Working for Pennies
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a web service that Amazon originally developed for internal use before making it freely available in 2005. The concept behind it is interesting enough, since it provides a platform that developers can use to generate data for their own web-driven applications, based on the concept of crowdsourcing, in which a large number of people all work to complete a project, not unlike ants or bees. April 6, 2008, 1:45 AM
History Is a Set of Lies Agreed Upon
While Napoleon wasn't thinking of the rough and tumble world of the inventor when he uttered these words, history has failed to acknowledge the seminal work of more than one bright spark. But sometimes the record is set straight.
April 1, 2008, 5:22 AMPost a Comment... Or the Cat Gets It
That's right, we're talking to you. Yes you, the one who visits the Graphics.com Network blogs regularly to glean pearls of wisdom from the dedicated blogging team. You've learnt much, haven't you? You've been the beneficiary of our collective insights, correct? And yet, have you taken the time to acknowledge our ceaseless efforts on your behalf, even once? Well, have you? We thought not. Well, buster, we've had enough of your kind. So get typing. Now. We have your IP address, we know where you live. So when fuzzball here gets it, expect a Fed Ex package with the gruesome remains. That's right, the demise of the old fleabag will be on your hands. There's just one way out of this dilemma—type, type like the wind. What are you waiting for? Post that comment! We are not kidding.
March 28, 2008, 5:06 AMGoing, Going, Gone
We humans are a strange breed. Throughout our history we've managed to bring forth engineering projects on a staggering scale, such as The Great Wall of China. Graceful structures spanning continents and millenia testify to the ancient beliefs and aesthetic refinement of cultures that could have much to teach us. The backdrop for these marvels of human ingenuity is the natural wonder of the Earth itself, at one time a source of spiritual and material sustenance. But rather than cherishing all this, we have systematically destroyed the best of what we have inherited from those who came before, either through neglect, greed or intolerance. And what little remains, is going fast.
March 18, 2008, 2:51 AMThe Sushi Variations
Blazing Sushi? That seems like a contradition in terms, given that one of the main ingredients of this popular dish is, in fact, raw. But in the world of design, clients with strange names are not unknown. Nor are design briefs that insist on including long strings of relatively dull text that must be somehow elegantly worked into a small area. These, and other perils, await the brave designer hardy enough to take on AbleStock.com Design Brief 8, currently running on Graphics.com.
March 11, 2008, 9:16 AMFlash: Internet Explorer 8 Available in Beta. Mac Developers in State of Shock
The latest version of Microsoft's browser for Windows XP and Vista is available for download. Oh, the horror.
March 4, 2008, 7:50 AMKuler Gets Cooler
Abraham Maslow famously said that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Closer to home, it would seem that for Adobe Systems, every web site is starting to look like an application. We're further and further away from the company's early 80s origins, based on the brilliant PostScript page description language developed by founders Warnock and Geske. But who can blame Adobe? There's an undeniable attraction to playing in the big leagues of application development, along with Microsoft and Google.
February 19, 2008, 7:06 AMA New Resource for Pattern Fanatics
I last covered the work of the Berlin-based Neubau team in 2006, when Die Gestalten Verlag published its Neubau Welt collection of 1,000 vector outlines of people and objects. The book/CD remains a great design aid and has since been made available as a less-expensive download. I've recently been exploring Neubau Modul, an equally-rich resource also published by DGV. And "exploring" is an appropriate word, given the vast realm of possibilities this new tome opens up for designers.
The Photos.com Challenge Turns 4
I came across the image at right, by Melanie Cooper, while going through some of the recent submissions to the January Photos.com Challenge on Graphics.com. It's a delicate, cleanly-rendered image that makes good use of two of this month's supplied base images, but what struck me more was a sense of familiarity. I'd seen something like it before in the Challenge galleries, but where? It took a lot of browsing but I finally found the reference, which turned out to be the base image for the very first Photos.com Challenge, launched way back in February, 2004.
Have a Merry (Responsible) Christmas
Those involved in the practice of design have a long and rich history of engagement in social and environmental issues. This is as it should be, given the unique abilities of this profession to reach and sway large numbers of people. In fact, we're at the point where it's hard to find a designer who doesn't in some way express this increasingly global desire to "do the right thing," whether through the use of environmentally-friendly paper and printing processes or pro bono work for non-profits.
October 20, 2007, 12:15 PMAll Things Typographic: 6
s the browser, as we know it, on the road to extinction? The rise of sophisticated web applications has been making it look increasingly tired of late, in no small part due to the pathetic manner it displays text. Sure, CSS is great, but we're still forced to render text with a tiny set of arbitrary fonts that's looking more restrictive every day. With no one except designers to champion tapping the thousands of available fonts, and type creators themselves spooked about the possible unauthorized use of their creations, what's been missing is a champion of the typographic cause to move things forward.
All Things Typographic: 5
f the tools of document design, such as InDesign and QuarkXPress, have for years provided pretty much the same functionality, whether employed on a Mac or a PC, the same can not be said of font management. To put it bluntly, font management on Windows systems has been primitive. Happily, recent initiatives by the two main developers in the field have gone a long way to achieving font management parity between platforms.
All Things Typographic: 4
ow many fonts do you think are now available in digital form? 25,000? 50,000? From what I can determine, designers are now in the luxurious position of being able to pick and choose from more than 100,000 fonts online. If that wasn't overwhelming enough, we seem to be in the thick of a typographic renaissance, with new fonts flooding onto the market, covering everything from carefully-crafted revivals and reinterpretations of classic faces to edgy new designs that are totally of this moment. That's the good news, but as is often the case it's also the bad news.
Let's Get Dynamic
As I wrote in Are You Deprecated, I've been making a valiant effort to shake off my antiquated Web page coding habits, which date back to the days of Notepad and Netscape 0.9. With most of my more horrendous old practices now behind me, I've turned to looking for solutions to display problems in new places. Hence my recent, if belated, arrival in the land of Dynamic HTML and fancier CSS. If, like me, your main focus is graphics and publishing, with just a secondary need to create and maintain Web sites, then the good news is that you can use these to quickly add snappy, modern functionality to your pages without making it your life's work.
All Things Typographic: 3
hese roundups covering font releases and typographic books, events and software were meant to be a monthly affair, but the flow of worthy items continues unabated. So with no further ado I'll start off with a sighting of a rare bird indeed—a significant update to a font creation and editing application.
