madmacreations.com Blog

What a Year!

This past year has been very exciting. Here is an excellent recap of the top tech stories of the year. Come back next year and check out their predictions for 2009.

If You Are Reading This, You Should Already Know

This article tries to re-build enthusiasm for PDF-X, but the standard just isn’t ready yet. Despite the efforts of many consortiums, I do not think that PDF-X will be reliable this decade. That’s where diligent communication comes in–it is the most essential tool in the artist’s box.

How’d You Like to Wake Up to This?

On January 30, social bookmarking site ma.gnolia crashed—bad. If they had taken all the steps discussed in this forum, would it have helped? Who’s to say they didn’t? On the positive side, this disaster was an opportunity to invent something new and better. I just hope they have kept enough of a customer base to make it worthwhile.

Teach Fair Use While They’re Young (and There Is Still Such a Thing)

The current controversey concerning artist Shepard Fairey’s Obama/Hope poster might just be a teachable moment. Renowned graphic arts legend Milton Glaser weighs in. Basically, he agrees with the majority of the world (but not, predictably, the courts) that Fairey’s use of an Associated Press photograph for the model constitutes fair use, but he cautions against art students taking the same approach. He believes that neophytes cannot walk such a fine line, and attempting to do so will dull their sensibilities, imagination, and intellect. While I agree, I foresee that corporate encroachment on individual expression will soon make this a moot point, and will prove to blunt the human mind even more.

Yes, If It Does Not Depend on Advertising

Is Graphic Design recession-proof? This thoughtful discussion ruminates on how American Graphic Arts has weathered economic downturns over the past fifty years. How useful is the $3,000 report? Not very, I hazard to say. If you are in Graphic Design, will you be willing to set up a booth at a local farmer’s market? If not, then perhaps you should think of a different profession, because the next decade is going to be extremely tough for artists. Niches are drying up, and the fittest will be those who can think in four dimensions. Generally, I see more potential in large-format printing than in web publishing, but I can’t tell you to take it to the bank—After all, who trusts banks these days?

This Is a Future You Can Bank On!

Participatory media is definitely the cash cow of the future. Any artist who can figure out how to cause his audience to share in a project’s creation is surely going to profit in the coming bad times. Novelist John Scalzi (Old Man’s War)  started out blogging about big ideas—now he is expanding it into a full-blown site of its own. I believe it is a big idea in itself. More big ideas to save our nation please!

Stupid, or Just the Most Brilliant Idea Ever (PDF)

Just when I was about to give up on the importance of brand identity forever, Pepsi-Cola rebranded themselves in a most amazing way. Their new logo has an intuitive familiarity that hasn’t been equaled in a very long time. Now a PDF is circulating on the web that purports to be the presentation that the Arnell Group pitched to Pepsico. It “scientifically” links the development of the new logo with the evolution of the cosmos. I’ve got to admit, this is pretty compelling, but I suspect it is more of a guerilla marketing stunt than a leaked confidential document.

Remember What Lincoln Said

Kevin Yank of Sitepoint has written a very enlightening review of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. He is a little unhappy with the fact that there is (still) not enough support for back-end development.

After All the Money I Spent on Fonts!

CreativePro reviews ten FREE tools every designer should know. Some of them are pretty ubiquitous by now. The Project Management tool looks interesting.

End of an Era

Apple announced its last year at Macworld Expo. Trade shows are another casualty of the economic crisis, I suppose–or could there be a darker reason?

Iconographic Hyperlinks

As always, making the web more accessible benefits everyone. Lately, designers have taken to adding icon images to hyperlinks to help illustrate what they might link to (and the icon’s alt text helps visually disabled users.) For instance, if a link is going to open a PDF, a little Acrobat logo might sit next to it. These icons have usually been handled with CSS classes, but Toby Somerville makes an excellent case for relying on JavaScript instead.

They Aughta Be Made to Eat Their Words

Most of the magazine and media predictions for 2009 look like they’ve been written by morons! Sometimes I seriously wonder how such clueless lunks get these jobs. Especially the ones who say that next year things are gonna turn around, and that the price of paper and postage, or internet competition are determining the fate of traditional media. Bottom-line: any media relying on advertising revenue is gonna suffer BIG time next yer. Next up: bad investments were much more important than infrastructure costs for crashing papers this year. Expect a long blog post on this shortly.

Turnabout Is Fair Play

Adobe InDesign has always been able to open Quark Xpress files (at least up to version 4, in my experience.) This functionality has been crucial in wooing users over. Now Quark is picking up the ball and running with it. While Quark Xpress itself is still InDesign illiterate, the Quark Publishing System will allow InDesign/Incopy workflows to integrate with Xpress users. WIll this be enough to keep the company from fading into obscurity? I doubt it very much.

Scads of Acrobat Tutorials

Adobe has been treating Acrobat like Macromedia (and now Adobe!) used to treat Flash: All things to all people. Now that Acrobat 9 has become a component of  the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, one practically needs a BFA to handle it. Fortunately, the Acrobat User Community has posted alot of very useful tutorials.

As a Veteran of Browser Wars I & II…

After having mistakenly chosen the rong side during the DHTML heyday, and while trying to keep afloat during this Web 2.0 bubble, I should have seen it coming. The advent of Google Chrome is igniting a new Browser War, with the once mighty Internet Explorer possibly the most threatened. Here is an excellent article that actually reinforces the basics of good web design.

Considering Soft Proofing?

Couldn’t make it to Chicago for GraphExpo 2008? This article covers the forefront of soft-proofing workflows from the Show Floor.

A Printer’s Port in the Upcoming Storm

Those printers who had the foresight to invest in large-format are probably the only ones who will weather the coming hard times. The Point-of-Sale market will likely expand massively in the near future.

Blame the Slowskis

Broadband speeds in the U.S. fall way behind other countries. At least it will take a while for internet users to find this out.

More Tricky File Conversion Help

While MadMac Creations does provide tutorials for printing difficult files, InDesign Guru Anne-Marie Concepcion provides an excellent series on converting files for use.

Table-Based Layout makes a (Slight) Comeback

Remember way back in halcyon days of the dot-com bubble, when your web development tools told you it was okay to lay out a web page in nested tables (it was right after those tools told you NOT to use frames any longer…) Now that Cascading Style Sheets have proven their worth to practically the whole world, some bright bulbs have considered trying to hack CSS into acting like tables again. The results, though, end up looking like slieght-of-hand tromp l’oiel.

The Redeeming Power of Focus Groups

I would love to know what finally convinced Microsoft to abandon Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s ham-handed treatment of their product (those terribly annoying Gates-Seinfeld vignettes.) Microsoft PR mouths tried to spin the blunder as only a first phase, and purely intended to seque into the current “I am a PC” campaign. But if that was the case, then why did they create ads that will never be aired?

A Very Good Investment

Digital Signage is the wave of the future. Invest in it. Here is a very good product roundup for your consideration.

…And It Didn’t Take a Dentist to Pry It Out of Him

Neal Stephenson loves OS X!

Hate to Be Right

Ad revenue is drying up so fast and so steeply, that many content producers are considering options that they thought they’d never live to make. I said this would be happening back in March.

Midori Leaks Out

Microsoft’s experimental new operating system, code-named “Midori” has been making its way through various rumormills recently. This operating system is such a deviation from the Windows kernel, that I doubt it will ever truly be released in this incarnation. Perhaps that is a shame, because its modular architecture is intriguing.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

The Washington Post is looking to upgrade its online presence, by looking to the New York Times. Personally, I think this is a smart initiative, as NYTimes.com is direted by one of the most brilliant designers of our times, Khoi Vinh.

I Prefer My Archetypes to Look Pre-Raphaelite

Artist and Curator Kevin Zucker discusses some of the images that permeated the early digital revolution, and ruminates on their ubiquitous nature. Very interesting reading. This essay confirms to me that post-modern art is more about process than content.

What Happens When Only the Rich Patronize a Thing

Magazine sales down 6.3%, ad revenue down, Playgirl folding… doom and gloom for print media. Perhaps publishing actual truth may help.

TIP: How to Open Anything

CreativePro has an excellent how-to article on opening quirky and legacy files–for a price, of course. MadMac Creations has a fairly good tutorial on printing stubborn files.

More than the dot-com bust, 9/11 is a touchstone for the nadir of American design. While both may have had the same root cause, the trauma of that day (and its resultant economic ripples) make it a much easier mark. Even Paula Scher would gladly lay the blame on Osama before the neo-conservative lunatics who flushed our economy away. She has been doing an impromptu survey of billboard advertising in New York City, and is pleased to announce that, not only has advertising resurged since that fateful day, advertising has taken on a new aesthetic. What a load of hogwash!

First off, neglecting indictments is the sure path to ruin. To ignore at best—and reward at worst—the criminals who beat the drums that lead a nation into a disastrous war, is bad enough in its own right. To let them off the hook is only inviting disaster (as if we haven’t had our fill of disasters for the past eight years.) The worst disaster of all, however, is inviting imitation.

Advertising and graphic design is historically the vanguard of economic prosperity, I will concede that to Ms. Scher. If it hadn’t been for the Depression, Woody Guthrie might have been a successful sign painter, and by all means could have founded a large Midwestern ad agency. But then his agency would be whistling in the dark today.

Adweek’s Joe Duffy seems to be the design world’s equivalent to Bill Kristol. He touts a new, democratic age of design that will just make everything better, but at the heart he is wrong on just about every point. Being one of those self-taught designers who worry those “Tiger Woods” level designers, I would like to use this article to support my raison-d’etre. Instead, I take great umbrage, perhaps because I really get it.

Our economy is poised on the precipice of a depression of historical proportions. Very soon, the vehicle wrap market is going to collapse because very few people are going to afford to drive cars, never mind decorate them with colorful advertising banners. Not that printers who integrated early will go bankrupt—there just won’t be much room for new business. Will these surviving printer make good design a priority? Well, seeing the glut of starving artists in the future, perhaps he won’t have to. Those artists had better be willing to work for a song, too.

The democratization of design means that the hand-painted logo on the side of a maid service van is respected as much as Dairy Queen (which may not be that much after all.) It does not mean that you need Crispin Porter & Bogusky to make your website more interactive. One big secret in web design is that graphics are actually spurious. They don’t hurt, but then again, they don’t help much either. Good graphic presentation is a shiny bauble used to lure clients—not customers. Those who know the difference truly get it.

Khoi Vinh is perhaps one of the foremost designers who gets it. He is Design Director of NYTimes.com. In an interview in the April 2008 issue of Print Magazine, he stated that a paradigm has shifted from the outside/in to the inside/out. Designers who see their product in the hands of the audience as the last step in a process are dinosaurs who will not survive the coming catastrophe. “We’re entering a new era of design where the brands and experiences we create are no longer closely held, highly controlled cathedrals, but rather bazaars of commerce and conversation… Digital media has upended that equation and now—yes—the audience is an active participant in the process of design.”

A designer who understands the convergence of print and web design has a head start. One who is willing to let the user, or audience (or client?) participate in the process will be the swift cat in the future. Let design be ugly if that is the case! Only do not let the liars put us in another colossal mess.

Don’t Hate the Hype

In our new “disintermediated media universe,” top-down dissemination of cool doesn’t influence buying decisions like it used to. What’s to replace it? Rovian fear and divisiveness are the default tactics of an entity desperately struggling to preserve power, and the blogosphere is a perfect battleground. Generating hype—or anti-hype—through the internet is rapidly overtaking the effectiveness of conventional media marketing. Like weapons manufacturers, marketers can sell their wares to either side and make a hefty profit.

A Cynical Craft

The hierarchical notion of cool is still the weapon of choice in the corporate universe, however. One of their favorite marketing strategies is to co-opt a trend or movement and re-engineer it to look as if they are leading it. For instance, look at how rampant greenwashing is. Likewise, over the past holiday season, when anti-consumerism generated a resurgence of Arts & Crafts, don’t think that Target and Wal-Mart didn’t notice. Look for expanded Crafts aisles next year.

Keylining Placed Images in Illustrator

An excellent tutorial from Mordy Goldman for putting strokes on raster images placed into an Illustrator document. Personally, however, I think the best practice would be to make a single-page InDesign document instead—right tool for the job and all…

Designing HTML Email

Consideration is always the first, and most important element of any type of design. This is doubly true for designing HTML email blasts. This article helps the novice think it through thoroughly before even setting the type.

Sun Acquires MySQL

This may be the most important technology acquisition of the year. The implications are enormous: the extent of Sun’s reach not only into the open-source community, but into the companies that rely on it. Personally, I am not as squeamish about Sun as I am about Microsoft. Should I be?

Not As Innovative As We First Thought

Gizmodo editor Brian Lams has put together an amazing article that shows how Apple Wunderkind and hailed designer of the iMac Jonathan Ive has in fact been cribbing his design ideas from 1960’s Braun designer Dieter Rams. I wouldn’t call it plagiarism, however—product design is very limited, constrained by concrete forces such as material, technology, and use.

Good Color Management Is an Analgesic

In one of my first design jobs, my supervisor was horribly afraid of the RGB color space. Back in the late Nineties, conversion of colorspaces was an unpredictable process at best. Since the advent of color management modules (CMM Profiles), the job has become so easy that it is nearly painless. This American Printer article fleshes out the whole issue nicely. Soon, hopefully, the default colorspace for continuous tone images used in press will be RGB (or even LAB?!)

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…

Hoping to gain ground it has lost to Adobe, Quark has released CopyDesk 7 to create a collaborative functionality with Quark Publishing System 7. Xtensions are still needed to complete the same tasks that InDesign/InCopy CS3 do straight out of the box (e.g., round-trip Photoshop Image filtering.) But since pricing is now more competitive, this should be a serious consideration for Quark users needing to upgrade to a more collaborative editorial workflow.

Calendars Abound

In this Web 2.0 world sprouting social networks everywhere, online calendaring has become more and more necessary. WIRED Magazine has compiled a list of the best of the breed. It seems (at first glance) that internet behemoth Google wins out once again.

Can Your Browser Pass the Acid Test?

Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch claims that Internet Explorer 8 will pass this test on Web Standards compliance. So far, the only broswer that I’ve found (on the Macintosh platform, anyway,) is Safari 3 (the image at left is a screenshot from my laptop. It is a G4 running Mac Os X 10.4 “Tiger.”) How important is this to average web surfers? Not very. On the other hand, this should be of major importance to web designers. I, for one, am sick to death of writing hacks for browsers that do not conform to Web Standards (and maybe, once they all do, I can familiarize myself with what those standards actually are!) I am pining for for the day when the design I create looks exactly the same no matter what browser or platform I am viewing it on. Now that the most blatant culprit is getting in line, that day has gotten a whole lot closer. Remember all those things you said you’d do when hell froze over? Better get to it…

Five Blind Men and an Elephant

MediaBistro’s UnBeige did an interesting article about five things that make a successful magazine cover. Normally, I hate these things–they remind me of the ancient Taoist folktale of the woodcutter who quit cutting wood to wait by a stump after a rabbit ran headlong into it. As soon as a successful magazine cover comes along with a new paradigm, they will have to change this article to “Six Things…” Thankfully, sloppy designers will always have a home at teen magazines.

For Those of You with Xacto Scars on Your Thumbs

Here is a piece of lore: “Typesetting & Paste-up, ’70’s Style!” Remember when “Blueline” actually meant something, and “Burnishing” was often your only form of exercise?

NEWSFLASH: Microsoft Finally Good for Something!

Microsoft is working hard to expand their ubiquitous sRGB color space into scRGB: a wider gamut that will allow greater flexibility when presenting images on digital displays (and, I suspect, better photo-editing capabilities in the long run.) The best thing Microsoft did to promote this new format was to put it in their Vista operating system, so that users do not need to purchase expensive image-editing software.

One More Design Community

Dreamstime, the online stock photo store, is now hosting blogs. I promised myself I’d look at it more, but how much time is there to read about someon else’s day?

#11: Insinuate that their degree ain’t worth the sheep it was killed for

Ten ways to drive a Graphic Designer insane–all of which any halfway-competent designer should be able to work around with a minimum of effort. But is it effort that truly drives a designer crazy?

The Vista out the Windows is a Little Murky

Microsoft has updated Windows XP with a new build simply because they have run out of product aactivataion keys. The latest build contains “no fixes or feature changes. Rather than upgrade to the clunky and quirky Windows Vista, many PC users would rather continue with the tried-and-true XP.

Hopefully the Only YouTube Link Ever

I always try to avoid making this blog a list of YouTube links, but this one is truly amazing. This presentation by Mitsubishi’s Shai Avidan, in conjunction with The Interdisciplinary Center and MERL’s Ariel Shamir, is as revolutionary as the GIF. “Content Aware Image Resizing” will re-make the concept of imagery with no less impact than the photograph. It will force us to re-define graphics and perhaps even the the relationship between imagery and truth. Phenomenal!

Legal Protection for Bloggers

Recently, Goggle pulled an blog post it hosted. That blogger had posted the salaries of Claremont, CA city employees. The blogger tried to leverage the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which protects online publishers. But lawyers represesnting Claremont argued that the salaries were copyrighted information. Pretty flimsy argument, if you ask me–since such records are opeon to FOIA requests.

But anyway, most of the time, censors and other fascists rely on your ignorance of the law to perpetrate their perfidiousness. Keep yourself informed by reviewing Chililngeffects.org’s FAQ on the  DMCA’s Safe Harbor Provisions.