because I like layout design. I have a little more experience and all the mistakes I made with this job, I can solve it and be more efficient with future clients. Now I am done with it and moving onto my next project that is building my own portfolio website.