To DIY or Not To DIY, that is the question.

My sister Nancy makes a valid point in her comment to my last post ... it's not appropriate to restrict graphic software to use only by industry professionals. Not in this day and age of do-it-yourself everything. I have mixed thoughts about this trend.

I like very much that there are tools available independent artists like Felicia Day and Projected Twin to bypass the big studio entertainment business blockades. They can create and distribute their own creative work, gather their own audience, and stay in direct contact with them at the same time. The tools are getting more sophisticated, and while "The Guild" may never have the special effects of a Speilberg blockbuster... it doesn't need to. It's great and it's out there, and it's not by Paramount or 20th Century Fox or Tristar. Yay all over that.

On a smaller scale, there's a self-checkout at the library, and at the grocery store, and of course the gas station... do your own taxes online... ok, still good...

How about going to WebMD to self-diagnose? How about going to one of these online trading sites to pick some investments? There are lines drawn for things that can affect your health, like purchasing certain medications, but there are many other things that you get to do all by your own little ole self, whether you are able to make wise and informed choices or not. Granted, you're not going to lose your savings or your health if you choose to create a jpg when you really need a gif; I'm just wondering at what point it becomes more problematic than convenient to do it all yourself?

Yes, this is an extremely silly comparison. I bring it up as two points on a wider scale. Maybe there should be a scale of 1 to 10, where sewing on your own button is a 1 and doing your own appendectomy is a 10.

Acronym Soup

I've learned to dread the phrase "Can you send me my logo?" Years ago, that just meant sending a sheet printed logos in different sizes. Easy. Now it's this whole ordeal requiring a full-blown inquisition... what format do you want? ("Oh, I don't know...") OK, how will it be used? Is it being printed? Digital or offset? ("huh?") Somehow I have to extract a bunch of technical info from a non-technical person in order to know whether to make an rgb.jpg or a cmyk.pdf or a spot color .ai or an indexed .gif. If I just send them whatever I have on file, I inevitably get the phone call saying that wasn't what they needed... can I send it another way.... no, that wasn't it... could I just talk directly to their printer/web designer/engraver/sign maker and see what it is they need...

My opinion: The proliferation of desktop publishing software to the general public has been a wretched development. I almost think you should have to be licensed before you are allowed to handle these bytes of data. And Word should have some kind of a warning label. "You probably can't use this software for what you are planning to do."

Hello, new Mac

My trusty old Powerbook G4 finally passed into silicon oblivion... I took it to the nearest Mac shop for responsible recycling. Seems strange to think that it's not here anymore, even though I haven't been able to use it for a while (the graphics card sputtered out after a long illness). That little machine had become a part of my home. I was all moved into it and had it all set up, and could generally find whatever I needed even through the digital clutter. I must admit, it had become a pretty fair reflection of how I live in the real world -- too many notes-to-self on the desktop, too many old and unused applications still loaded, too many long-completed projects left on the hard drive, too many started but not finished projects left to keep the finished ones company.

And now here I have a brand spanking new one! It's spiffy, it's speedy, it's minty-fresh and has scads of available disk space. And no clutter at all! How long can I keep it organized? I wonder, if I can get a handle on keeping this little digital lap warmer clean, will it motivate me to keep the rest of my home clutter-free?

Probably not. But for right now... hello, zen. This is nice.

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.