NewsLinks Tuesday, February 12, 2008
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?!)
