Post an article I wrote two years ago for this Thanksgiving. wish every one a happy holiday.
Learn to Appreciate
I frequently ran into situations when people asked me for my card (as an ikebana arranger or a potter, not a system administrator), but unfortunately, I do not have one. So I thought to get a name card.
I have a stamp that I use for decorating my ceramics works and I’d like to have it on my card. I thought the design work could be relatively simple – scanning in the stamp, touching it with Photoshop, adding some background colors, and typing in the words. I knew a few basic things in Photoshop, but I would not trust myself to make a perfect card. I remembered one of my girl friend who is a artistic designer. She donated her time to design a logo for my charity and I liked her work. She is a good friend of mine, I felt that I could ask her for a favor that may only take her a couple hours.
She was very nice to invite me to her home. I went with the stamp. She treated me with a cup of top quality green tea that she bought back from Hangzhou, after looking at the stamp, she explained that she would use Adobe Illustrator for the design. Since she did a great job to give me a tutoring of PhotoShop few years ago, I asked her to show me how Illustrator works. She did.
It was a very good learning experience for me. Not only I learned the basics of Illustrator, but I realized that my assumption was completely wrong. It would take far more efforts than I originally estimated to design a good quality name card. What I thought were digital photos before, now I knew that they were actually drawings by Illustrator pixel by pixel, she also told me that almost all magazine cover pages or inserts were done that way.
With this knowledge, I asked her do not design my name card. Actually, if I knew the efforts involved, I would not ask her for such a big favor. In the past, I appreciated her to donate her valuable time to design the logo for my charity, but now my appreciation is in much deeper level.
If I did not get the chance to learn, I would not know and would not appreciate in the level like now. I had many similar experiences in the past. If I didn’t know, even I appreciated, I would never appreciate in the level as I had the knowledge. The more I learn, the more I appreciate.
Thanksgiving holiday is coming. It is the time of the year when we are reminded to be thankful. Learning and increasing appreciation level through learning will help us to be more thankful.
As part of my Thanksgiving tradition, I made table arrangement for you to enjoy. Thank you all for all your caring and support to me.
Happy Monday and Happy Thanksgiving!
In Friendship Through Flowers,
Yirou
看本文的中文版点击这里。
