I’m going to start today with the material in my Commentary folder.

First up – after 28 years I returned to my Alma Mater in London, UK – The Royal College of Art to see the Spring Graduation Show. Sure the technology has changed – Apple MacBooks on most desktops, but the range and diversity of ideas is equally exciting today, as it was then. Was I really that young when I was there!

There are a number of sites that show the work of the students in the various disciplines, such as the ‘Communication Art and Design Show 2009‘ In 1981 I was in the School of Industrial Design and that now appears to be supplanted by Design Products , RCA/ICL Industrial Design Engineering (ICL stands for Imperial College London ) and Industrial Design Engineering Projects. Two current students that caught my eye were Emma Caselton who has created her own web site and managed to get her products featured in other design blogs such as Gizmodo, and Giles Miller , also with his own web site. The opportunities to get your ideas ‘out there’ have definitely multiplied since my time, but they have to, there were only 16 of us who escaped 28 years ago. Some of us have retired by now, and like RJSID have sites that show what we did do, and others are obviously still active, such as Daniel Weil and Dale Bevington.

I pass through London quite often but this is the first time since those bygone days that I have spent time there, wandering and revisiting old areas that I used to haunt. The images below are some of those I took while there this time.

There are a few other names I would like to mention. Attending the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture , which is located here in Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, during this summer of 2009 were many talented folk. One was Vaydehi , a young photographer of Indian origins, who has a web site of her work at www.camerawaali.com

Another persons work I really liked was Hilary Pollock , an Austrailian artist who was returning to the school, having attended a previous session here. She is a painter, Illustrator, printmaker and sculptor – her work visually crosses those boundaries.

The last single person I will mention in this posting is Ailsa Rollo, a young and very talented fashion designer who has recently relocated to Brighton UK. Below some of the creations that she showed during theBrighton Fashion Week 2009.

Click on the images to the right to load them, there are a total of seven outfits that illustrate her talent.

Enough about what I like and mentioning single individuals. Onto web sites that provide what I feel is interesting commentary or thought provoking material

The first is another work in progress by the code monkeys of Google – This one called Google in Quotes – There are different editions (4, plus custom) and different individuals that can be paired commenting on a range of subjects. Politicians must hate it, it is a classic example of a past statement coming back to bite you.

The other site of quotes is called Quotes on Design. While more specific, it is a wonderful repository of pithy phrases. It has the added ability through a provided api to add these to a personal site, and provides a rss feed and the ability to suggest other quotes that you have found.

If you are or want to be an optimist, ‘The Optimist Conspectus‘ may be a useful destination. With comments from different parts of the world and different genders it can be a nice pickup after reading the news of the day.

But if that doesn’t cheer you up, then surf over to the article on the ‘New Scientist ‘ web site that shows some instructive graphics in an article titled. ‘Where is the remotest place on Earth ‘

As a designer there is nothing I like better than an elegant solution – be it a product, a piece of art or and infographic. And the tools we have to hand these days to present previously opaque data, in meaningful ways with the added dimension of time or motion are wonderful. If one thinks of the data sets that were analyzed for the images in the article above… Two other great infographics are below. The first is ‘The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions‘ – something we are to well acquainted with in real life but have not often seen illustrated. It is one of the many infographics displayed/explained on the site ‘Information is Beautiful‘

Another interesting infographic is this from Interbrand which is dynamic, actual a Flash file that while presenting a lot of data alters to make particular points stand out. What were the top brands a decade ago, which are there now and how have the faired in between

And a level deeper for designers is how products have changed over time. In this graphic by the UK paper the Guardian , the Fifties to the Noughties (I did not come up with that name for the millennium decade – they did), the Changing Face of Everyday Design . The images are displayed by decade and six categories – clicking on the category leads you one layer deeper, to larger images of each category. A great resource. This infographic reminds me one one of my favourite design source books, Crosscurrents, by Tony and Claes Lewenhaupt (I see that the book is still available via Amazon or from High Valley Books amongst many sites), which compares Art fashion and design spanning 1890-1989. Design is so much more powerful when seen in context.

As many of you know I am a news junky, reviewing a broad range of news site on a daily basis, exploring the various angles different interests present the same news. On of my weekly visits is the Economist – a great site that allows you advanced access to if you subscribe – you can do so either to the web site alone or in conjunction with the printed magazine. While a bit deeper than an infographic I found this sub site of theirs, called Think Space which explores individuals inspiration very fascinating.

I have in previous entries mention the people at Trendwatching , and their free monthly newsletter that covers a variety of marketing trends, that may impact of you design decision. I also regularly receive an e-news letter from the people at The Cool Hunter which reminds me to visit their site and explore the articles more deeply.

There is another type of site that is quite interesting – those detailing new business ideas or business/causes that you can get involved in. Springwise and Kickstart are two that I found interesting and have added to my already too long list of bookmarks. http://www.springwise.com/

As if it is not already getting hard to make a living as a designer, with clients supplying solutions they want you to tidy up, stock agencies giving away images – or nearly so – and design competitions created by clients to troll for cheap design solutions, this week I got an email from a Stock Photo agency wanting submissions of logos if you please – Give me a break! CreativePro in their newsletter CreativeProse clarified iStockphototo compensation policy and provide links to forums where the issue was being discussed. Logo design, good logo design, is not easy – The broad range of media that the result must work in, if it is going to be successful, can complicate the transformation of a cute idea into a workable reality. Touching on the assorted aspects of this particular type of design is Logo Designer Blog

I have mentioned the SmashingMagazine design website many time – An great mix of useful reference material and inspiration along with a dose of design history. I am eagerly awaiting my copy of their new design book . They recently had a great article on the Bauhaus the ’school’ that has had such a huge impact on architecture, product and graphic deign.

Another favourite web site, mentioned frequently is TED. If I were still working full time I would attend one of their seminars at the drop of a hat. But they are not cheap! – thankfully they are constantly adding material culled from the conference sessions to their web site. Another site that I recently discovered was Academic Earth , a repository of videos on diverse subject that is course material from some of the leading universities in the world. You are never too old to lear or revisit a subject from your younger years and see how it has progressed.

And that is it for this entry – I have stolen time over the last three days to post this and there are other things I had better get on with. Hopefully I will get onto the other folders in my Blog Stuff Folder ( Applications / Font Stuff / Books / Mac computer stuff/ Photography, Images and Ads / Web issues / Products) I want to thank those who have found things that they thought might be of interest to me and the wider audience.

I close with one more individual, Ben Cooper . A young photographer, working with NASA, who gets some unique photo opportunities others never get.

http://www.rjslade.com/nswager/

Hardware and Software Changes

We have switched from Apple Aperture to Adobe LightRoom

Also during the intervening months and with upgrades to Sarah’s computer and camera she has been busy learning the new hardware and software. The G5 she was using was replaced by 4Gig Ram 2.5Ghz dualcore Intel MacBook Pro, and a 24 inch LCD screen for the studio.

The Canon 20D became my camera and she added a Canon 5D MK2 to her Canon 40D.

Oh and did I mention that Adobe CS4 shipped in there!

The upgrade presented an issue that ought to be talked about. I had two full Extended PShop versions of the CS3 Suite. While I use most of the programs in the suite, my wife uses PShop and PShop – LightRoom is not part of the Suite! So what do I need – One upgrade to the full Suite, one upgrade to the non extended version of PShop and one full version of LightRoom – I will put up with not being able to use LightRoom while she is using it – I only use it to try workflow issues anyhow – they are her images and she can do the tweaking. First we have the fact I am now resident in Umbria Italy, the software was bought from my VAR in Canada – I want to continue to do that – He is a good friend, and can use the pennies for the upgrade that Adobe would keep for themselves if I was able to order it at American prices via the web (which I cannot – yet another issue!) So the full suite upgrade, the PShop upgrade and the full LightRoom! The disks duly arrive and I start plugging in the serial numbers (I had already been using the 30 day demo’s). The suite went OK except that DreamWeaver has not even till now been recognised as part of the Suite and I cannot install any plug-ins into it! -

Adobe have confused copyright protection with usability and copyright protection seems to win out – please bring back the days when you can just drag the application to the Application Folder!

No go for the PhotoShop upgrade though – No way it was going to accept any of the numbers I had! Buried deep, and I mean deep, on the Adobe web site I found what appears to be the definitive list of what can upgrade which and guess what- You cannot officially go from the CS3 to a standalone version of PShop – not without a standalone number of the PShop included in CS3. At this point I blew my stack and provided it with a number and moved on.

( Given that I have owned every damned Adobe product, available on a mac over that last 20 plus years, a lot of which they discontinued after I had paid for them, and taught designers how to use them ( who also bought the ones they needed ) – I regard this as very shabby treatment. ADOBE be careful – you are getting too large and unfocussed on your user base and they will start to bite back if treated this way! )

After the previous explanation of why Aperture vs LightRoom, have we switched? I want to state that Aperture is a great program and remains in some ways better than LightRoom! But the user is using only in conjunction with Photoshop and is submitting her images to sites which we do not totally create so that the ability to modify the web templates is no longer as big a feature. In our opinion, LightRoom better at keywording and its relationship with PhotoShop is better.

Combined with those previously mentioned Adobe upgrades came some very good web based training from Lynda.com. We have used the Chris Orwig series on LightRoom2 for Photographers and PhotoShop for Photographers and found them to be very helpful.

So where are these new images?

For the latest work by PHOTOempt go to www.photoempt.smugmug.com

or use the following links for:

images of London
images of Durham County, North England
images of Mull
images of the High Sierra
images of Catalina Island, California
images of San Francisco
images of Umbria

With luck, I will return later this week as there are some 87 items resting in my folder of ‘blog stuff’ to comment on. All for now – R

Photography in the modern world:

The first major thing that happened was my wife had her thumb broken – note I have not said that she broke her thumb. But rather – it was broken.

It is not an easy world for photography these days. Concern over security, post 9/11 has made any photographer a questionable person – why are they taking the photo. Strange in a world so watched by CCTV of security forces, mapped and photographed globally and available online through the likes of `Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) or Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/tour/thanks-mac4.html) or StreetView (here is a Telegraph article on StreetView. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/20/eastreet120.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox)

The private security forces ‘protecting’ the rights of their paymasters do not understand the law regarding photography – what one is allowed to photograph and from where – legally. The reason for the photography is also important.

The UK Guardian Newspaper had an article entitled ‘Are photographers really a threat?’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/05/news.terrorism

Three important sources of legal advice, specifically American, British and Canadian are:

• http://ambientlight.ca/laws.php
• http://www.sirimo.co.uk/media/UKPhotographersRights.pdf
• http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf

In the case here, Sarah, my wife, who among other talents, is a photographer was photographing a local event and a local individual took exception to it, approached her angrily and resulted in her thumb being broken.

The photo that led to this incident are here:

12 hours after a larger tent than this was upside down in the field in the foreground, the festa was again underway – Unfortunately the thumb has yet to heal and current photography is limited.

Pretty innocuous, recording the ability of our local community to spring back from a natural calamity over a very short period of time. The images were taken to record the event for the community and were posted on our site at www.rjslade.com

Given that Sarah also plays the piano, the cello and hauls about considerable photo equipment, the full use of her right thumb is very important. At the moment she has not got that, just considerable pain as the fracture mends and she tries to not do too much with it.

It has given her more time to do the drudge work of being a photographer – cataloguing , describing and keywording images as required by assorted vendors of images.

We continue with out personal sites at:

www.photoempt.com

and

photoempt.smugmug.com

The initial site, which is my own design, and generated by Apple Aperture (http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/) from which I can export the finished sets of images, having modified the built in templates, continues, but is now the second site. I have previously covered in this blog why I chose Aperture over LightRoom (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/) to manage our images – As Sarah gets more proficient herself with Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshopextended/) and we move away from our own site, the reasoning is less important the the workflow issues of management and image editing become more important

SmugMug (http://www.smugmug.com/) is a wonderful site ; I found out about it through a comment made on BagelTurf (http://www.bagelturf.com/) by Steve Weller which I discovered while researching the question of Aperture vs LightRoom. Steven uses them to host his images. They have three different types of plans, Standard, Power User or Professional and a wonderful set of features. We signed up for Professional, and it is the first place we upload any new photography

Following the Mull Workshop mentioned below, Sarah returned to London UK and did a few days of photography. Here the ‘Gherkin’ framed by the Tower Bridge in the evening light. One of the aspects of photography in London is security and Sarah was stopped by police, questioned and documented while doing photography. No hassled but they did take notice. The amusing thing was that this was while shooting an image in Bedford Square, not while shooting a major landmark!

One of a group of bikers practicing their acrobatic skills on the SouthBank. The walls are painted with graffiti. This image required a model release so that it can be sold, and one was obtained. The issue of releases is yet another impediment to photography.

The access to Canary Wharf Underground – one of those iconic shots. Here the security people insisted that a tripod was not allowed

As you can see, if you visit the site, with a little work you can alter just about any aspect of the look that hey provide, but the feature set they provide and the level of support is wonderful. Add to that, the community around it, through DGrin and other forums is outstanding. Sarah has met through them, Muench Workshop (http://www.muenchworkshops.com/) Sarah has Attended one of their workshops in Mull Scotland and is scheduled to attend another in August. Details on these are at:

Mull Scotland: http://www.dgrin.com/printthread.php?t=73417&pp=40

Extreme Sierras: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=775588

Above and below : The Isle of Mull

Some other sites of individuals that I have found interesting, some found by me, some suggested in articles and by other people

This woman got a write up recently and has some interesting work:

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir at: http://www.flickr.com/people/rebba/

Gordon Woldford has a great site that shows off his travels around North America.

Gordons pBase site at: http://www.pbase.com/merriwolf

Jim Reid’s site was just pointed out to me – Wonderful!

Jim Reed is recognized as one of the world’s most accomplished weather photographers for his one-of-a-kind images of America’s changing climate. A veteran full-time storm chaser, Jim has spent nearly two decades documenting almost every type of meteorological phenomena — including tornadoes, blizzards, electrical storms and floods. He has documented 15 hurricanes, including Hurricane Katrina — the costliest tropical cyclone ever to strike the United States. In 2004, he penetrated the eye of all four major hurricanes to strike Florida. http://www.jimreedphoto.com/gallery.html?gallery=Fine%20Art

A Web magazine – JPG Magazine. Well actually it is a real printed magazine – yeas – paper – but I have only ever viewed the pdf back copies that are available on the web site. I can’t say I enjoy all the work but it is an interesting source of what is ‘current’ http://www.jpgmag.com/

Researchers have managed to get the hardware and software cost down to a level that makes this hardware viable for most professionals. From Times Online. May 15, 2008 ‘Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera’ http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3938717.ece

And the web site dedicated to the project: Gigapan http://gigapan.org/

Three great sites to compare the details of assorted photo hardware. I usually start with DPReview:

• http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/
• http://www.dpreview.com/
• http://www.steves-digicams.com/diginews.html

(heh I just realized this is now hosted by SmugMug!)

B & H : your first stop when you are ready to buy that new must have: This store is the photographers Mecca – located in New York City it is wild. The staff is very knowledgeable, can come across as quite brusque (downright rude sometimes) but if it is worth having they have it and at prices that are hard to match. Their retail price is better than most Canadian wholesale prices ! Watch the holidays and opening hours though, They are observant jews and honour their calender.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/

“Professional” organizations that worry about these photo issues:

• Editorial Photographers (EP) A non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health and profitability of editorial photography. Our mission is to educate photographers and photography buyers about business issues affecting our industry, and in the process raise the level of business practices in the profession. http://www.editorialphoto.com
• Stock Artists Alliance SAA supports and protects the business interests of professional stock photographers worldwide. http://www.stockartistsalliance.org
• UPDIG Working Group The UPDIG Working Group is an ad-hoc industry consortium of nonprofit associations, whose logos are shown here, along with allied trade groups and manufacturers. http://www.updig.org/published/Updig.AboutUPDIG.html

A few of the other Photography Community Sites you might want to visit:

• Fine Art Photoblog The Fine Art Photoblog is a unique website dedicated to collectors and admirers of fine art photography. The site is something of a mix between art gallery, photoblog, and search engine. http://www.fineartphotoblog.com/
• Fotocommunity Are you a passionate hobby photographer? Are you are ready to be inspired, to share your passion and knowledge with more than 670.000 members? Great! Then fotocommunity is the perfect place for you and your creative works. http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/channel/50
• The Radiant Vista The Radiant Vista is a creative community of inspiration, passion, and grace. Together we pursue our dreams and explore our endless potential. http://www.radiantvista.com/

Old photo’s are a great source of inspiration. The American Smithsonian and the Library of Congress are starting to put some of their collections online. And then there are articles on particular subjects – I list here one on old images of New York City ( you might have noticed a fondness for this city – we have been there numerous times for enjoyment and photography.

• New York in Black and White: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=29988&mode=threaded
• Prints & Photographs Online Catalog : The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) provides access through group or item records to more than 50% of the Division’s holdings, as well as to some images found in other units of the Library of Congress. Many of the catalog records are accompanied by digital images–about one million digital images in all. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
• Smithsonian Institution’s Photostream : http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian

And last, but definitely not least the three main groups of Royalty Free Vendors we list our images with. Why these three? FotoSearch approached us a few years ago as Wonderfile (part of Masterfile) was folding. They represent most of the big names and have a growing body of individuals, who they have approached.

StockphotoPro are recent – we (and I gather from blog entries on the web, hundreds of others) received an invite to join them. We liked their site and the tools they provide and the service/support they have given us.

PhotoShelter is our most recent choice. Again the tools and service of the supplier have been big issues.

While there is no cost to us to have these people represent us, they obvious take a percentage of the sales. We have, as noted in previous posts, dealt with microstock, but the return for the work and hassle is questionable. These firms return a more reasonable amount for each sale and set the bar in terms of image quality and content much higher. Each site has its own requirements though, its own methods of submission, and paper work required to ensure required taxes are withheld on sale. We will never get rich selling our images but it does make it all meaningful and gives our passion an outlet. I came across a joke the other day that says it all:

Q : What is the difference between a professional photographer and a pizza. A : The pizza can feed a family of 4

PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter is an online photo community where 37,000 of the world’s photographers find new opportunities and liberation from the traditional model of selling their work. http://psc.photoshelter.com/

StockphotoPro

Join the professional photographers from across the globe who have already submitted their best Images. Contribute to the StockphotoPro collection and earn a commission every time a picture of yours is sold. http://www.stockphotopro.com/

FotoSearch

What is Fotosearch? Publitek, Inc., dba Fotosearch is a provider of royalty free and rights managed stock photography, illustrations, maps, video, and audio. We bring together many different stock agencies to provide “The World’s stock photography at one website.”™ The products on Fotosearch can be licensed and easily downloaded for use in your advertisements, promotional materials, websites, etc. When you purchase a license to use an image, video clip, or audio clip, you do so based on the license agreement of the publisher of that particular content. The license agreement will be presented to you before purchase confirmation. http://www.fotosearch.com/

That is it for this entry – There are still 84 entries in my folder of URLS, covering colours, fonts, software – Will try to add another posting real soon – 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!

Easter here in Italy is the big church festival of the year. In Canada, I always thought of Christmas being the most important church day of the year – but then what would I know! Interestingly, while England and North America include Good Friday as an integral part of the celebration – it is not a holiday here. Today, Monday is.

This allows me an opportunity to add to the blog. Not that I have neglected it!

I have upgraded, re-installed it twice, and re-input all the articles that were there previously! Thank goodness for backups. What really saved my bacon was the program I mention a few blogs ago – ecto – Still in beta 3 and being updated regularly, it is still a work in progress. I have been having trouble trying to make the entries consistent looking but fonts, styles, sizes and all sorts creep in that I do not want. At the moment I have reverted to using a plain text editor – Text Wangler by Bare Bones Software, Inc. This is the free version of their product BBEdit

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. BBEdit transforms text with high performance.

Then I will open my WordPress pages in Safari. Have all of you downloaded this weeks update from Apple! It is worth it. If you go under the menu item View to Customize Toolbar you will see some new icons. One for tabs, one for a side bar, one for bugs and one for tools – under that tools menu there is a whole lot of new items – or at least new to me. You can now figure out what the various page features are! This adds some of the features that can be added through plugins with Firefox. I also use Saft and Safari Stand – add-ons to the program.

• Saft is a Safari plugin to add features like draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, search-able bookmarks and history, URL shortcuts, kiosk mode and more.
• SafariStand for Mac OS X – Includes: Sidebar (thumbnail tab), ‘Stand Bar’ (Bookmark, History, Side Bar compatible, Simple RSS Reader), ‘Quick Search’,'Stand Serach’ – supports Spotlight

Saft amongst its many features allow me to save single page pdf’s and SafariStand presents the tabs as little page images down the side! Neither are really needed but we must play with out toys!

I have not given up with ecto, and I still bounce between FireFox and Safari – I am itching to upgrade Wordpress to 2.5 – which is a Release Candidate but not yet official and I want to try adding some images to the weblog – but slowly slowly. At the same time I’m continuing to alter the look of our SmugMug site.

Anyhow, onto today’s entry:

AUTO Design

B.A.T. stands for Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica. An article and a slide show from the New York Times:

• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/automobiles/collectibles/23BAT.html
• http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/23/automobiles/collectibles/0323-BAT_index.html

From a wonderful car shape, onto a green design:

The Lightning Car Company - The Lightning Car Company is proud to release one of the UK’s first electric sports cars for 2008.Combining classic, British sports car design with racing car technology and state of the art NanoSafe™ battery power and Hi-Pa Drive™ electric motor innovation, the Lightning has been developed with exhilarating performance front of mind. Whilst its head-turning looks will appeal to the most discerning of drivers, unlike other sports cars, the Lightning is also easy on the conscience. With virtually no polluting emissions, this energy-efficient car uses clean technology and will have the ultimate green rating. Following production of several petrol Lightnings and with the electric prototype build now well underway, the electric Lightning GT is now available to pre-order.

IDEAs

As a source of ideas I have mentioned TED already. A good idea that is well undertaken and appears to have results by causing the ideas it showcases to snowball. This has in the past been sponsored by the likes of Adobe and BMW. This year a major sponsor was Autodesk

Autodesk not only participated as a major sponsor, but hosted a lunch on Sustainable Design featuring Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and IDEO CEO Tim Brown as well as demonstrated a technology experiment called the BIGVIZ.

In their words:

• The BIGVIZ is an exploration in visualizing the Big Ideas presented on the TED mainstage. Two visual cartographers, David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, created over 700 spontaneous sketches of the presenters’ ideas using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software running on Wacom Cintiq tablets and rendered on a Perceptive Pixel multi-touch display. These tools illustrate the power of interactive visualization to present the big picture to foster insight and communicate ideas visually, central principles of design innovation.
• THE BIGVIZ-Download a 200 page Acrobat pdf book featuring the sketches, illustrations and ideamaps of each of the TED mainstage presenters.
• THE BIGVIZ Movie -Watch a three minute movie of the TED2008 BIGVIZ sketches created by Autodesk animator and compositor Keith Chamberlain with music scored by TEDster Michael Montes.

I found all that out, and watched the movie and downloaded the pdf all because I was visiting the site to view some of the newer offerings from this years conference. I thought the two listed below were really good:

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight - Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life - “Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels” — biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes).

Another exciting project that has been acknowledged by TED through receiving a TED PRIZE is:

The Encyclopedia of Life - This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth. Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life

More Reading and Viewing

I love a bookstore – the shelves of books on Art, Design, Photography and Science. And old bookstores with old books on these subjects are just as interesting if not more so, for their historical significance. The new books, the current books have Amazon to bring them to your attention, and in many cases give us a foretaste of the content through the ‘See Inside’ feature. The old books are another issue. The following site in one person interest in old books

BibliOdyssey - Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart. A hard copy in book form, and a review of the book:Touching on the subject of copyright and intellectual property, that I have covered before, with regard to the making of the book Permission Unpossible

Continuing on the theme of intellectual property

You Can’t Picture This - Thousands of UK residents have signed a petition against a law preventing photography and filming in certain public places. Yet this all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and no such law was proposed. Rajesh investigates the way we view the lens and the way it views us.

On the subject of Colour:

Adobe® kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. The color themes in kuler are contributed by its users, many of them designers or in the creative business. You can share with the community your own chromatic ingenuity, too

and a useful spinoff of that is:

Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, Adobe® Photoshop®, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum

Colour is but only one type of inspiration one might need. A few other sites that I have found particularly interesting this week are:

• commandshift3 ; A site that shows and rates web site by look. It opens with you deciding which of two images you prefer but as you enter the site you can see what others have voted best and worst.
• A weblog by Andy Rutledge; A beautiful layout and great content. It is called design view
• Royal Magazine ; The Cultivation of Culture – Royal is the private journal of The KDU. (Keystone Design Union). The publication focuses on Collisions, Culture and Capitalism. We believe that we are more than just editors or filters. We believe in active media, and live by the rule of “never just observe, always interact.” We believe that the gravity of our culture is so powerful, nothing and no one are immune to its pull. We are dedicated to injecting sensation back into a numb world.

Images and Thoughts:

How does one express complex ideas in a manner that can be easily understood? This is what we as designers are supposed to do.

We Feel Fine : An exploration of human emotion, in six movements by Jonathan Harris and Sep KamvarHarvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

This site and some TED content are included in this Smashing Magazine article that will link you to a wealth of similar stuff.

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches - Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years…

and a similar approach but concerned with time can be found at: mysociety.org Their mission is:

mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives…

It is always interesting to get some idea of the talent that is on the horizon, Papers like the New York Times, or in this case The Guardian follow issues like this:

The top 50 - When it comes to design, the UK is home to some of the world’s biggest talent. But who are the brightest stars? We put together a panel of judges to identify the hottest names. Here they are …

Well that is it for today. Have a lot else I could say but I am off to watch a movie and relax. In closing one more article – not so much political, definitely not entertainment – an article that might add some ‘food for thought’ the next time you hear the term Sharia. Like many people, my understanding of what it is has been negatively framed by miss use and understanding. Like the word Communism vs Socialism these words mask so much – can be interpreted through ignorance, or miss used on purpose, for negative reasons. Anyhow, all this to suggest you might find the article Why Shariah on the New York Times an eye opener and provide you with another perspective on the world around you.Really, that’s it – Ross

I do spend some time each morning reading the ‘Newspapers’ – With web access this is great:

• BBC NEWS
• Electronic Telegraph
• Guardian Unlimited
• CNN.com
• New York Times
• The Globe and Mail
• London Times Online
• Economist.com

Of these sites the only one I pay for is the Economist, the other are free services, although you may have to subscribe so that they can justify themselves to their advertisers. Still, with the ability to read left, right and centre opinions from the western world on the same issue, these do provide an interesting perspective to the world around us. I must say, the fact that I live on a slightly remote hilltop, and that many times the world below is shrouded in clouds, gives me a sense of retreat from the madness of the world!

More on Wordpress:

I have been playing, tinkering, with the code of this blog, and collecting information on how it really works. I have not been brave enough yet to add images. I have come across this information this week:

This seems like a good explanation of what it is all about. So often, to get ones mind around a new program, it is important to know how one slices the information, what parts are presented, and how those parts can be individually altered and integrated with each other. Then the other possibilities start to form.

HOW TO: Customize Wordpress Part 1 Submitted by Suzy on December 13, 2005 – 1:08pm

There are two main ways that I can see to go about customising themes in WP. I’m not really a theme user, as I tend to build from scratch, so it’s difficult for me to say which way would be easier for everyone. One way is to customise the functionality of the blog itself this involves getting into the “Loop” (more on this later), the other is just to build around the existing CSS of an already stable theme. There is a lot you can do by just dissecting your chosen base theme and using the CSS to do the work.

Another article that is very helpful, yet not too detailed is at:

WordPress Guide – Customizing WordPress Theme

For more in depth explanation, this site has a number of articles:

Devlounge : Design, Develop, and Grow

Most of you know we are heavily involved with images, with our PHOTOempt.com web site, our presence on SmugMug and our efforts to sell through agencies such as FotoSearch . One of the newsletters I subscribe to is from Crestock . Others are iStock , and the New York Institute of Photography . In the Crestock newsletter this week there was an interesting article:

13 Minimalist Blog Designs You Really Should SeePosted Thursday, 13 March 2008 by Lars Hasvoll Bakke in Design, InspirationIf you’re tired of websites bursting at the seams with widgets, flash animations and all the colours of the rainbow, check out this list of selected low-key, minimalist blogs. Greetings all! My name is Lars, I’m one of the Crestock regulars and I plan on throwing in an entry here in the blog every now and then.

I mentioned iStock above. Their newsletter this week included a link to the third article listed below:

• http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=392
• http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=395
• http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=413

This is a very slippery slope – one that is being greased by some and not by others. It potentially makes the legal responsibility of a photographer, a huge problem. Is an artist responsible for how his ‘art’ is used? It has been said by others ‘guns do not kill, people do’. Where do we draw a line? Where do we let others draw a line for us? As a seller of images, if I state how an image is not to be used, and the buyer agrees to that – can I be responsible for its misuse? Do I need to worry, that even if not responsible, somebody might take legal action that I would need to incur a large expense to defend myself against. This may seem like an incidental concern to some, but it has prevented me from undertaking product design, my original profession, for 23 years. I was unwilling to take the risk of legal recourse for the misuse of a product I created. How many useful ideas of mankind are wasted by the inappropriate application of ‘intellectual property’ rules.

After those comments, onto some lighter stuff.

Some interesting reading on Colour: MOMA in NYC is having an exhibition on Colour

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/colorchart/flashsite/

and two articles on how colour is used. I was aware of the initial article before, but found out that they had done a second one when I returned to the site today, looking for material to put in this posting. I was particularly interested in the pink/blue use for male/female.

• http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/05/01/11-great-color-legends/
• http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/07/03/13-more-great-color-legends/

This weeks sites from Maurice Belanger include: An interesting collection of Graphic design at:

http://graphic-design.tjs-labs.com/index.php

There is a lot of stuff here – I personally believe the presentation is a little to sparce to do it the justice it deserves but… He also found a link to the forerunner of Apples current AppleTV. Interesting that this information is on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Interactive_Television_Box

If you are interested in this sort of Apple product history I strongly recommend ‘The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group‘. To me fascinating, but then given my background, can you be surprised?

I mentioned ‘The Telegraph’, at the start of this entry, one of the big UK daily newspapers. They have run a photo series this week on the best 100 cars, as chosen by its readers. Again, a great collection of product design. The main link to the 5 part series is at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?xml=/motoring/2008/03/10/mfcars110.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

Following the link to an interesting idea for a digital clock led me to this site:

http://alvinaronson.com/

Do what this page says, and you will be presented with a nice portfolio of work. For those you love, or those who love their coffee, another cute product is shown at:

http://www.yankodesign.com/index.php/2008/03/12/deep-love-of-coffee/

And I guess my last link for this posting will be a site for Water – I had a link to an interesting bottle shape a few postings ago – here is another. A nice site as well.

http://www.seiwater.com/

Back to the other things I need to do, like walk that dog I previously mentioned. Hopefully I will get to add to this blog again soon. In the mean time, your comments would be appreciated, either in private via email or using the site to add your own two cents worth.

All for now – Ross

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!