Entries in the Links/Resources category:
Helvetica - the movie
Monday, December 03, 2007
I watched Helvetica last night. Watching a movie about a typeface marks me out as a consummate geek, but it was a great documentary.
By giving lots of information about Helvetica’s development and usage, it ends up as informal history of design over the last 50 years.
Great clips from graphic designers and type designers keep things moving along, and one of the things that struck me was how different American designers use of the font was from European use.
So far from being a fascistic typeface forcing conformity on us all (as the boomer-era designers insisted), it has within it the capability to create very different moods and impressions.
Lots of Apple gear on view in the designers’ studios of course, and I really want a Freitag bag now (made from recycled truck tarpaulins and used seat belts). With some Helvetica on it, of course.
Color management - welcome to a corner of hell
Friday, June 22, 2007
I must confess to have been only vaguely aware of the wide differences in the way colours are displayed online - until recently. Or rather, I was aware of the differences from testing sites in different OS and browser combinations, but I was only vaguely concerned - Macs’ 1.8 gamma meant a difference from PC’s 2.2, and every now and again I’d get a photo to edit that had a colour profile attached, but that was it.
And I was partly right about this - unlike the print design world, where color profiles for monitors, printers and the like are carefully controlled, and there’s a real struggle to get color matching as right as it can be, in the online world, we have to be a little more flexible. Almost all of our audience wouldn’t know a calibrated monitor if it ate their lunch, and most browsers (the programs, not the people) are a sorry bunch that don’t support color management anyway. It’s a sRGB world, for better or worse. Or so I thought.
Going digital after all
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Back in September, I wrote about how the explosion in digital photography had created some bargains for film SLRs. I benefited from this myself, when my mother in law upgraded to a new Canon digital SLR, and gave me her old film camera.
This, together with the natural desire to take lots of pictures of my young daughter, rekindled my interest in real photography - after I’d been distracted for years by the ease of digital point-and-shoots. And I got some shots I was really happy with (like the one accompanying this article).
I was right - getting hold of cheap (or in my case, free) film SLR is a good way to start taking more pictures, and now is a great time to get hold of one. But I was also completely wrong, in ways I’ll now describe.
Broken Windows
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Over at Macworld, Rob Griffiths outlines how badly infected his Parallels-powered version of XP became in a hurry.
I ran AVG and AdAware on the version of Windows XP I have on my Mac, and found over 30 problem files that needed clearing - bots, trojan horses, viruses: all that malarkey.
What was startling was that I’d hardly used it - maybe a total of 6 hours for site checking over the last 6 weeks. Everything was tidied up quickly, but it makes you realize the kind of nonsense Windows folks have to put up with all the time.
Oh, and the extra one gig of memory I put in the MacBook Pro now makes things much speedier when I’m running both OSes.
Hell Freezes Over
Monday, January 22, 2007
OK, so it’s happened. As you can see, there’s Windows XP running on my new MacBook Pro.
Using Parallels went pretty well, except the XP disk I got was corrupt so the installation hung. Welcome to the world of Microsoft.
Another disk installed perfectly, and soon I was opening sites in IE6, and adjusting them in TextMate on the mac, refreshing and seeing the changes.
New life for old SLRs
Monday, September 18, 2006
The move to digital SLR cameras is gaining pace, as prices drop and enthusiasts look to improve on the sturdy but not spectacular results they're getting from their point-and-shoot digitals. But this is also good news for people still shooting film.
Good sites need good writing
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Sounds obvious, right? But you’d be amazed how many clients are happy to stump up for programming and graphic design, but won’t pay even for an edit to their dodgy copy - which is, after all, what people are coming to their site for in the first place.
My latest article for iQ Content (and the Marketing Institute of Ireland’s print newsletter) gives a couple of examples of good and bad writing:
When organisations plan websites, they usually spend most of their time working out the required features and the design - what the site does and how it looks.
But what they often fail to focus on is what they actually say on the site. This is a critical mistake, as good writing sets the tone for a good website.
Internet Explorer 7 - fingers uncrossed
Friday, February 03, 2006
So I just took the new beta of IE7 for spin, to see if it would break any of my sites (trying out on the Dell PC I use for testing).
It didn’t - which is what I’d expect, as it’s more standards-compliant than IE6, but you never know.
Backup plan
Friday, October 07, 2005
After the hard drive on my wife’s laptop went south earlier this week (prompting a dash to Office Depot to snag an external drive before the laptop breathed its last), I hastened my plans to get a good backup strategy in place.
I’d been backing up all my files and mail onto my 20G iPod every week, and archiving old project files on to CDs, so things weren’t too bad already. And using Basecamp as my project management extranet means that there’s already an external copy of project communication and files (which is another good reason for trying it out, but that’s another story).
But there’s always room for improvement.
Basecamp and Backpack
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
You know that Dyson vacuum cleaner ad, when James Dyson says in his plummy accent, ‘I just think things should work properly,’?
The folks at 37 signals agree. Usability consultants who took the plunge into making things (rather as I’ve done, being a ‘content guy’ or consultant on sites, who now finds himself responsible for the whole thing), they make things that work. Brilliantly.