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Sixtyspots

June 24, 05 //
9

Sixty SpotsFrom the looks of it, there’s a new web appli­ca­tion about to hit the Inter­net that uses emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies like XHTML­Httpre­quest (bet­ter known as Asyn­chro­nous JavaScript and XML or AJAX) into some­thing that one could only hope be a sweet service.

See­ing as though this is a project stem­ming from the mind of usabil­ity and AJAX guru Adam Michela, I’d be sur­prised if it isn’t the next best thing for travel and communication.

For the moment there’s only a teaser splash page with the typ­i­cal, dan­gling the car­rot sign-up form. Is it just me or does this make you sali­vate for the ser­vice even more? In the past I’ve been drawn in from other web app teasers, mostly those by the 37signals guys, but this splash page is dif­fer­ent (it might be the bril­liant and semi-cuddly use of clouds in the logo).

For one, it’s using AJAX and the FAT (Fade Any­thing Tech­nique) in a sub­tle man­ner. It’s instant feed­back, draws your eye and assures you that some­thing occured — a much bet­ter ver­i­fi­ca­tion tech­nique than just your typ­i­cal “Email received. Thanks.” mes­sage that fol­lows most forms after they’ve been sub­mit­ted. I might even con­sider snatch­ing it up for use on the Sidev­ille splash page. Which by the way, just where did the term “splash page” come from?

At any rate, I’m curi­ous to see the end result and know for sure that the next time I’m plan­ning a trip, I’ll keep Six­tyspots in mind to make sure the hotel I reserved is legit and isn’t secretly a sweat­shop front for My Lit­tle Pony clothes wear — you just never know. 

The New Portfolio

June 17, 05 //
8

I’ve dis­cussed this idea numer­ous times with friends and col­leagues of mine and each time it becomes clear, no mat­ter how many opin­ions are thrown in the ring, that blog­ging has evolved into some­thing dif­fer­ent. It’s no longer just a per­sonal log to gather — in a col­lec­tive dig­i­tal bin — thoughts and obser­va­tions, rather, blog­ging by def­i­n­i­tion is now con­sid­ered a work­ing port­fo­lio for prospec­tive job opportunities.

Over the course of the past year, the term blog­ging has seeped into the media as either the new face of jour­nal­ism, more specif­i­cally a tour de force of inde­pen­dent writ­ers cut­ting the fat from what would oth­er­wise be edited mate­r­ial, or a threat to main­stream media.

Whether you believe blog­ging is the new wave of jour­nal­ism or a creep­ing threat isn’t the point, it’s that despite all that, it’s mostly a medium in which cre­ative types (writ­ers, edu­ca­tors, artists, web devel­op­ers, speak­ers, etc.) can express them­selves and poten­tially col­lab­o­rate, whether it be dis­cus­sions that add new lev­els of thought to the mate­r­ial (be it an arti­cle or pho­to­graph) or bet­ter yet, cre­ate some­thing with a more tan­gi­ble grasp of bet­ter­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion and human interaction.

At this point it’s all opin­ion, nei­ther right or wrong, but, it’s some­thing to think about if you ever won­der why blog­ging has become so main­stream and why from here on out it’ll only (hope­fully) evolve into some­thing far beyond our cur­rent lev­els of comprehension.

 

Odd Thoughts: Part Two

June 11, 05 //
5

There are some posts through­out a blogger’s time­line that beg for revi­tal­iza­tion or per­haps, as in this case, a chance to revisit and expand upon. Around two months ago, Odd Thoughts was posted for one sim­ple and yet obvi­ous rea­son; for me, to share with you, a few thoughts that ram­ble and bounce along in my mind.

Some are quirky, oth­ers just down­right silly and implau­si­ble, yet as a whole they are a col­lec­tion of ran­dom spurts that to some might seem inco­her­ent or use­less in some capac­ity but to oth­ers are the key towards hap­pi­ness and con­tent­ment, a break from the per­ils of real­ity. To me, these thoughts, while not nec­es­sar­ily life chang­ing by any means, are still impor­tant to keep a sense of san­ity in a world where seri­ous­ness is abound.

Every­day we are faced with that per­son who we come across, whom at first glance, seems pouty or sour in some way. You know who I’m talk­ing about because these indi­vid­u­als always seem down-and-out, rest­less or grumpy. Our first gut reac­tion to this might be to either ignore the per­son in ques­tion or attempt to make them smile, to fill their mind with lyri­cal and hope­fully humor­ous non­sense that actu­ally serves a pur­pose; to enlighten their hid­den but whim­si­cal self.

Life is too seri­ous to not take a step back, breath in and laugh at your­self and laugh with oth­ers, it’s impor­tant to not only your own sense of mind but to oth­ers. Laugh­ter and humor is in fact con­ta­gious and for each per­son that smiles and shrugs off any feel­ing of despair­ity, solem­ness or begrudge­ful thoughts, will emerge from their shell and real­ize that life is much too short to for­get about what makes us feel good inside.

On that note, I’d like to share with you some addi­tional “Odd Thoughts” and if you’d like, please share some of your own or you could even answer a few.

If George Jet­son and Homer Simp­son were in a box­ing match, who would win?

If you woke up tomor­row and every­thing was made of clay, would you be afraid to shave?

Why isn’t there a jump rope made of licorice?

Why is children’s music (like the Itsy, Bitsy Spi­der) typ­i­cally used as creepy back­ground music in hor­ror movies?

Why do some peo­ple take care of grass as a plant when there’s plenty of it outside?

If paper can cut as eas­ily as it does, why hasn’t some­one come out with non-paper-cutting paper?

What would Orco (from He-Man) look like with­out his cape?

What did Tashi Sta­tion look like? Luke never got the chance to pick up some power converters.

If you could choose any movie to be mag­i­cally trans­ported into, what would you choose?

If Nig­gles are Noogles and Pas­tries are Grob­bles, what is a TiddlyWiki?

If tomor­row they rename Fire­fox to Fire­cow, would peo­ple still use it?

 

Wrath of the Keebler Elves

June 9, 05 //
11

As a kid, I remem­ber the Kee­bler Elve’s com­mer­cials quite fondly. At the time I never really under­stood the con­nec­tion between the elves and Kee­bler, but I had no knowl­edge at that age of a key com­po­nent of mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing; branding.

Accord­ing to the Kee­bler Brands web site, the Kee­bler elves (includ­ing the main elf him­self, Ernie Kee­bler) are among the most rec­og­nized char­ac­ters in adver­tis­ing, right up there with Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Bud Light’s Spud MacKenzie.

The elves are sup­posed to sym­bol­ize ded­i­ca­tion, gen­eros­ity and good-naturedness as they work in a hol­low tree churn­ing out end­less amounts of Uncom­monly Good® prod­ucts, which include mainly snack items like cook­ies and crackers.

Paul David­son, author of Con­sumer Joe, recently blogged about whether or not it’d be bet­ter to be a Oompa Loompa or Kee­bler Elf;

Let me put it to you this way. Would you rather spend each and every day danc­ing around like a clown, singing songs for stuck-up chil­dren on a tour of your bosses’ choco­late facil­ity, con­stantly bend­ing at the knees (ouch, arthri­tis!), con­stantly hav­ing to wear weird flourescently-decorated striped M.C. Ham­mer stretch pants, and singing in rhyme… OR… Would you rather work in a nice lit­tle for­est, in a great house built into a tree (phat, baby!), and come up with great new and excit­ing ideas for cook­ies, crack­ers and other sweet treats which you, your­self, will always get credit for?

It breaks down this way. Would you rather be a slave or an entrepreneur?

It’s inter­est­ing how these lit­tle elves are per­me­nantly ingrained in our minds as “do good­ers”, the per­fect worker, tiny entre­pre­neurs who do one thing right; cre­at­ing sug­ary good­ness for sweet-toothed consumption.

I don’t know about you, but every time I pass by a Kee­bler pack­age sit­ting there on the shelf I often won­der if a Kee­bler elf might’ve acci­dently fallen in, wait­ing there for me to pur­chase the box so I can take him home and release him back into the wild to con­tinue his (or her) quest for snack good dominance. 

Musical Baton

May 16, 05 //
11

John Oxton passed the musi­cal baton to me so here goes nothing;

Total vol­ume of music files on my computer

Near­ing close to 9-10GB on my work com­puter and about 30GB on my home com­puter. My tastes in music vary so I’ve got every­thing from orches­tral to alter­na­tive with a wee bit of clas­si­cal mixed in.

The last CD I bought was

The last CD I bought was the Men in Black sound­track (for $1.00 from ebgames). What can I say? I’m a sucker for orches­tral / movie sound­tracks, notably any­thing by Danny Elfman.

Song play­ing right now

Bring Your Lovin’ Back Here by Gomez. Thanks goes out to Molly for tun­ing me in and get­ting me hooked.

Five songs I lis­ten to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

  • Run — Col­lec­tive Soul
  • Iris — Goo Goo Dolls
  • Banana Pan­cakes — Jack Johnson
  • Some­one Else’s Arms — Mae
  • Fake Plas­tic Trees — Radiohead

Five Six peo­ple who will be passed the baton:

 

Celebration, Florida

May 4, 05 //
10

Celebration, FLIn 1994, the Walt Dis­ney Com­pany fig­ured out what they could do with a sliver of unde­vel­oped land near Dis­ney World. Exec­u­tives decided to trans­form the swamp land (pre­vi­ously used as a hold­ing tank of sorts for cap­tured alli­ga­tors) into a master-planned liv­ing com­mu­nity, deem­ing it Cel­e­bra­tion, Florida.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, there are two ver­sions as to the rea­son­ing behind this decision:

One story for the rea­son behind Disney’s idea to build a com­mu­nity there was that Osce­ola County was con­sid­er­ing tax­ing the land at a higher rate to rec­og­nize its poten­tial, and so Dis­ney chose to make money off it.

Another ver­sion, which seems to be more per­sonal and friendly is that the Walt Dis­ney Com­pany was ful­fill­ing Walt Disney’s orig­i­nal vision of EPCOT as an “exper­i­men­tal pro­to­type com­mu­nity of tomor­row”. Instead of becom­ing a test­bed for com­mu­nity liv­ing and city plan­ning, his orig­i­nal vision turned into more of a show­case for cur­rent and future tech­nolo­gies; a hands-on learn­ing center.

In Walt’s words:

EPCOT … will take its cue from the new ideas and new tech­nolo­gies that are now emerg­ing from the cre­ative cen­ters of Amer­i­can indus­try. It will be a com­mu­nity of tomor­row that will never be com­pleted, but will always be intro­duc­ing and test­ing and demon­strat­ing new mate­ri­als and sys­tems. And EPCOT will always be a show­case to the world for the inge­nu­ity and imag­i­na­tion of Amer­i­can free enterprise.

Dur­ing the con­struc­tion phase, the Walt Dis­ney Com­pany sought the help of world-renowned Robert A.M. Stern archi­tects, Cooper Robert­son & Part­ners and Michael Bierut and part­ners from Pen­ta­gram who worked together in cre­at­ing a har­mo­nious con­cept of “New Urban­ism”. A rel­a­tively new ideal, New Urban­ism is the syn­ergy of mod­ernism and futur­ism where res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial zones would be meshed together.

Archi­tects and graphic design­ers worked together in cre­at­ing every minute detail in the town, from the homes to the movie the­atres includ­ing cus­tom designed man­hole cov­ers and street signs. Accord­ing to one of the lead graphic design­ers on the project it wasn’t always a pleas­ant col­lab­o­ra­tion as design­ers and archi­tects would on more than one occas­sion clash horns. In the end, the result was noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar; a neigh­borly com­mu­nity wrapped in archi­tec­tural per­fec­tion, even if that sense of per­fec­tion has attracted crit­ics who see Cel­e­bra­tion as noth­ing more than a “cel­e­brated” movie set. 

Girls are Weird

April 15, 05 //
8

The fol­low­ing comes from an email inter­view I had with John Martz of Robotjohnny.com for my Typog­ra­phy course.

Around 1997, Cana­dian graphic and font designer John Martz decided to design a type­face which would be inspired, in part, by his child­hood and his bewil­der­ment with the oppo­site sex. Accord­ing to Martz;

It shares its inspi­ra­tion with a lot of my work, which is the stuff I grew up on as a kid — Hanna Bar­bera car­toons, lit­tle Golden books [and] Looney Tunes. A fun, almost retro style.

The font would be called Girls are Weird and lit­tle did Martz know that for the next 7–8 years it would become one of the more pop­u­lar free fonts dis­trib­uted on the Inter­net due to an unusual and refresh­ing usage agree­ment; that is, if the font is used for com­mer­cial pur­poses all that Martz asks for in return is a pur­chase from his Amazon.com wishlist.

Girls are WeirdGirls are Weird is a curly-q font made purely for dec­o­ra­tive or dis­play pur­poses with a rel­a­tively large x-height. When Martz was design­ing Girls are Weird he men­tioned that he never thought about its intended use, instead focus­ing on the fact that he was just moved by the fun of cre­at­ing it. On that note he also acknowl­edges the fact that the font itself wasn’t dif­fi­cult to create;

I cre­ated it almost 10 years ago before hav­ing any for­mal design edu­ca­tion or real grasp of the soft­ware, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m both pleased and sur­prised that it’s still kick­ing about.

In the cre­ative process, Martz explained that he first starts with sketches. From there, once he’s pleased with a sketch, he’ll then scan the draw­ings into the com­puter and work in Illus­tra­tor to con­struct the font visu­ally. Like any­thing, his ini­tial attempts at font cre­ation used more arbi­trary methods;

My first exper­i­ments in cre­at­ing fonts [were] done in stone-age ver­sions of Corel­Draw, which had an option to export draw­ings into .ttf files with very lit­tle con­trol over any­thing. I soon grad­u­ated to a com­bi­na­tion of Illus­tra­tor for draw­ing and Fontog­ra­pher for the con­struc­tion and out­put of the font. I now use font­lab because of its com­pat­i­bil­ity with OS X.

Since Girls are Weird is fea­tured on a mul­ti­tude of free font sites it’s not sur­pris­ing that the font itself has been seen in the wild. Martz has seen it used on toys, games, books, comic books, CDs, store­fronts, sig­nage and even on Television.

In regards to offer­ing his fonts for free online and his Amazon.com share­ware model, Martz explains that the only real issue he’s run into is when peo­ple don’t abide by the rules;

… part of the prob­lem that the Inter­net presents is that peo­ple love free stuff, so my fonts get passed around and they show up on free font web­sites and CD-ROMs often with­out the orig­i­nal copy­right infor­ma­tion, so it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to police. I know that every time I see one of my fonts out in the wild that often­times it’s by some­one who didn’t pay for the font, but I ulti­mately can’t com­plain because it’s still excit­ing to see my work in the wild and I can’t guar­an­tee that it was my own site that the font came from.

Despite this issue, Martz has been impressed by those who do abide by the share­ware model; “the hon­est and good nature of peo­ple con­tin­ues to impress me, and I get sev­eral things pur­chased from my wish list every month, so even if I feel I’m get­ting ripped off by the peo­ple who don’t read my copy­right info, there are still a good bunch of peo­ple out there who do and they keep my book­shelf stocked!”.

Finally, Martz offers a piece of advice for cur­rent and bud­ding graphic and font designers;

Detail. Don’t skimp on the details. Good design is made by peo­ple who pay atten­tion to the lit­tle things, whether it be kern­ing, mea­sure­ments, colour, etc. Iron­i­cally, its advice I wish I was given when I cre­ated these fonts, some of them in high school, because I feel they’d have a longer shelf life, but I’m still happy Girls are Weird is still popular.

 

Adobe CS2 Woes

April 8, 05 //
14

Creative SuiteI recently pur­chased the entire Adobe Cre­ative Suite about two months ago, pat­ting myself on the back for invest­ing in soft­ware which helps aide in my cre­ativ­ity. A few weeks later, as prob­a­bly every­one is aware, Adobe announced a new update — avail­able in May — to the Cre­ative Suite, dub­bing it CS2 (or appro­pri­ately Cre­ative Suite 2).

One of the coolest fea­tures included in the update is the Van­ish­ing Point, a tool which allows you to dig­i­tally “clone, brush, and paste ele­ments that auto­mat­i­cally match the per­spec­tive of any image area.” Since I had pur­chased it in Feb­ru­ary I fig­ured I’d qual­ify for the free upgrade which Adobe calls the “Post Announce­ment Upgrade”.

Appar­ently the only peo­ple who qual­ify for the upgrade are those who’ve pur­chased CS 1.3 between April 1st and July 31st, 2005. What con­fuses me is the fact that noone would pur­chase the orig­i­nal CS when they could have the Cre­ative Suite 2 for the same price, so I pro­pose that Adobe revise their free upgrade pol­icy, allow­ing those who’ve pur­chased pre­vi­ous ver­sions of their soft­ware within 90 days before the announce­ment to qual­ify, not the other way around. Accord­ing to one of the sales­peo­ple I spoke with at Adobe their pol­icy can account for a cer­tain amount of time before the announce­ment date, but they aren’t allowed to dis­close that information.

Adobe, I love your soft­ware but your upgrade pol­icy needs some tweaking. 

The State of Animation

March 28, 05 //
12

Oliver and Company [1988]My wife and I were watch­ing the mak­ing of Disney’s Oliver and Com­pany on DVD. Unlike today’s exten­sively (and some­times exhaus­tively) researched “making-of” fea­turettes, you could tell this one was used more so as a mar­ket­ing tool. Halfway through the fea­ture, the announcer men­tions that Dis­ney used “state of the art” com­puter tech­nol­ogy as an aid to tra­di­tional 2-D animation.

The next scene shows an inter­view with Roy E. Dis­ney who seems excited about the adap­ta­tion of com­puter tech­nol­ogy and sug­gests that it’ll be a use­ful tool for future Dis­ney films. Now here’s the kicker — towards the end of the com­puter ani­ma­tion bit the announcer reminds the view­ers that while com­puter ani­ma­tion is a fan­tas­tic tool to aide in 2-D ani­ma­tion, fear not, for it will never replace tra­di­tional animation.

15 years later we’ve seen the imme­di­ate clo­sure of Disney’s Florida Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio in 2004 which “put approx­i­mately 250 ani­ma­tors, tech­ni­cians and other per­son­nel out of work.” — a move that many say ended the era of tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion and the rumor that Dis­ney will redo many of their clas­sic films using CGI (or Com­puter Gen­er­ated Imagery).

Like many I’ve been extremely impressed with Pixar’s films, but also feel a bit sad­dened by the fact that tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion is viewed as some­thing arbi­trary and stone aged. To me there are tra­di­tion­ally ani­mated films that impress me more so than computer-animated movies. Put it this way, to this day I’m still moved and in awe of many 2-D ani­mated films (like The Jun­gle Book and Bambi) and mostly because of the flu­id­ity and beauty that res­onates via a few pen­cil strokes.

The secret to Pixar’s suc­cess, at least from what I’ve gath­ered from watch­ing “making-of” fea­turettes and books, is their abil­ity to dig deep into their sub­ject, into the core of their film and its mes­sage and then flesh it out with CGI, some­thing that is lack­ing in other ani­mated films.

Start learn­ing graphic design in Philadel­phia and look for­ward to cre­at­ing the next famous ani­mated char­ac­ter in movies.

Related: The State of Ani­ma­tion Fea­tures by Michael Heilemann 

Oxymorons

March 23, 05 //
17

In George Carlin’s book, Brain Drop­pings, Car­lin lists his favorite oxy­morons, includ­ing but not lim­ited to:

  • Assis­tant Supervisor
  • Orig­i­nal Copy
  • Lim­ited Life­time Guarantee
  • For­ward Lateral
  • Par­tial Cease-Fire
  • Unin­vited Guest
  • Full-time Day Care
  • Busi­ness Ethics

Just in case you didn’t know, accord­ing to Hyper­dic­tionary an oxy­moron (pro­nounced: ‘âksi’mowrân) means “con­join­ing con­tra­dic­tory terms”.

Do you have any favorite oxy­morons to share? Leave a com­ment and maybe this will turn into a repos­i­tory of oxy­morons to use in daily conversation. 

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