This is where I work
By on May 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
I’ve been thinking a lot about Graphic Design lately
By on May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
What is Graphic Design exactly? I really thought I knew, but of late it’s become more confused and gray. Why does Graphic Design exist? The purpose is utility, not art. The purpose of Graphic Design is clear communication. This isn’t meant to be a definite answer, but to start some sort of dialogue about what Graphic Design is.
Working with clients
In this view, a client comes to you with a job. You take the content you and try to mold it into the most compelling outcome. The main feedback that you get is from the client. From my (limited) experience, this is how the print world works. You can propose different ideas to the client and try to sell them on what would work best. It feels very intuitive. Your decisions are often based on experience and what you know has worked in the past.
The economics of Graphic Design
A Graphic Designer is not self sufficient. The very nature of the profession depends upon others. Graphic Designers work for the client, for the money. That’s what it really comes down to. It is love of the the craft, but it does make a living. Thinking about the economics of Graphic Design becomes much more interesting and measurable when it comes to the web. A lot of what I’ve been learning at my new job is this. Design is measured by its success. How many people complete the form? What are the numbers? Do people prefer red to blue? And what not. What is good Graphic Design in this model? Is it good if it sells a lot but looks like garbage?
Aesthetics?
What consideration should be even to aesthetics? In school we learned that good design follows rules (or breaks them eloquently). But what if beauty doesn’t sell? Ideally, design that follows the rules and is built on a grid and is typeset well will sell. I believe this deeply. But what if you can be mathematically proven wrong? If this ad makes a lot of money is it good design? If good design is clear communication and this ad speaks to people who are wanting to refinance their home it must be good design? I know you might think, “of course it isn’t good design.” But it has really got me questioning things. If weird poorly designed (ha!) flash ads work as a marketing tool than who am I to say they aren’t good Graphic Design. Is it me being an elitist? Does it really help anyone for me to ream somebody for having no consideration for typesetting?
Type
Ligatures, kerning, smart quotes, none of these really exist on the web the way they do traditionally in print. This is a real loss to me. I do what I can, but there are many inconsistencies to worry about. There is no way to anticipate for dynamic content. I mean, I have smart quotes happening, I specify font size and line height, but I can’t really force there to be no widows or orphans, especially on content I’m not generating. Also, I use Helvetica for this blog, but if you view it on a Windows machine or even in a feed reader chances are you are reading it in Arial. Helvetica and Arial are 2 fairly different typefaces (to say the least). They look and work in very different ways. They will even render differently render in different browsers on the same operating system. Ugh.
What do you think?
This is not to be a one sided conversation. What do you think makes good design? You don’t have to be a Graphic Designer to answer this. Are you attracted to ads like the one above? Do you gravitate to minimalism and clean design? Do you own a mac? Do you hate anti-aliasing on Windows?
A deeper connection
By on April 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
My boo
By on April 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
A rousing adventure yarn of derring-do on the Antarctic.
By on April 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
I just finished a book that I must reccomend. It is called The Survivors. I feel so down since I finished this book. It is the essence of everything I love about books lately. Adventure, suspense…
I bought The Survivors along with Rendezvous with Rama, another gem from Counterpoint. I mean, it was on the vintage paperback shelf. I paid $1 for this book. I bought it solely on the cover. Perhaps my greatest find at a used bookstore.
I am deeply obsessed with polar regions for the same reason I’m obsessed with the ocean and outer space. It’s the unknown, it cannot be contained. We cannot really grasp it, even with our thoughts. It is the sublime. It is beautiful and bleak.
Polar regions have incredible occurrences that only happen at the poles. Auroras? High concentration of meteorites? Yeah! Talk about feeling small. The thought of it all overwhelms me.
The Survivors follows the story of Duncan Craig, who left his job in London in search of something new. He travels to South Africa where he thinks he will be able to find work. The work he finds is far different than he imagines. He becomes a skipper of a catcher in a whaling fleet. The circumstances in which he becomes employed are sketchy. There is a lot of unrest in the fleet and speculation of murder and wrong doing. There is a rush to get out into the Atlantic and sort out all the trouble.
As the story begins to become monotonous, Craig goes into the floes in rescue of another catcher whose hull was cracked from the ice. This simple rescue escalates and many ships go down, including the large factory ship The Southern Cross. With over 500 men on the ice, they must figure out how to survive without freezing to death or being crushed by the icebergs moving through the floes. Whoa! You begin to get an idea of what it would be like to be stranded on the ice, how small we are in the scheme of things, how little control we actually have.
And this is the real deal. While researching this post I came across this blurb about the author: “Hammond Innes was a writer who made a point of researching the material for his adventures in great depth. If he was writing about oil-rigs then he spent time on an oil-rig; if about the Antarctic then he spent time in the frozen South.”1 Hammond Innes had personal contact with the forces of the Antarctic. He witnessed the magnitude of the ice. I can’t imagine anything more perfect. This book is “a rousing adventure yarn of derring-do on the Antarctic” written by an author who experienced it first hand.
1 Asto
Fighting bad design
By on | Permalink | Comments (0)
Hello Internet. Though Internet Explorer is an inferior web browser, I know many people still use it. I think most Internet Explorer users fall into two categories: They don’t know any better, or they don’t have a choice. The fact is many people use it. People who come to our site do. In fact about one fourth of all visits come from Internet Explorer users. Worse yet, more than half of these users are on IE6 or older. I have ignored this fact for a long time. I kept telling myself it was a fluke and to not worry about it. But over time it has remained consistent. So, it is time to reconcile.
About two weeks ago I set out to fix my templates to work and look the same for IE as they would for Safari and Firefox. I did most of this in one long day. Most problems were with css layout, but there were a few others that I had to get deeper on.
- I fixed alpha transparency on pngs. This is only a problem with IE 6 and older. I use pngs for the header images and for the peace button. Before the fix the images looked like they had a white box behind them. Now they have beautiful transparency. I looked at different solutions for this, but iepngfix was the best and had the least effect on performance.
- I fixed the flickering header images. This is another problem that exists in older versions of IE. When the header image was hovered over with the mouse, it would show the hover color underneath. It took a little tinkering to figure out this fix, but the tutorial I linked helped a lot. This was my first time using and understanding what !important means.
- I fixed the extra space on the header images.
- I learned to never use EMs for layout. It works inconsistently.
It took me a while to figure out these fixes. A lot of searching around. That’s why I’m documenting it here. To bring it all together for people who, like me, don’t bother with IE very much. This is by no means complete or comprehensive. And again, I apologize to all IE users who’ve had a sub par experience here on the site.
Did I mention I was a college graduate?
By on April 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Possible future for my bike.
By on March 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I bought my bike about a year and a half ago with the intention of pimping it out. Or maybe not pimping. Pimping usually has to do with adding tons of stuff. More like simplifying my ride. Most parts I’ve bought over time. There was a lot of trial and error in this process.
My bike is a late 80s white Peugeot road bike. (From what I can find I think it’s called Tourmalet.) When I bought it it had most of the original parts, all Shimano grupo, Mavic rims, that kind of stuff. So far I’ve replaced the handle bars with Nitto bull horns from Ben’s Cycle, the saddle with a nice Brooks saddle from IRO, the bottom bracket and cranks with IRO parts from Orange 20, and the back wheel with a cheapo Alex Rims wheel from Coates. I’ve been looking into Velocity Deep-V Rims since the beginning because the are so hot, but I haven’t gotten up the courage to drop $300 on that yet. When I do I think I will put a blue on the front and a white on the back. I want the blue to closely match the top tube pad I bought from R.E.Load.
Well, the future is unknown. This is only one possible direction. Besides who needs Velocity rims, that just makes your bike more valuable to steal.
So I upgraded to Leopard
By on March 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
A couple weeks ago I finally upgraded to Leopard. I wanted to document some problems I’ve had.
Transparency
I have a G4 Powerbook and the dock and menubar transparency do not work. I tried editing some plist files, but that didn’t work. It actually really messed stuff up. I had to boot into single user mode and fix it. Don’t do this. Transparency is not worth it.
LastFMHelper
Force quit that sucka in Activity Monitor (located in Applications > Utilities). Makes my CPU run high. Quitting this won’t affect Last.fm app in any way. From what I gather, its main purpose is to automatically recognize your iPod when you plug it in.
Adium
Adium got painfully slow. I tried different Message Styles, but it still hung a lot. It stressed me out for it not to keep up with my typing. No fun. I love Adium, but I’m back using iChat. iChat isn’t awful, especially in Leopard because it has tabs.
Camino
Camino! My love! Slowed down a lot since I upgraded. I feel so sad about this. Having a bunch of tabs open makes my fan turn on. I still use it occasionally, but Safari is now my default browser. I do like Find being in the same window and also find-as-you-type in Safari 3.
Flash
Infamously bad in Leopard. Works on 90% of things in Safari. I had to uninstall and reninstall even though I was up-to-date in Tiger. Persistent problems include Google Street View (not all of Google Maps), the audio player for Tumblr, and a few others I can’t think of right now. These both work in Camino though, which is weird. Other weird things, watching Fox online only works in Safari, but watching NBC only works on Camino.
MAXIMUM EDIT: DOY! My problems with Flash were all my own. I tried going through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling Flash again and I found that the Adobe site showed be the INTEL version instead of the PPC version. So I downloaded the PPC version and everything works well. My bad. Sorry.
Panic
On a positive note, Coda, Transmit, and Unison work perfectly. I was really worried about these because they are so much a part of my daily computer existence (apart from web browsing and IM).
These problems are not all encompassing. They are few and far between. I would definitely recommend Leopard. It works better on newer computers, but what doesn’t?
I read this book
By on March 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
While looking for our book club books at Counterpoint I came across Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke for $3. I really like this guy, Arthur C. Clarke. This is the third (fourth?) book I’ve read that he has written. Okay, the others were 2001: A Space Odyssey (obviously) and Islands in the Sky. I watched the film adaptation of 2010, but that doesn’t count. Also, the film wasn’t that good. Though it was made 16 years after 2001 the special effects are far more primitive. But that’s not the point. I read Rendezvous with Rama and it was very good. I liked it very much. I read it in (essentially) two sittings. You should really read it.
This book has it all, all the elements. It’s really the perfect representation for its genre. It has adventure (Wild at Heart hahahah), it has uncertainty, it has the unknown. That’s one thing I really like about Arthur C. Clarke. It is a theme in all his works I’ve read. The uncertainty, the unknown. No matter how advanced and futuristic society becomes, we never know more than our Solar System firsthand. Our Solar System is quite large, and colonization of planets happens, but we still are always curious. There is always the infinite universe. It is pretty darn overwhelming.
To explain the plot briefly, Rama is a 31 mile long spacecraft. It has been traveling for perhaps millions of years. The closest it has been to any star was more than 200,000 years ago. It is an enigma. It is unknown. As it is traveling through our Solar System the crew of the Endeavour has 3 weeks to explore it. That process represents the core of this book. There are many surprises. If you read this book, keep in mind that the Ramans do everything in threes.
