Slash and Churn!

I have a guest rant today! This all started with a question I fired off to a friend and fellow geek (ok, actually I'm seriously out-geeked here). Our exchange follows--used with permission, but my Guest Ranter requested anonymity "as it's probably half wrong, but it's the mostly-right part that counts." (Note... you have to get past a couple of exchanges of fairly dry Geekish before the Silly starts!)



Me: "Random question, what's the difference to a computer between a forward slash and a back slash? Don't they both just indicate directory structure?"



GR: "MS-DOS, Windows, and variants use the backslash "\" for folder structure. UNIX, Linux, and most all other operating systems use the forward slash "/". Windows systems running IIS for serving websites use the forward slash for folder structure on the front-end of the website. Clear as mud?"



Me: "The only thing I didn't follow was "IIS" -- is that a system, or a flavor of a system,...? Weird that they'd change from one style of slash to another from the computer system to the web server. Wonder if there was a reason for that. (Or if it was like a NASA thing; one side uses metric and one side doesn't and let's explode something...) "



GR: "IIS is Internet Information Services, Microsoft's suite of site-hosting services for "serving up" WWW, FTP, etc. sites. Similar to Apache web server for Linux.



The internet (and later, the WWW) was around long before Microsoft and Windows existed. It was a happy place, full of unicorns and rainbows and peace-loving beings from all walks of life. The earliest (and still dominant) infrastructure for the internet was built on mainframes and minis running VAX, VMS, AIX, or other UNIX-like systems, so the WWW and the rest of what we collectively refer to as "the internet" sort of inherited that style of folder structure. And then, along came Microsoft.



When Microsoft came on the scene with DOS, and later, Windows, and started making their Operating Systems more network (and thus, internet) capable, by necessity they had to adopt the existing nomenclature for folder structure, especially for running servers. Otherwise, while the rest of the world is linking to http://www.site.com/folder/file.html, if Microsoft had it their way, sites running on Windows would be http:\\www.site.com\folder\file.html and you'd have broken links all over the place.



On the "back end", the nuts-and-bolts part of the server where it does its dirty work, Windows servers still handle folders as drive\folder\file.html but automatically translates that to drive/folder/file.html when the file is being publicly served.



It gets really frustrating when lazy web developers use old and broken versions of MS's Front Page suite, which never did correct the / vs \ behavior, and you'd wind up with a link like "http://www.site.com/files/drivers\windows\driver.exe" --see the switch halfway through? This is still such a widespread problem (solely created by Microsoft's unwillingness to conform to perfectly acceptable standards), there is a plugin for Firefox called "slashy" which automatically corrects "broken" slashes. Of course, IE automagically fixes this bad behavior, but no standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Opera, or Konqueror automatically fix this behavior, because technically speaking, it shouldn't be there in the first place!"



There's supposed to be a fun little end-rant-tag here but I've yet to figure how to get this site to stop stripping it out...



This makes me think of the scene in Zoolander, with Fabio accepting a "Slashy" award: "This means you see me as Best Model-Slash-Actor... and not the other way around." [smirk]

An existing and proven business model?

I think I'll set up a design business like an insurance company. My customers will have to pay me a monthly retainer to do nothing. If they DO have a project come up, I will raise the rates and make them pay a certain amount of it up front, no matter how many months worth of retainer fees they have already paid. If they have any existing bad design, I will refuse to do any new design work to improve it. And if they ever try to do something on their own that I deem dangerous to good design, I will drop them as a client.

Should work, don't you think?

Next they'll just put 'em in the Crackerjacks box

This just in... as posted by Babs, my icon and inspiration (and the answer to so many of my "drawing a blank" design times: "WWBD?") -- iStock has made it possible for all us designers to unload all those pesky logos that are just taking up space on our hard drives. And here it is:

If you create one of the first 10,000 approved logo designs for iStockphoto by January 1, 2010, we’ll pay you $5 per approved logo and another $5 if we reach 10,000 approved logos by that date. So fire up Illustrator to create some amazing logos or dust off all those much-loved logos that never made it past the third round with a client.
Woo hoo. "Fire up Illustrator", huh? This is just depressing.

Re-defined behind my back!

I've discovered something. Designers are now programmers, by agreement of just about everybody except myself. Listings for graphic artists are now all for User Interface Developers, Flash Developers, Actionscript developers... I'm sure there are quite a number of skilled visual creative professionals who also happen to be skilled programmers, but in my experience, the visualizers usually cringe at excessive use of code, and the code crunchers would prefer not to be pixel-jockeys. But during my career I have seen the job of "designer" absorb several other careers: image scanner, typesetter, lithographer (truly though, how many designers even now really understand how or why to trap their graphics?), air brush retouch artist . . . I miss the collaboration with all these skilled pros. As a new artist at an ad agency, just a few months out of school, I was able to spend a lot of time with one of the local litho shop owners, and I learned more from him than I did in any of my college classes. Now the guy sells real estate. Sad, this elimination of the team, but apparently it was inevitable. But I cannot for the life of me see how a designer is now also supposed to be a programmer. There is some helpful software, yeah... but I simply can't see it happening. Perhaps the programmers will now all be expected to be designers... aye me. I've already seen the results of THAT idea. No, no, it takes two completely different types of thinkers to really do both of those jobs well. Unfortunately that's not what the ole bottom line wants. The bottom line wants to cross right through one paycheck or the other. I have no solution for that.
...OK... let's see.
play_btn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, playMovie);
stop_btn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, stopMovie);
function playMovie (event:MouseEvent);void
Oh, yeah. That's what my BFA is all about.

Designer, Brand Thyself!

I finally got a custom header put together for this blog. Truthfully I didn't mind the "generic" Blogger layout at all. I like what they came up with a lot, and it was no chore for me to keep my musings under their very well-designed header while I figured what I should do on my own. It's much easier for me to design a look for someone else than it is myself. My sis can probably relate; it's similar to her hiring a professional organizer to help her clear the clutter. Hire someone who isn't ATTACHED, who can just get the darned job done. I'm much too aware of the huge list of fonts on my system and I want to try each one. Does it REALLY express what I want to say? Do I want to wear that as a brand, all the time? This process becomes a great exercise in learning empathy for my own clients.

The font I used this time is an old one, Lubalin Graph. It's not what I was planning to use at all; I was planning more of a hand-made font, maybe a very-slightly-funky sans serif. This one I just tried out and it sat there properly. For now. It may change. Right now it's just a header, I'm not calling it my brand.

The art is a painting I did called "Bright People." It's in oil, which is not a medium I use now (too messy!); I just really like the imagery here. What are those colorful people talking about? Why is everyone else blandly staring off in another direction? I would hope to be one of those bright people.

Now if I can just find a type face I feel that way about.

Blowups and no sense of proportion!

I can't get over how few people seem to understand the concept proportion. No drama, and nothing abstract or conceptual here, just the literal ratio of height to width. I get a lot of requests to enlarge a photo or piece of artwork to fit a certain area (usually to fit a standard-sized frame), and the toughest concept for people to GET seems to be this: if I enlarge it one direction, it's going to be enlarged the other direction too. Either that, or it gets stretched or scrunched. I'd think that anyone who works with images would have a good grasp of this idea, but apparently not.

I dunno if anyone will ever see this, but I'm going to make a recipe to follow here.
Divide the desired width by the original one. Take that number and multiply it by the original height. If that result is the same as the desired height, then you've got an original of the same proportion as the new size you want, and you can enlarge it without having to crop it. If not... guess what. Something's getting cropped off.

The options:
1) "float it" -- sort of like the "window box" that movies sometimes use if they are being shown on a TV screen.
2) Distort it -- if it's scanned digitally for enlargement, it CAN be enlarged more one way than another to fit; sometimes you can get away with it if it's not to drastic. Don't try it on a portrait though. Yuck.
3) Get a custom frame made.

Random graphic communication

I've been keeping watch lately for communication graphics without words that just show up as part of a day-to-day routine. It's actually trickier than I might have imagined to find them. A red octagonal sign at an intersection communicates "STOP" even before you notice the word printed on it... but the word is still printed there. Some of the nonverbal graphics I've been consciously aware are arrows (up and down buttons on an elevator. A severe bend in the road. More info on the back). I also will count the striped crosswalks painted at intersections; those have a pretty clear meaning without need for explanation. But I'm disappointed; it seems there would be more examples than that. I'm either seeing them but am so used to them that they are only registering subconsciously, or I live in such a small town that there just isn't much need.

There is one thing I remember from one of my previous jobs though -- it was in the pressroom, which was full of all sorts of big heavy equipment. One machine had a couple of huge rollers that paper fed through, and there was the silliest graphic stuck to it as a warning... it was a silhouette of a guy with long hair, and the hair was caught between the rollers. Silhouette-guy's mouth was wide open; I could practically hear the yelp. It was an effective graphic, I must admit, even though it would never win any design awards.

Who is using a contemporary iconography now? The search continues.