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Quote of the Week:

Blogger now not so FTP-friendly

I know probably none of you really care, but in March Google will be discontinuing their FTP support of Blogger, the weblog platform we use to post our thoughts here.

This means that at some point we'll be unable to continue this blog as it is now. The good news is that our content management system is basically one big blogging tool itself, so we'll just use that instead. All the current posts will be archived here, forever. So there's still time to make some really inane comments that your descendants can laugh at in coming eons.

By the way, if anyone can point us to a good migration tool that will take Blogger-generated posts and push them into a Joomla CMS, let us know. That way our archives won't look like they are stuck in 1990.

Labels: blogs, google

posted at 2:22 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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2.11.2010

Crowded

For the record, InDesign's palette interface makes it very clear why you should only use their software on a two-monitor setup. One for the layout, and another for the palettes. I'm working on my 15" Mac lappy away from the office right now, and it's none too easy to see a screen-ful of design-space when you've got a fifth of the screen width taken up by this:

Yes yes yes, I know I can collapse these, but when you're manipulating color, typography, and strokes over and over and over, it doesn't really make sense to do that, now, does it?

Labels: software, UX

posted at 10:22 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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2.10.2010

home-made charts

home-made charts
Originally uploaded by bucknam

Doing some work for a client and the look of the piece calls for all home-made, high-school-style charts. These will get scanned and the different shades of gray will break out into different colors, thanks to the magic of tritone magic. Stay tuned to see the finished project.

posted at 8:34 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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2.08.2010

Now with more infographics

Thanks to Betsy and Heather, I've got me a shiny new account over at Behance. It's the official online portfolio of the AIGA, as well, so I'm super-duper covered now.

Not much up yet, seeing as I can't even get time set aside to get my work on the new notchcode site up, but you can check out a dozen or so information graphics and such that I've put up. Let me know what you think of them.

Labels: information graphics, social networking

posted at 7:38 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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2.05.2010

The best analogy I've read about spec work and graphic design...

...comes this past week from AIGA Executive Director Richard Grefe, who wrote a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, admonishing them for requesting designers to create a logo on spec for a new program, "Art Works". Go read the whole article, as it's filled with bon mots like this:

It would seem to me that the analogue in theater production would be for producers to invite dress rehearsals of a variety of productions before an investment or commitment was made on any one production.

Labels: spec work

posted at 10:14 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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2.03.2010

One more reason to stop using Internet Explorer 6 and upgrade already

Google announced that it's discontinuing support of Internet Explorer 6. This is welcome news, as it's one of the largest resource sinkholes any web developer has to face when working on site design and development. And there are some much better, more compliant browsers out there for people to use, in any case. Now, some organizations' audiences still skew heavily toward IE6, and I (and others) will assuredly continue to develop sites that are IE6 compliant when necessary; but I think it's safe to say that it's no longer a standard that most developers will hew to automatically.

Google is the latest, not the first, large web-based concern to move away from IE6 compliance. IE6 accounts for just over ten percent of total browser usage as of January 2010. That's down nearly 50% from January 2009. At this rate, IE 6 will account for something just north of 6% total user share by January 2011.

IE6 denial message image courtesy of RobotJohnny

Labels: usability, UX, W3C, web design

posted at 2:27 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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1.29.2010

Bauhaus: why I love her.

I'm a bit sentimental, especially when it comes to things related to Colorado. And even though Herbert Bayer isn't a native son, he came here and made Aspen his home, and we consider him one of our own.

Is it any wonder, then, that I had a poster of his Articulated Wall replica in my bedroom as a teenager? And is it any wonder that we use a modified version of Bauhaus as our logotype?

I had been using Gill Sans, prior to our redesign a few years ago, as our identity face, but I've always liked Bauhaus, and the simplicity and nostalgic modernism inherent in it, so that's where we went. Until recently, though, I had kept Gill Sans around for report headings, and so on, because I like how readable it is; how cleanly it scans with your eye, and how even its proportions seem to me.

This week I went totally nuts and set all the headings and subheading for a Brand Brief in Bauhaus. I was going to set the body copy in it as well, but after looking at it for about ten seconds my eyeballs went crazy and I reverted to Bembo, always a safe choice for longer runs of copy.

The end result was nice:

Bauhaus is an early 1970s re-expression of Bayer's universal face, created in 1927. One reason I think some people have an aversion to the Bauhaus face has to do with its introduction in the early '70s, and its use all over the place in popular culture at the time. I happen to like it, despite this. I am enamored with Bayer's reductive minimalism, of which his typeface is a great example. Design often can get in the way of the message, and Bayer strove to make design serve it, instead.

Labels: typography

posted at 2:40 PM Leave your comments here: 2 comments

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