A wonderful school project that was taken out of context – the poor fellow was trashed on a variety of sites when it was learnt that this was but a project and not a reality. What a shame – it is a wonderful school project

http://biggestdrawingintheworld.com/drawing.aspx

this is the supposed route of the ‘project’, chosen to create a giant map

Fonts:

We all make jokes about doctors and their writing and the need for pharmacist to take course in writing recognition. I know many people who only ever got the ability to print nicely from their Architecture degree, and I myself am not known for the neatness or klegibilty of my own script therefore I found this posting wonderful:

“Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate … how do they themselves communicate? If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces … how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note? http://www.themaninblue.com/articles/handwritten_typographers/

One letter – M

Used again and again for the public transport systems around the world. Here is a compilation of what has been done with it. http://mic-ro.com/metro/metrologos-static.html

The beautiful things that can be done with type are amply displayed here: http://www.aisleone.net/2008/design/a_b_-peace-terror/

“A_B_… is a functional information design piece that uses computational aesthetic principles to compare complex and socially relevant data. The dual-sided overlay of the two graphs allows for a direct visual comparison of the peace and terror measures. The functional nature of the poster becomes poignantly relevant when one makes detailed comparisons across nations for the various measures—many of the results are quite surprising and stand in contrast to prevailing norms of collective national perception.”

Free Fonts: They sometimes say you ge what you pay for but I hesitate to apply that sying to some of the things that are given away in the design world

“Welcome to Font Cubes. Here you’ll find the best free PC fonts and free Mac Fonts from the best font artists in the world. The fonts listed in our free font collection are their author’s property. Please contact their authors for further consultation regarding the use of the listed fonts.
‘ http://www.fontcubes.com/

the barber shop font

MisPrinderType

ABOUT-name: Eduardo Recife- location: BRAZIL – Belo Horizonte – MG

http://www.misprintedtype.com/v3/fonts.php

These Numbers are not free but there are 16 different fonts here so the 129US is pretty reasonable!

http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_styles.php?productLineID=100018&cpuCount=1

I particularly like the ‘Premium” but can imagine times when the others would have been useful



Ralf Herrmann’s Typography Weblog

http://opentype.info/blog/

‘EXPLORING WEBFONT POSSIBILITIES

Embeddable webfonts (as introduced with Safari 3.1) are not just about using fancy fonts on web pages. It also opens new possibilities for using glyphs that are simply not available in the standard system fonts. Let’s say you are a linguist or archeologist and wan’t to set an ancient text and you need characters that are not available in Arial or Lucida Grande. Putting little images inside the text was the only way to do it – so far. But the images wouln’t scale and copy & paste of such a text wouldn’t work properly. But with webfonts you could do those things smoothly – and much more. Here are two examples …”

http://opentype.info/blog/2008/05/14/exploring-webfont-possibilities/

This is once again gaining support, thankfully, with the ability being built into new browsers. There is a great resource here ; http://www.fontembedding.com/

‘Why FontEmbedding.com?

Fonts play a critical role in the display, printing and manipulation of text based information and content. As technology has evolved, so have the intricacies of properly developing, licensing and deploying fonts. This evolution impacts everyone that designs, develops or uses fonts:

• Type designers, font foundries & distributors

• Graphic designers & typographers exploring new media

• Web designers & web developers

• IT managers & system administrators

• Software developers & hardware manufacturers

Type as Art

An interesting site – but unless you want to have others market your ideas, this is only a starting point for your exploration. Note -

‘The typographic creations built with this application will be stored in a database hosted by JRVisuals, LLC. As such they will be and perpetually remain the joint property of JRVisuals and Silo Design. We reserve the right to use these creations for promotional and/or commercial endeavors. All efforts will be made to credit those who took part in their creation however compensation is not promised nor implied.’

Along the same lines:

LADIES OF THE BASELINE http://www.inkfinger.us/store/2007/02/ladies_of_the_b.html

‘Each Typewoman is created entirely with type (letters, punctuation, ligatures) in the typeface of their namesake and sit atop a pattern created with the same. No letterform has been skewed, stretched, flipped or any other bastardizing technique — just scaling at rotating. So the letters are pure as the driven snow! Check out this little glimpse of how the letters are laid over each other:’ http://www.typeisart.com/

Typebase – Foundries and Designers

A listing or links http://www.typebase.com/foundries.html

Credits-Last update on 05-01-2008, TypeBase contains 553 links to fine quality typographic websites around the world, selected by Donald Roos [VetteLetters.nl] & Robert-Jan van Noort [Pankra Studio].

My Fonts – What the font

There are a varierty of sites of this nature – but boy can they save time when the client has provided you a piece of artwok and no idea of the deigners font source.

‘Ever wanted to find a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using our WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database…’ http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Assuming the client does not want you to match an existing font – here is resource to help you pick an appropriate font – http://www.typesql.com/

And while time is passing you can have this as a Screensaver to keep track of the time http://www.simonheys.com/wordclock/

‘Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X and Windows. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes.’

They say it will also be available in this rotary version

I have mentioned this site before but on July 21st 2008 there was a nice posting covering some wonderful funny doodles – on a napkin no less http://ilovetypography.com/2008/07/21/sunday-type-napkin-type/

If you want a static desktop rather than a screensaver the same site points you to iStock for a free image



They also have a listing of their Popular Articles

• How to Make a Font

• Type History series

• Web Typography Guide

• On Choosing Type

• Identify That Font

• From Moleskine to Market

• Who Shot the Serif?

• Typoholism—an addict’s tale

As you can see, one of those is about trying to identify fonts and it includes the link I have mentioned above

A couple of more fonts for those odd situation; This time from The Design Bureau of America

http://thedesignbureauofamerika.com/thebureaulovesyou/fonts/

‘Welcome to The Design Bureau of Amerika’s design resource site. The assets found here are FREE to download and use. This is simply a way for The Bureau to say “thanks” and give a little something back to the design community. If you use these assets, please show The Bureau some love back and give credit when possible. Thanks,Keith Bowman, Creative Director’

Other sites that touch on type: http://inspiredology.com and http://inspiredology.com/typography/

‘Inspiredology is a new resource that covers everything that inspires us. Most sites show Best of galleries and massive databases of thumbnail sized screen shots of css sites. We are here to give you what our name says, we are here to inspire. If you find yourself stuck or looking on how you can make your project better, visit inspiredology.com to get yourself out of that dark creative hole.’

Type for you – http://www.typeforyou.org/

‘Typeforyou is a blog on typography.

‘My name is Pedro Serrão and I’m a graphic designer from Porto, Portugal.
I like type, playing piano, architecture, product design, motion, travel, music, interaction, MIT, art, vespas. If you´d like to see of my work go to www.pedroserrao.com or www.thisispacifica.com

João Planche www.prideparanoia.com

I’m João Planche, an interactive designer from Lisbon, Portugal. Among other things I like everything that moves, interactive explorations, experimental solutions, architecture, hang out with friends and a special love on typography.

Pedro Mesquita www.thisispacifica.com

Hello, My name is Pedro Mesquita and I’m graphic designer. I live and work in Oporto. I love design, surf, skate and a lot other stuff.’

Any of you who have designed a web site and want the end user to see what you are seeing , know of the problem of the end user not having your fonts. In CSS you use a device called a font stack. A useful resource is: http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-stacks/

‘Better CSS Font Stacks by Nathan on 6.26.08 | One aspect of designing for the web that almost immediately offends designers is the lack of fonts that are considered safe to use. While it is true that there are only a handful of web safe fonts, the ones we do have at our disposal can be quite powerful and diversely useful. On top of that, CSS gives us a nice little thing called a font stack.’

And from ; http://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix

‘Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix by Richard Rutter’

Not about fonts, but images…

Photoshelter is the most recent outlet for our images… They have available an interesting widget that allows us to embed the images here in the blog… Neat marketing for them, and for us…

Onto getting that type off the screen

http://www.printerville.net/

‘We love everything about printers, paper, ink and printing. We have been playing with them, writing about them, and using them for more than two decades, so we like to think we know more than a little bit about them.

Of course, the world of printers is a big one, and we’ve chosen to focus largely on photo printers for amateur and professional photographers. Run by Rick LePage and Ben Long, Printerville offers unbiased news, reviews, technology discussions and more. We are not affiliated with any printer manufacturer, paper supplier or other company in this market.’

Rick LePage and Ben Long

Remember those names – Articles by them a worth reading. Along with David Pogue, Dan Margulis , Ben Wilmore and the crew from The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (http://www.photoshopuser.com/), Scott Kelby probably the best known.

Fantastic writes were Cary Lu (http://www.tidbits.com/carylu/) and Bruce Fraser (http://www.brucefrasertribute.com/) but have both passed on. If you can find material by them, it is worth a read. Cary in particular helped me through my early days of mac discovery.

From Red River Paper:


‘Inkjet paper from inkjet paper experts. Red River was founded in 1997 and has over 40 years experience in fine papers. We hand pick fine paper from mills around the world and bring them to our plant in Dallas, Texas. From here, we convert the paper to various sheet sizes and rolls, as well as add special features available only from Red River. We offer wholesale direct pricing, and the convenience of over 30 different inkjet papers under one roof. Red River invests the time and money to understand and test the latest inkjet technology from Epson, Canon, HP, Lexmark and others. Our customer service reps are well versed in our products and inkjet printing, and can give our customers helpful advice on which Red River papers will suit their needs.’

Not only a source of printer needs it is a great source of info, like this article on ink jet printing costs : http://www.redrivercatalog.com/cost-of-inkjet-printing-v1.html

And to end this posting I will share with you a brief movie about a font conference.

It is to be found on collegehumor.com at http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

As they say ‘This video wasn’t long enough, so we made it double-spaced.’

Going to stop here, the ‘Interesting topic folder‘ is down to 81 items, three major groups and many single items – I may never get caught up!

Bye for now – R

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:

http://webtypography.net/

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:

http://typetester.maratz.com/

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:

http://wiki.novemberborn.net/

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:

http://www.parallels.com

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:

http://browsershots.org/

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:

www.ted.com

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:

• http://hdrcreme.com/photo-gallery/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/hdr

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:

http://www.hdrsoft.com/

I found a new product – HYDRA from:

http://creaceed.com/hydra/

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.

http://gigapan.org/

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:

• http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
• http://research.microsoft.com/projects/wwt/

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 -

http://www.sliderocket.com

One I have paid for was BannerZest from -

http://www.aquafadas.com/

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:

http://www.copyscape.com/

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/

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

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!

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!

Those built into WordPress itself, are based on a browser interface and while OK in FireFox are less than solid in Safari – my browser of choice. Maurice Belanger had mentioned that another acquaintance uses ecto – So I decided to give it a spin. Lets just say I have after a couple of hours I have paid the 17.95$ US that was requested.

It is not perfect but they are working through the version 3 beta and features are constantly being added. For those on a PC – commiseration first – but there is a version for that platform as well

I am very intrigued with the templates of WordPress and desperately want to explore how to modify them to produce the features that I want – As a designer and not a propellor-head, this will be a challenge, but there are a lot of templates available to work with..some are provided directly from Wordpress at: http://themes.wordpress.net/ but there are other sources as well.

A good one is:100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes They have developed one they call their own:Dilectio: A Smashing Wordpress Theme and the same people smashingmagazine have an article on the relatively new idea of ‘paid for’ premium themes, group of people building a new market on the backs of the work by this free community WordPress Themes: Are They Here To Stay ?

At this point I should say a few words about smashingmagazine. From the site at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Founded in September 2006, Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information for designers and web-developers. Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in web-development – clearly, precisely and regularly. We don’t try to convince you with the quantity, but with the quality of the information we present. That’s what makes us different. In fact, we smash you with the information which will make your life easier. Really. Why Smashing Magazine? Well, why not? We smash our readers with information which might be useful for them, even although they haven’t realized it yet

At the moment I have some 30 bookmarks of site that I troll regularly to find interesting articles on design. SmashingMagazine is one of those. They spend a lot of time collecting links to interesting content and ideas – sometimes related to one theme, others more general in nature. From these I visit but a few and from those I try to keep track of those that I think are interesting or might be interesting to myself, and hopefully, you.

Other series of articles, also linked from SmashingMagazine, one on fonts.If ever there was a subject that mixes art, technology and human advancement it is the issue of fonts and methods of visible communication. It is a subject that on its own could keep a person busy for a very long time. Articles by Topic: Fonts … and one on sourcing images for you desktop

I spend a lot of my time on the net, doing design work for clients, exploring new programs, keeping up to date on current events and continuing to learn. Two of the services I have taken advantage of that deliver content to my electronic mail box are ‘A Word A Day‘ and ‘DelancyPlace‘.

The magic of words — that’s what A.Word.A.Day (AWAD) is about. We are a community of more than 600,000 linguaphiles in at least 200 countriesh

Delanceyplace is very simply a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came

For an interesting article on the evolution of the Google logo, the following link shows the development of a modern day icons development explaining some of the reasoning behind the choices made. And another icon – those three stripes that we all recognise as Adidas

If you would rather read a whole bunch of articles from one source…

New Adobe Magazine availableVolume 2, Issue 1 of Adobe Magazine, the company’s quarterly design and technology mag, is available for download. The new issue features Photoshop being used for concept art, architectural illustration, and scientific imaging.

Maurice passed on this link, among many on tools for the creation of ‘greek text‘ – that imaginary content that we designers use to simulate the content that the client has yet to provide… You know – the stuff you forgot to remove before the web site goes live!

The one I use since the advent of widgets in the Mac OS is the Lorem Ipsum Widget available on the Apple widget site. There is also an Apple Service generator lipServiceX available, which provides one of the pop up or pull down services that are available is so many applications. Have not yet discover Apple Services and what they can do for you?

• Greeked Text
• Lorem Ipsum Widget
• lipServiceX
• Apple Services

I was interested in this new bottled water product – not for it thirst quenching abilities but for its unusual form factor

http://www.ywater.us/

As a seasoned traveller who always tries to just have carryon luggage, this article appealed too me. 7 Reasons To Travel With One Bag – a variety of authors around the web offering sage wisdom on why you should travel with one bag.

For those of us who were not able to make it to San Francisco and the MacWorld in January 2008, the conference organisers have provided, on line, and free, some of the content. Not the same as being there, but a wonderful resource.

http://www.macworldencore.com/online/presentation.asp

And now I will end this posting with two entries on environmental issues. The first is a web site and movie on the Life Cycle of a product, its normal representation and some of the reality behind it. Having watched that you can move onto the second link, more description, and a calculator of costs.

Life Cycle Analysis Calculator From birth to imminent death,IDC’s free online LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) Calculator estimates a product’s carbon footprint.The web service was devised following the results of a survey of designers and engineers working in new product development by Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC), a multi-award winning product design agency based in Berkshire. The survey revealed some 50% of companies interviewed admitted that the environmental impact of a product was not currently a major design consideration for them. Yet, 82% believed it would be in the future. 61% were also aware of life cycle analysis (LCA) as a process to calculate a product’s carbon footprint, but only 29% believed their company had ever carried out an LCA during design stages. The interviewees were united in a resounding positive response to the possibility of a free LCA online service; all said they would use it and be willing to employ the simple changes that could make a great difference to a new product’s environmental impact.

That is it for today – well actually two days, it has taken me that long to steal the time to do this entry! – R