‘Design Thoughts’ : rjslade

With the best of intentions to add to this blog on a regular basis, the last weekend has sped on by with anything added. Not that my folder entitled ‘Stuff on Desktop‘ has not filled up with interesting items.

First up a couple of links to the group at creativetechs

They have a weekly free newsletter that you can register for and it usually has something interesting in it. Last week was on ‘Adding translation links to to web site‘

Todays mail included a link to xScope, a handy utility being marketed by the people at Iconfactory. I have actually given this a try already and have a previous times paid for assorted parts if it before under different guises.. I just cannot justify the expense for what it does - not now anyhow but can understand its utility in the correct setting.

This causes me to think of the strange marketing practices of software - who has the idea, who writes the code and which part of the code, and who is the public face of the software we use. One cannot think PhotoShop without thinking Adobe, but it has not always been so. There have been some recent articles chronicling the gestation of this seminal product. If you are interested: http://photoshopnews.com/2008/02/19/most-important-date-in-digital-imaging-history/ But that story is a fairly happy one. The number of products brought under the umbrella of a company and then faded away is remarkable. Before I moved I cleared my shelves a an untold number of old products that Adobe has marketed and do so no more… (Adobe CS, GoLive, Premier, TOC, ATM/Super ATM, ATR, SiteMill/PageMill, Dimensions, Persuasion, Streamline, TextureMaker, Gallery Effects, ScreenReady, MathType, Word for Word, Fetch, After Effects) And that is only one company.

The other tip was regarding some of the added features to Leopard OS and the include Disk Utility. It is amazing to me how many small features that can make a big difference to the user experience are seemingly undocumented in a system upgrade. If you are new to the Mac, or even a long time user I strongly recommend David Pogue’s Missing Manual, and staying up to date with it. There you will find a lot of the missing detail.

Returning to creativetech, a list of all the previously supplied tips are at: http://www.creativetechs.com/tips/

The tips, like those passed on here are sometimes from these people directly but more often than not, like mine, sourced from elsewhere…

On to Font Stuff.

Last time I mentioned body text generators - that text that fills in for what the client has yet to provide. Humorously enough with the correct generator the fake text may actually be better than the real content. There is a fantastic web based generator at http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/ and while you are there don’t forget to click on ‘about dummy text’ to get some of the history and background.

The people at Extensis, the current home of Suitcase, have a fun site at: http://blog.extensis.com/typecaster/

While in the past I have both used and liked, very much, both Suitcase and Portfolio, software evolves and new solutions are explored. Apple with Aperture and Adobe with Lightroom have changed to the market for Portfolio, expanding greatly of what Extensis had originally brought to the marketplace. MasterJuggler and Suitcase for years fought for the hearts of designers trying to bring sense to the disorder of fonts and font formats. Then FontAgent got very good at sorting your library and correcting the problems that crept into it as it grew. OSX threw in a free program from Apple that has been improved dramatically but at the moment my program of choice, from who better but a font source is the free FontExplorerX. As they say, it is simple, it is smart and it is free!

Of course Apple made things a lot easier in that it will now use almost any type of font out there, Mac or PC. We no longer have the excuse for reflowed type because we don’t have the PC version of a font that the previous PC based designer used.

I may have mentioned this site before but I Love Typography is a wonderful resource with articles and links.In particular look at: http://ilovetypography.com/2008/02/28/a-guide-to-web-typography/ If you thought the mystery of font usage was large in print, the web adds a whole other dimension. I sure wish there was more work going on with embedded fonts and web usage. People rely on fonts they know are on both Mac and PC systems and set up cascading font choices to allow for fonts not being installed. Adobe through Flash and Acrobat allow exchange of documents with fonts embedded by font licensing prevents the embedding of most fonts on web sites for use on a particular web site. Yes I know there are some open source fonts and I have actually been to sites that have provided a link to a font files that a user can install, but I think this is another area of exploration that can be made.

And for the final mention in this section on fonts I have to mention a posting at IronicSans

keming. noun. The result of improper kerning.

You have to see the graphic that goes with it - I am seriously considering the T-shirt. It was especially appropriate in that I had to do a critique of a design job this week and the kerning among other things, was less than perfect.

Thanks to the Core Graphics that Apple has built into its OS, it just takes a clever designer to uncover for the end user a unified feature set that is of use to the budding artist. This is magic that used to be written from ground up by the coders of PhotoShop, ImageStudio and the like. The problem we are faced now is trying to decide which is the best tool for us. I have looked at perhaps 6 or seven of these programs. In fact at the moment ImageLobe is on my computer. It is nicely done. I already use ReelBean marketed by the same group, but that is for moving images.

For those who need some help JonWhipple and Image is Everything covers off Pixelmator, Acorn and DrawIt

I did stumble on some interesting historical material this week: The Wonderful World of Early Computing in words and images shows some of the early work that have made our desktop machines and portables what they are. If you back out from that particular Article to the parent site of Neatorama, there a links to a whole bunch of interesting articles. If you are interested in flying things, the A-12 Spy Plane was the precursor to the SR71, This pilot earned his days pay landing this aircraft and if you want to see the sort of instrumentation that you need to master on today’s A380 Jumbo Jets, another interesting link. Paul Rand was the father of a lot of graphic design that we all know, ranging from IBM to UPS. Again if you back out from that article you arrive at Logo Design Love, a interesting site on the design of logo’s. If you are working on a project and need to use an existing logo, All Free Logo is a source of good vector artwork, potentially saving you a lot of time.

And as I continue to explore what is possible with Wordpress, the software base for this blog, I came across 48 Unique ways to use Wordpress. Obviously I have not made my way through all of this article but it is making for an interesting journey

That is it for now. Have to get back to modifying our new site at www.photoempt.smugmug.com . That is a work in progress and has to be done around further uploads of imagery. And then there is the iMac with a dead or sick harddrive sitting next to me that needs to be fixed before its owner returns, and some design work as well… I want to thank Maurice Belanger, Tony Euser and Darrel Eagles for sending links that they thought interesting. I have not included all of them - have to save some for another posting. Anybody interested in an article on trying to solve the iMac harddrive issue - there is a tale of woe!