Archive.
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 Link
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We've certainly been getting an earful about the latest Veer catalog since it started hitting mailboxes this week. And naturally, the feedback has been present at both the positive and the negative ends of the scale. One of the comments forwarded to me regarding the aforementioned catalog cover was as follows:
"Is it just me, or did someone actually go to the trouble to Photoshop out this dog's asshole?"
I would like to respond to this comment by assuring viewers out there that the retouching was only minor and that no orifices were harmed during the final production of this image. Here's the original version so you can compare for yourself. I'm sure it's just sitting up there, somewhere under the mudflap.
Monday, April 28, 2003 Link
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Haven't I always said that today's visual content catalogs needed a little more dog ass? Straight up, baby. And if your feeling the need to get a little closer to the action, grab a handful of it right here. Damn, I love working in this company.
Boy, I must have been busier last week than I realized because I completely missed the announcement of TypePad. If the Six Apart gang can wedge even a fraction of Movable Type's gizmos and hoojiggers into TypePad, I'm that much closer to dropping Blogger like a bad transmission. Then again, TypePad hasn't shipped yet and I've still got an awful lot of blog invested in that other service, even though that other service is terribly overdue for tune-up. What to do, what to do?
Saturday, April 26, 2003 Link
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When we last visited the Stowaway Keyboard Project, I had successfully connected my Newton MessagePad 2100 to a folding Stowaway keyboard by crafting (rather cleverly I might add) an adapter from the end of an old serial cable and a disused Palm III shell. To do this, I relied on a rough sketch of the connector pinouts and the necessary mapping thereof provided by Daniel Padilla, the man behind the driver software for this project. The sketch was accurate enough to get the thing hacked together, but I thought it could benefit from a bit of light housekeeping prior to being added to the growing repository of technical documentation for the project. Naturally, I bounded up the plate with a copy of Adobe Illustrator in hand and pitched out the following PDF, all gussied up for public consumption. Please note the tasteful use of Gill Sans Regular, the official Newton typeface.
Friday, April 25, 2003 Link
This is big. As big as a pen and ink rendering of an Ed Benguiat swash cap. When a supa-cool boutique font outfit nabs one of the most amazing old school, film-based type collections around, it's big. Really big. Yep, House Industries purchased Photo-Lettering. How big?
"Physically, the collection takes up about 350 cubic ft (10 cubic meters) of space and consists of film negatives and positives of most of the 6500 fonts produced in the company's 55 years. There are also countless patterns, cartouches, borders and dingbats, all of which have been preserved in film negative form. Each negative is approximately 28 in (71 cm) by 5 in (13 cm) high."
Mad props to Rich Roat and company for one hell of a typographic finagle. A full press release is available over on CreativePro.com for further reading and natch there's also a discussion thread at Typographica. Coincidentally, I've been thumbing through my old Photo-Lettering One Line Manual of Styles for years, dreaming of being able to use digital versions of the unqiue and quirky display faces that defined the PLINC library. All the while, trying not to drool on the pages. If anyone can bring the Photo-Lettering collection up to digital snuff and still respect its roots, it's House. Dang, I think I need to sit down.
Wednesday, April 23, 2003 Link
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Lots of things to mention. No time to type them up. Way too many items loitering around the to do list. Not enough of those same characters getting scratched off. Several deadlines approaching. Still can't access the production server. You want piles? I got piles. Now, where did I put the top of my desk? Blimey.
Saturday, April 19, 2003 Link
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Easter eggs. Calgary.
Friday, April 18, 2003 Link
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I received an kindly email regarding my recent photo of the day from the one and only Marshall Sokoloff of Blurbism fame. Aside from the fact that he has a domain name that I truly adore, he tipped me off to some of his own dumpster-inspired and urban corrosion-themed photography. Gorgeous.
Good Friday isn't just about getting a day off of work. Neither is it simply a time to attend church as component of Holy Week and participate the reading of the Passion. That's certainly a significant part of it for my family, but this year Good Friday also marks the fact that spring is mentally here for me. Sure, the calendar said that spring officially arrived a few weeks ago, but until I see the crocuses blooming (which they are) and the back yard completely devoid of dog crap (which it is), spring doesn't quiet surface in my mind. However, today it must be spring. Additional proof? I felt a light sprinkle of rain on my face moments before I finished reattaching the down spout to the rain barrels. The outside water has been turned on, the hoses are reconnected to the spigots, and the lawn has had its first cleansing rake of the season. It really, honestly must be spring. Thank God.
Wednesday, April 16, 2003 Link
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Paint drips on industrial dumpster. 4th Avenue Southwest, Calgary.
Monday, April 14, 2003 Link
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Believe it or not, I was just starting to look around for a new source of independent music. You know, stuff I've never heard before. In the basement, back in a corner of the bedroom, out in your best friend's garage kind of stuff. Twangy, college-pop tunes and glitchy, experimental electronica and the like. So, what do you suppose happens to drop into my lap? A magic link to MetaFilter Music, that's what. A streaming download repository chock full of songs sharing the same quirky attitude as the community weblog that inspired it. Serendipity? Perhaps. Worth spending an hour or so digging the nuggets out of the growing pile of steaming contributions? Definitely.
The available domain name of the week is hexhaust.com
Oh happy day. Apple finally released another public beta of Safari replete with tabs. If you've been following the various rumor sites or Dave Hyatt's Surfin' Safari weblog, you probably already know that this version also sports niceties such as form autofill, the ability to reset your privacy settings, bookmark importing, improved AppleScriptiness, and ongoing standards compliancy stuff. Regardless of any precognition on your part, I thought it was worth another mention anyway. Oh, and the v73 release actually renders border-style:dotted as border-style:dotted now. Hot damn.
Friday, April 11, 2003 Link
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The local shindig for agencies and other creative types to flaunt their design chops is the annual Ad Rodeo. The Veer team entered a few tasty gems into the awards event, just like we did when we were all still part of the EyeWire crew. We pulled off a couple of merit awards the last time around and that was certainly nice a nice cap on the evening. But that's not the whole reason we end up going to these things. The evening is about reconnecting with friends you used to work with and discovering what they've been up to. It's about filling everyone in on what the heck you've been up to lately, beside spouting off in your weblog. It's about schmoozing and laughing and trashing a few of those other entries that you just can't believe somebody submitted into the awards with a straight face. And it's about the food. Hence my latin reference in the title this post. Adrodo means 'to gnaw at' and now that I think about it, I suppose it could refer to either the food or the conversation. I'll let you know how we did tomorrow.
[ Update ] We snagged a merit award in the corporate ID category. Better than a swift kick in the portfolio I suppose. We probably should have left after the presentations in those few first categories too. No matter how many of these things we attend, we never seem to learn. Zzzzz.
Tuesday, April 08, 2003 Link
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Apparently, deleting an email account in Apple's Mail.app not a very good idea. I knew there was still a reason for me to be running Claris Emailer under OS 9. I know. I'm a wimp.
The lovely Dean Allen guides us down memory lane in this little ditty about PageMaker and Quark and all things stupid about growing up with page layout software. One was a inept piece of software from a decent company. The other was a slightly less inept piece of software from a company who thought customer support was a painful boil to be lanced. It's really quite funny. And it's true, up to a point. Dean closes by saying that InDesign is good, but nobody uses it. Nobody that is, except us apparently. And here's a few reasons why we do.
I found the following statement running along the perforated fold on a rather formidable-looking bank draft. It read, and I quote:
"This document is printed on Tonerfuse™ security paper
with bleed through MICR and gothic numbering."
Whoa. I'm still deciphering what some of this means, but I'm pretty sure that this little old piece of paper is downright secure. Reading the above proclamation over again, it's beginning to sound an awful lot like a design project I had to hand in during my fourth year of art college.
Monday, April 07, 2003 Link
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You know how you can install one of the those point-of-use taps that dispenses almost-boiling hot water right at your kitchen sink? Great idea, right? Sooner or later some smart person will see the light and combine one of those things with a coffee maker. When they do, do I ever have the web address for them. The available domain name of the week is coffeefaucet.com. That's a web site just waiting to happen, my friend. And for those of you who missed it, last week's domain name was squishingly.com. All right, you caught me. You couldn't possibly have missed it, because I forgot to post it in the first place. Cheese and crackers, I could sure put one of them desk-mounted coffee faucets to good use right about now. Squishingly, squishingly, squishingly.
Sunday, April 06, 2003 Link
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You know what I love doing? I love spending way more time and energy than I really ought to cleaning up a series of posts on a public message board that I run because some knob who had his Corn Flakes pissed on this morning decided to peck them out of his keyboard so fast that he obviously wasn't thinking that somebody could possibly take offense to his tone and attitude even though the same people he's berating are the ones who may actually be able to help him with his issues that ended up coming out sounding not only asinine but rude and ultimately a waste of my and everyone else's bandwidth. That's what I love doing.
Wednesday, April 02, 2003 Link
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ASP in a Nutshell with asparagus and noodles. Calgary.
John Siracusa has written numerous enlightening articles about OS X going back to the early developer previews. This week he specifically takes the OS X Finder to task for not being a successful spatial user environment. About the Finder... isn't so much about slamming the obvious problems and interface widgets that everyone loves to hate, but more about exploring why some concepts are better than others as related to the way humans learn and interact with things. Basically, the spatial Finder works more like the way people explore and search and noodle and uncover information. Earlier iterations of the Mac OS prove this on several levels. Many of John's points and explanations harken back to the days when Tog preached, Apple listened, and the desktop was a more usable piece of real estate. I particularly agree with his assessment that path-based navigational leftovers are tied more to the historical Unix underpinnings of the OS than to task efficiency and true usability.
... the apparent efficiency of path-based file management and navigation is an illusion created by the lack of visual clutter, and the invisibility of the effort expended in order to build up and maintain a working set of abstract file path information in the mind of the user. In reality, the 'total cost' of such an interface is very high, the capacity is very low, and the recall speed and memory persistence is poor when compared with more visual interfaces.
Word. I also love the fact that he unearths a few elements from the ill-fated Copland user interface - like "live search folders" to show how smart the Finder could be. If you hate the new Finder, read this article. If you love the new Finder, read it as well. Maybe a few big brains at Apple will have a gander at it too.
Tuesday, April 01, 2003 Link
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Bare Bones Software Announces New Pricing Option
BEDFORD, Mass. - April 1, 2003 - Bare Bones Software today announced they have expanded their pricing options for BBEdit 7.0, the award-winning professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh.
Now available is the option to purchase a single user license of BBEdit with hand delivery by a Bare Bones Software employee and one full year of personal service (including unlimited feature additions, ripping the cellophane off the CD, reading the manual aloud, and more). This opportunity is only available for a limited time, at the special price of US$250,000.
"At Bare Bones Software, we have set the industry standard for customer service and technical support," said Rich Siegel, founder, president, and CEO of Bare Bones Software. "Many people didn't think we could possibly offer better service; I'm happy to say that we've proven them wrong."
Heh. Read more of this press release and relive previous April foolery from the Bare Bones gang. For example, the personal analog device announcement, the acquisition of fenway park, their determination that lime iMacs ran software faster, and the infamous Bare Bones hardware product.
Furthermore.
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