I Just Wanted to Make a Wall Art. Then Adobe Turned It Into a Detective Story.

What a tiny px vs. inch mistake taught me about looking for simple answers.

Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash

I Had One Simple Job

Design is a process that feels free in some ways, but is also shaped by many factors — especially when you’re working with digital design.

You sit down at your computer, or pick up your tablet, excited to bring an idea to life.

And then the software you use seems to have a completely different plan for your day. :)

That happened to me recently.

My goal was simple: create a new wall art for my Etsy shop.

The design itself was already clear in my head, so I opened Illustrator and started setting everything up.

At least, that was the plan.

Instead, I somehow found myself in the middle of a little detective story involving InDesign, Illustrator, and Creative Cloud.

InDesign Had Other Plans

When I opened Creative Cloud, I noticed that there were some updates available. I decided to install them before starting work.

Once the updates were finished, I opened the programs to have a quick look at the new features.

I opened InDesign and started with one page. Then I wanted to add a few more.

But instead of new pages, I got a loading icon, a frozen screen, and an application that simply refused to respond.

While trying to figure out what was happening, I remembered that one of the new updates included Alt Text and Generative AI features.

Could AI be trying to add alt text to my pages and slowing everything down?

Apparently, yes.

I turned the feature off, and InDesign went back to normal.

Lesson learned: sometimes updates and new features bring more problems than convenience — or at least they can while you’re getting used to them.

But my wall art was still waiting.

Then Illustrator Joined the Investigation

“Forget the updates. Just focus on your work,” I told myself.

So I opened Illustrator. My plan was to create a 10 × 8 inch artboard, a size I often use for wall art. I didn’t think twice. I selected my usual setup and clicked OK. Then I was ready to start designing. Except… something was very wrong.

The font size I wanted to use looked absolutely enormous.

The zoom level was something ridiculous like 4800%.

And when I duplicated the artboard, the original one suddenly disappeared from the screen.

At that point, I genuinely thought:

Is Adobe messing with me?

Meanwhile, my laptop fan was working overtime, and the machine was getting hotter by the minute.

I gave up on designing for the moment and decided to solve the problem first.

At This Point, I Blamed My Laptop

I checked the settings and ran a quick test to see whether the GPU was causing the strange behavior.

It wasn’t.

So I opened Task Manager and started going through the running processes one by one.

Near the bottom, I noticed Creative Cloud applications and some Node.js processes that seemed to be working alongside them.

My CPU usage was much higher than it should have been, and I started wondering if these processes were at least partly responsible for my laptop’s increasingly enthusiastic fan.

So I closed them all.

I took a deep breath. The fans stopped. The area around my laptop finally became peaceful again. :) But there was still one question:

What was actually wrong with Illustrator?

And Then I Found the Real Culprit

Just when I thought I had solved that problem too, I realized I hadn’t.

I spent so much time trying different things to find the source of the problem that I couldn’t help thinking:

If I’d spent that time designing instead, I probably would have had two products ready to sell by now.

Eventually, I started suspecting my laptop.

Maybe it was the RAM.

Maybe something was wrong with the device itself.

And then a very, very small detail suddenly smiled at me.

Remember that 10 × 8 inch artboard I mentioned?

Well…

It wasn’t inches. Somehow, my preset had been set to pixels instead of inches. And I hadn’t checked it before opening the document.

So there I was, expecting a perfectly normal workspace from a document that was actually 10 × 8 pixels.

Yeah.

That was probably a little optimistic. :)

I stared at the screen for a moment. And then I started laughing.

The Smallest Setting Caused the Biggest Drama

This whole detective story taught me something that had very little to do with design software.

When we run into a problem, we often look for the most complicated explanation — or the most complicated solution.

We check the hardware.

We blame the software.

We investigate settings.

We start imagining all sorts of technical problems.

And sometimes the answer is hiding in the tiniest detail, right in front of us. For me, it was two little letters:

px.

Not in.

I don’t think I’m going to forget the difference between pixels and inches anytime soon. :)

So, before blaming Adobe, my laptop, or the universe next time, I’ll probably check the units first. :)