Late May – Time does Fly
22 05 2008Hello Again:
Late May now, almost a month since the last post
So much has happened! Where to Start? My URL’s folder on my desktop now holds more that 60 links of things I thought interesting, and my Application folder contains a variety of new applications that having found, tried and paid for, I want to tell you about.
I think I will tackle that URL folder first and try to put some order into it. Then maybe a few entries over the next few days…
If you don’t know the Screen Capture Keystrokes that Apple has included in your system, you ought,and even better the modifier keys to make specific selections of things like entire windows. But they are not the only story out there. the people at konigi.com have a list of 6, Apples and 5 others:
http://konigi.com/notebook/6-screenshot-utilities-you-should-know-about
And of course there is the next category up for capturing moving imagery on your screen. I personally settled on iShowU now at version 1.66 from
http://www.shinywhitebox.com/index.html.
And you must not forget Screenshot Settings.app, a two trick pony that does nothing but change the format of those created screen shots and where they are saved to. Don’t like Apples choice of png – like pdf and a specific folder?
I tried to look up the source of that last mentioned little application – it is actually a small Applescript. Search Results for ‘Screenshot’ at http://www.versiontracker.com returned ‘no Result by that name’ Oh well It is a script and editable at that using Script Editor.
Font Stuff:
The I Love Typography is again the source of some wonderful web inspiration regarding fonts and their use.
15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography
PART I: SHOWCASE http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography
15 Great Examples of Web Typography
QUARTER 2, 2008 http://ilovetypography.com/2008/05/07/15-great-examples-of-web-typography-q2-2008/
Do you know the origins of that wonderful character, the Ampersand ? One of my found in ‘Hoefler Titling‘ At Hoefler and Frere-Jones in their News, Notes and Observations section you will find a illustrated history at:
http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=98
I have also found another site dedicted to all things Ampersand to quote:
” The Ampersand- A scribal abbreviation for and. Derived from the Latin word “et.” I like the ampersand. I think it is often the most attractive punctuation mark of them all. This blog is an attempt to give this humble character the respect it deserves.“
It is located at: http://ampersand.gosedesign.net/
The folks at Smashing magazine have assembled ‘50 breathtaking typographic posters designed by artists across the globe’, while no facing the limitation of type on the web, these too are great inspiration. The collection is at:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/25/breathtaking-typographic-posters/
If like me you are concerned about making your web type accurate and cross platform, knowing the correct coding for the odd characters in most fonts are needed. The ‘Designers Toolbox‘ have assembled a useful resource at:
http://www.designerstoolbox.com/designresources/html/
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – A practical guide to web typography , is an ever increasing set of articles on the various aspect of just that. As of late May it is up to 3.2.1 Use titling figures with full caps, and text figures in all other circumstances. To date the subjects of ‘Rhythm & Proportion‘ and ‘Harmony & Counterpoint‘ have been addresed. As a work in progress it is worth returning or subscribing to its RSS feed. The site is at:
Have you ever needed to know what different fonts at differing sizes would look like on the web? And having then got the correct size spacing, alignment etc wanted the correct CSS description. Well it is available – one very great site called ‘typesetter – compare screen font‘. It is located at:
Think you know your fonts? Helvetica vs Time – Easy ! But try out ‘ the rather difficult Font Game‘ and see how good you really are. It is located at:
http://fontgame.ilovetypography.com/
Yet another way of having type elements retain their visual integrity on the web – Have you heard of sIFR – to quote ” sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalent ” if you want to know more about this technology they have a site at:
A beautiful font based screen saver; You can test it for awhile but it is not free.
It is called dropclock and the site is located at:
http://scr.sc/products/dropclock/
While I am still mentioning things web related I know one of the largest problems it trying your web site in assorted browsers for a client. If you are lucky the client has collected data from his existing site using some tool like Google Analytics available at:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
With it you will know what browsers, what platforms, what screen sizes, languages and plugins your viewers are using. A great starting point when doing a redesign. Use your tool of choice to develop the new site – mind you if you, like me have a preference for GoLive – you are now out of luck – Adobe have mothballed it. It has always been a better tool for the designer, Dreamweaver for the propellerhead – oh well. It still works, if you have it – it is just no longer supported or sold! Gee I bought it before it was an Adobe product – I remember it at the Boston MacWorld way back when…
Anyhow you have a site – now does it work? On the mac you throw it at Safari, FireFox and the now unsupported Explorer. If you are lucky enough to have a intell based mac, you probably have PARALLELS DESKTOP 3.0 FOR MAC from:
or VMware Fusion from:
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
so that you can run Window XP or Vista. Hopefully XP – got your Service Pack 3 download for it yet. If you are using Apples of Boot Camp,make sure you down load the SP3 upgrade from Apple before you upgrade your copy of XP. Having used both Boot Camp and PARALLELS recently I strongly suggest PARALLELS of the two – It is so seamless – I have had no experience with VMWare.
Anyhow – you try Explorer, FireFox and Safari also on the PC. But what about the other browsers. I have used and strong suggest Browsershots. To quote ” Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.” You will find it at:
If they don’t have the browser – don’t worry about it. You will save yourself a lot of potential embarrassment if you do use it! Don’t let the client have the opportunity to use the fact the site was created on a Mac – for the reason it doesn’t look or work as it was meant to!
Lets move onto Cars – Automobiles.
I like cars, old cars. This last week has marked this years Mille Miglia here in Italy. 3 days to drive from Brescia to Rome and back. The second day has them going through Assisi, located near me here in Umbria.
One of my favourite cars has always been the Lotus Europa, but also up the is the BMW M1 – I doubt at six foot two I could even slip into the former, and given that used M1 are trading for 100K or better I can’t afford the latter. Still I was intrigued to see BMW’s supercar icon, the M1, which to quote: ” blew out the candles at the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este this weekend. In honor of the car’s thirtieth birthday, BMW rolled out the new BMW M1 Hommage ” See the images at:
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/04/27/modern-retro-bmw-m1-homage-officially-revealed/
and:
http://www.thecoolhunter.net/transportation/BMW-M1-Concept/
A Wonderful VIDEO: Volvo’s 81-year History in 9 Minutes. I found this link originally on:
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/04/11/video-volvos-81-year-history-in-9-minutes/
but they had linked to the source file on YouTube. Here it is, we.ll woth 9 minutes
More Video:
Over the last few days I have yet again been going through TED video. I have mentioned this site before and I do so again. They are at:
the most recent ones I have watched are:
- TEDTalks : Siegfried Woldhek (2008)
- TEDTalks : Roy Gould (2008)
- TEDTalks : Johnny Lee (2008)
- TEDTalks : Jill Bolte Taylor (2008)
- TEDTalks : Craig Venter (2008)
- TEDTalks : Clifford Stoll (2006)
All of these a very thought provoking, but a tip of the depth of ideas that are covered in this conference. But once again I was most impressed by the man who was not the president – Al Gore. His 2008 speech, included below was a followup to his prior presentation ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘. If you don’t take in anything else in this posting – take the time to watch this video – PLEASE
TEDTalks : Al Gore (2008)
Photography:
I have before expressed my interest in HDR Photography. Wonderful galleries of images are located at:
Most people who are interested in the subject have probably found the article by Colin Smith at:
http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/HDR_ps/hdr-ps.htm
Having read that and played with the HDR features in PhotoShop CS3 and the demo of Photomatix from:
I found a new product – HYDRA from:
To quote: ” Hydra is about mixing a number of under- and overexposed shots to get a natural sight of a scene. It provides human eye-like perception to your photographs by allowing you to create high dynamic range (HDR) images from a series of regular photographs, either from DSLRs or traditional point-and-shoot cameras.” As I use Apple Aperture I was also interested in the fact it worked as a plugin to Version 2.1. I downloaded the demo, I tried it and I paid for the product – Very simple to use – I like it. Here is an image I have done with it:
Now having said that, My wife is on a photoworkshop in Mull , Scotland , led by Mark Muench – http://www.muenchworkshops.com/gallery/3200186_JKGVA and I gather she has learned some new tricks – Apparently HDR is frowned on by this group of professionals and my wife says I have wasted my money – but then it was only 60$, one third of that from hdrsoft. I will report on what they had to say in another posting. They also have informed her that Aperture was not the best choice and to stick with PhotoShop and Adobe- I guess we all have our own preferences and workflows.
This week also brought a link to:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/times_online_tv/?vxSiteId=d8fa78dc-d7ad-4d5a-8886-e420d4bc4200&vxChannel=Times%20Online%20News&vxClipId=1152_timesonline0664&vxBitrate=300
and ‘Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera‘ on the Times Online – UK Newspaper site at:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3938717.ece
and another site related to this sort of photography.
It is amazing the technology spin off that is happening across the entire field of photography from the panoramas in Google Earth to the PhotoSynth and World Wide Telescope from Microsoft:
And into OUTER SPACE
From the Guardian and the UK National Archives, information has been released regarding UFO’s. Regardless of your own belief or not some interesting reading at the Guardians, Explore the X-files :
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/05/explore_the_xfiles.html
or the National Archives, newly released UFO files :
http://ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
On a more mundane subject regarding things whizzing around in the sky above us, from the European Space Operations Centre ” Space debris: evolution in pictures – Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories.” at:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESOC/SEMN2VM5NDF_mg_1.html
The images of the debris that the astronauts and spacecraft must avoid are frightening.
NASA have a site of multimedia : Images, podcasts, video and TV of past and present events…
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/index.html
Presentation:
Be it a slide show, a series of images or a story you need to tell. We all have to order and assemble information in a presentation , either for ourselves, our friends or your clients. If you have a Mac – you get a lot of programs supplied with your machine and if you keep iLife up to date, and/or have paid extra for .Mac and iWork you probably won’t need anything else. A .Mac slide show is great! But if you want something a bit better?
Photoshop outputs images as slide shows in a variety of formats – here is one:
http://www.rjslade.com/DolceGara_RJS/index.htm
This collection of images is of a Dessert Competition that we have had every year in Monte Castello di Vibio, since I arrived – I have been lucky enough to be a judge. Note the controls in the bottom left corner of the window – play with them and see what they do.
Then from Photoshop you can use a plugin such as SimpleViewer. It is available free from here:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/
They also have a paid version that allows more customisation by providing the source files. Some of the navigation is obvious, some not so. You can see the larger images loading in the thumbnails and the arrow under the thumbnails obviously directs you to more thumbnails – it is obvious isn’t it. Less obvious is that as you mouse over the vertical midpoints of the larger image you will get left and/or right arrows that take you directly to the next image. The plugin is available for use with an assortment of programs. For an example see here:
http://www.rjslade.com/Torraccia/index.html
As an aside the images are of the Summer Bar just below the walls of Monte Castello di Vibio.
Of course if you have the full version of Acrobat, you can build a show in it. The people at CreativeTechs recently posted this tip on doing just that:
http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/build_an_acrobat_pdf_slideshow.html
As I advise a lot of artists, one of the advantages of this solution is ensuring that the colour profile of the files are included. Artists get quite upset when colours shift! Not all browsers on all platforms display the true colour of an image.
There are a growing number of online places that will host your presentation after assisting you in creating it. One of these that I have looked at recently was: SideRocket -
One I have paid for was BannerZest from -
I got it as part of a MucUpdate bundle (http://www.mupromo.com/) that included
Parallels ($79.99), BannerZest (49.00), Sound Studio (79.99), DVDRemaster Pro (49.99), Typinator (29.99), StoryMill (44.95), Leap (59.00), MenuCalendarClock (19.95), Art Text (39.95), Hazel (21.95) – Total Value: $474.76 (Get it at MacUpdate for $64.99) Can’t argue with that sort of pricing, even if you only use half of the products regularly. I up graded BannerZest to the Pro version and you can see a simple set of images above, created in it , those of the cars in the Mille Miglia.
Why is it that we are so often dissappointed when we open the packaging and see the product inside. This is particularly true for food so from: Advertising vs Reality – A Product Comparison Project
http://funtasticus.com/20080324/advertising-vs-reality-a-product-comparison-project/
A German website, Pundo3000.com, has conducted a study of 100 different products by comparing the look of the products as shown by the packaging with the actual contents inside the boxes. Quoting the website, which is in German: “ All products were purchased, the packaging photographed and the contents prepared and photographed too. All products were then eaten up.” and also: “The purpose of the project is not to discredit any brands or products but to critically compare the packaging advertising with the inside contents ”.’
If you like the way more news site present tomorrows cover pages, the evening before you will love this site:
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp?p_size=611
619 front pages from 58 countries. ” The Newseum displays these daily newspaper front pages in their original, unedited form. Some front pages may contain material that is objectionable to some visitors. Viewer discretion is advised.“
As you must know – news is not just content but also presentation. Here is a site on just that subject:
http://www.designingthenews.com/
From the site “About – Well here it is, all you ever wanted to know about DesigningTheNews.com, and all about what/why/when/how it is and does! Over the coming year (2008) this page will be updated with more information as I focus and refocus what I want the site to do, as well as maybe explain a little about the content it frames, and why I’m doing this.
The ‘elevator description’- DTN is a series of experiments which visually explore the news in various ways to encourage new ways of seeing a predominantly text based medium.
What is DTN all about?- News in general is primarily a text based format. When accompanied by an image, the image serves to reinforce the story, but what if the news was the image? DTN is about bridging the gap between traditional cartoonists and modern day generative news visualisations.“
But it is the presentation of data that is most interesting to me.
here are a few really interesting sites:
http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie_posave.php
has an article on STEFANIE POSAVEC “ON THE MAP”
http://yesyesnono.co.uk/article/30/invisible-journeys
has a article ‘Invisible Journeys‘ dated May 2, 10:39 AM to quote the site:
” Invisible Journeys is my first try at data visualisation. I have seen a few wifi geographical mapping, but they looked a bit too technical to my taste. Here, i aimed at a semi abstract visualisation while keeping the ability to extract sense out of the graphics. Below is one of the visualisation showing 4 different journeys. Bigger to smaller rings : London / Vescemont / Belfort / Barcelona.”
and a third site is: http://benfry.com/
Quoted from the site: “Biography – Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. At the end of 2007, he finished Visualizing Data for O’Reilly. He currently works as a designer in Cambridge, MA.” Really intersting stuff.
All this interesting material from so many places. Not always posted by those who originally created it, but hopefully the correct sources referenced. I have tried to note where the material has come from – credit where credit due! On the issue of copyright ‘Who’s Ripping Off Your Website Content?‘ is an article in Issue 71, 5/15/08 Written by Anne-Marie “HerGeekness” Concepcion :
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/ .
The story she recounts is all too common I would suspect. Her story will lead you to Copyscape at:
They have both free and paid services that could help you protect your content, or at least let you know who else is using it. Of course you can also use Google Search and do it yourself.
Information Architects of Japan, have taken the old idea of the London Underground map and populated it with another type of information. Not the first time I have seen this sort of thing but the example at:
http://informationarchitects.jp/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/wallpaper1600_1024.jpg
It is good and you can buy it here!
http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-3-get-it/
‘ Web Trend Map 3: Get it! -It was featured by The Guardian, WIRED, Le Monde, Corriere, kottke, Boingboing, Techcrunch, Mashable, Valleywag and literally thousands of blogs. We are happy to announce that the coolest gift for geeks, the A0 poster of the 2008 Web Trend Map (841mm x 1189mm / 33.25in x 46.75in), is now up for grabs’ :
I have included a small example here but other versions are available at the web address I have quoted above.
Odds and Ends;
I have to assume no one has read all of this material in one go! but I have a few other things to include this time. Maurice has supplied many links over the last month, I thank him on your behalf. A recent one is this:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_image_resources_on_the_deep_web.php
to quote: ‘ Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web – Written by Sarah Perez / May 14, 2008 8:33 AM
Sometimes you stumble across something that really makes you say “wow” and reminds you that there’s so much more to this internet thing than just the latest web app. Case in point is this article describing some of the visual resources available on the web. The deep web. These images won’t show up in search engines’ image searches or on Flickr (save one exception), but instead can only be accessed via the links below.‘
Another resource is the MoOM – THE MUSEUM OF ONLINE MUSEUMS . It is located at:
http://coudal.com/moom/index.php
to quote ” Welcome to the Coudal Partners Museum of Online Museums. Here, you will find links from our archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector.”
For a colour specific source there is Follow the Rainbow: 101 Color Resources for Web Designers located at:
http://whdb.com/2008/follow-the-rainbow-101-color-resources-for-web-designers/
It is part of a larger site with lots of information presented with a bit of humour. Quote ” Hello and congratulations on reaching our humble Web site on the World Wide Web. Well, I suppose you’d like to know a little more about us, the wonderful people who have built WHDb. Well, we are two monkeys working in a cage scrambling frantically to complete this Web site so our masters will let us eat again. One of us is pictured below. This Web site features your daily dose of WWW goodness and all that encompasses, namely software, gaming, and Internet commentary.“
That list of URL’s in my URL folder that started off above sixty, it is now less than twenty. So I will close with two more things.
The first – TEN THOUSAND CENTS located at :
http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html
to quote ” Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.”
A great work of participatory art!
And as so much of this posting has been about the news, and its presentation what better to close with than another video clip from flicker. The Day There Was No News from ‘Today there was no news. And here is the proof.‘ : Double click the image below to play the clip.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbernaut/2476955162/
That is it – Really! Hope you enjoy the reading and find it helpful – R
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