‘Design Thoughts’ : rjslade

To those looking for a weekly fix from this blog , I apologise – I was away for a weeks holiday – yes even we on pension need holidays! I knew it was a holiday as I drove 2100Km – somehow that always happens!

The Holiday

Unusually, this time I did not have internet access. The furnished apartment we normally stay in when we go south is located in Acropoli, about 30 minutes south of Salarno Italy. For details of the place see Discovery Agropoli They had a bad storm a few days before we arrived that had fried his router, so my usual wireless access was not available.

This time we spent a lot of time visiting archelogical sites – revisited Pompeii and for the first time visited Herculaneum and Oplontis, two other sites that were buried in the aftermath of the Vesuvius event. Pompeii is definitely the most well know of these sites and is huge. This was our second time and we have seen only less than half of it. That is having spent more than eight hours exploring its streets. Given that all the buildings are never open, some still under re-construction, I would estimate an equal time will be needed to see the balance of it. Mind you, we are busy taking photos and referring to our own guide books, rather than glued to the audio phones that are provided, for a cost, and which help visitors see the site in a couple of hours! If you are going to go to the trouble of seeing these places – why get the “Readers Digest’ version?

If you want to see some images that we have taken at Pompei, see those posted at

http://photoempt.smugmug.com/gallery/4343618_p2jjF

The newer images are not yet posted but ought to be soon added

http://photoempt.smugmug.com/gallery/4697382_N9Lmz

Anyhow – The highlights of this Pompeii visit were the Villa of the Mysteries and the Brothel or The Lupanare. I recently saw a list of the best art in the world to see: The World’s 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them) and the Villa of the Mysteries was included. Having previous been to Pompeii and missed it, it was 1st on the list this time.

The other Pompeii building of note this time was The Lupanare or brothel – here we have proof of the ‘oldest profession’ Needless to say, it is on a corner – even then, location was important. The interior decorations that remain (as some have been removed to the National Museum in Naples) are amusing – I have not included those here – this is a family site! But even in those times, on the lower walls were scenic images of plants and patterns, and up at adult eye height, the ‘menu’ is displayed.

As good as Pompeii is, it does not hold a candle to the other two sites. We spent two 1/2 days at Herculaneum . It was buried by the pyroclastics after the main eruption, some 17 metres of very hot mud, but it left buildings standing and perfectly preserved; pieces of wood, albeit carbonized, are still there, as are the wall paints, the mosaics, and the multilevels of building that are less obvious at Pompei. The site is much smaller, but to me, had a much greater impact.

But the best of the three – Oplontis. This site was one palace, that of Poppaea Sabina, wife of the Emperor Nero. It consists of more than 100 rooms and some of the most beautiful frescoes I have seen. It also contains the remains of a swimming pool 61 x 17 metres !

Getting to this last site was a bit of a trial – It is located in a rather rough area of Naples suburbs and is currently under re-construction, prior to the summer season of tourists. All access roads were blocked and the signage was lacking… Three times around the site in our car, close, but unable to find an entrance, driving on crowded narrow streets, hunting for a place to leave the car.

Oh well – It was a great trip – tiring but very memorable. So much to see, so little time. My advice if you visit Italy – give the Amalfi coast a miss and head further south.

Onto Design Issues

Having touched on the issue of sex above, my first link today will be to a related subject. A wonderful, subtle ad for the longstanding magazine, not exactly known for its lack of sexism…

Automotive – Darrell has provide a link to

http://www.oldclassiccar.co.uk/ .

Which includes:

• Volume 1 Images: Photographs of 1920s and 1930s vintage cars, lorry and sporting machines
• Volume 2 Images: Photographs of 1940s WW2 era cars, buses and lorries, racing cars and more
• Volume 3 Images: Photographs of 1950s automobiles, including trucks and a few wrecks too!
• Volume 4 Images: Photographs of 1960s classics, from Austin, MG, Chevrolet, AC, Ferrari, Ford and heaps more
• Volume 5 Images: Photographs of more recent 1970s classics, from Austin, Lancia, Datsun, Jaguar & many more, please click here

If your favourite old car was not on the Telegraph list provided in the last posting , maybe it is here.

From the CoolHunter.net I have found my dream car. Like the banner at the top of this page, a Ferrari. I have always lusted after a Porche Carrara but living here in Italy and regularly seeing these works of art on the road, I am starting to be torn… Not to worry, I cannot afford either, and at this point in my life I doubt I will ever own one!

I mentioned the Telegragh above. This week they had a useful list of ‘The 101 most useful websites‘. These cover the subjects of: Technology, Entertainment, Advice and Information, House and Home, Social, Shopping and last but not least, Travel.

Adobe, Apple and Other Software

Adobe has been busy: Lightroom has been upgraded to version 1.4 and Version 2 is available in beta – a beta with a tist. If you are a current user or an invited guest of a current user the beta willlast till version 2 ships – otherwise it has a 30 day limit. Still the 30 days of full use to ‘kick the tires’ of a program is a wonderful marketing method. Truly gives one a chance to see if it will meet your needs and that yours needs really need it.

Adobe have also:

• updated DMG Conversion tool and Camera Raw
• shipped an update to Flash Player
• launched Photoshop Express, with a good review at DPR Review
• started to ship Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac
• shipped Adobe Media Player
• started Adobe TV

some free Photoshop actions are available at

http://www.addictedtodesign.com/free_photoshop_actions.html

I particularly like the ‘Polaroid 600 Instant Film‘ action given Polaroid’s withdrawl from the film market

100 wonderful photo effects Photoshop tutorials are available which cover off many useful effects you may want to use. While many of the examples are based on the PC version of the program as is obvious from the screen shots, the same apply to the Mac versions.

Also made avaialbe over the following week were:

Liquid Resize In their words: Liquid Resize is a “content aware” image resizing application for Mac OS X and Windows. Liquid Resize will allow you to resize an image without traditional geometric limitations while minimizing any distortion that would typically result from changing the original aspect ratio of an image.

Rsizr is a similar solution, albeit online rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

And while mentioning plugins, Aperture 2.1 has shipped! Plugin were announced with the shipping of V2 but have been accessed in this version with the inclusion of Dodge and Burn within the program, and others like Viveza from Nik Software providing trials of a wonderful selection tool. Other vendors are also working on extending the abilities of Aperture as can be read in this informative article about the upgrade. If you use or are considering using the program it iw a great article that reveals many not so obvious alterations between version 2 and 2.1

Fonts:

Lets start with the source of free fonts – well one family at least, BB PetieBoy. I personally like the destoyed version. I regularly get the myFonts newsletter and only recently have realized that these fonts are created by quite a community. on further looking I really liked the work of Ellinor Maria Rapp of Sweden. I particurly like her FG Elias and FG Nina both available at a good price! I am a particular sucker for this style of font, handletter or handwriting

Along the lines of Handwriting the people at FontShop make available a great pdf of their Font Magazine with current and past issues available. They have a Handfont service – for about 300US FontShop will make a digital font from your handwriting. Available in either PostScript or TrueType formats for Mac or Windows. Given the quality of my handwriting this would be a waste of money, but if you know someone with nice penmanship…

Continuing on the FontShop site, have a look at Fontstruct Here are some on-line tools to let you make your own fonts and see the work of others. Although still in beta some interesting typefaces have already been created. I was charmed by kawaii a dingbat font.

Another font site I came across this week was House Industries. I managed to find time to spend on ‘i love typography’ where they posted a new article on Apri; 4th ‘On Choosing Type – FIRST PRINCIPLES‘

I mentioned in my last posting embedding of fonts for improved web presentation. This is one of the features that has been added to Version 3.1 of Safari and the latest web standards of HTML 5. A wonderful example of this is this web page If you want or are interested in the details go to this site

Another good site for the use of fonts on the web is ‘A practical guide to web typography‘ which is a work in progress.

Other sources for web issues, not just fonts, is the site of Eric Myers , Designing with web Standards, Jeffery Zeldman and the Zen of CSS Design Both of these latter two have books published by New Riders that are part of my library

Finishing this topic with a tie-in to a previous one – if you are going to use a font on a web site, make sure you are using a font that allows it. They need to be licensed for this use or ‘open source’ . Apple in the documentation of Safari 3.1 misleadingly implies that any font may be used. This is not the case!

For more of one rights to use, Anne-Marie Concepcion has included in Issue 70, 3/25/08 of DesignGeek a short piece on ‘A Fair(y) Use Tale‘ with a link to A Fair(y) Use Tale - a video primer, by the Media Education Foundation

Regarding Intellectual property, the European Court has just made a dangerous decision in the favour of Addida regarding the use of stripes, as mentioned here in a International Hearld Tribune article.

Yikes this posting is getting rather long! So I will close with a bit of reading from others and some music, legal music, sources.

Leander Kahney, a name that elicits a response in the Mac world has a few books published. Two of them have been made available digitally The ‘Cult of Mac‘ and the ‘Cult of iPod‘. Surf over to nostarch.com and scroll down to ‘We’re Giving Books Away‘ to find the links.

For music, the folks at BusinessWeek have assembled a selection of sites where you can get your music legally. Content will vary depending on your geographic location, as will the definition of a legal download, but it is nice to have a resource like this to point you in the correct direction. The BusinessWeek main site is a wonderful source in information and has joined my list of news sources.

That is it for now – I will continue to collect thoughts for the next posting. I am also going to remove the need to be logged-in to post a comment. Maybe more of you will add a response.

I will be in Canada for a week starting Thursday April 17th so if you think you see me in the Toronto/London area – it just may be me!