Art, and Accountability
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- 00 April is for ART, and Accountability
- 000 The "Designing Women" feature continues
- 01 Feature: Ilise Benun interview: "Heads in the Sand Design"
- 02 Meet Designing Woman Mary Baum
- 03 Photoshop 911: analyzing X-Rays
- 04 "Faulty Tower" web site gets a second look
- 05 Web Design Critiques for April
- 06 A reader critiques our critiques
- 07 What makes a good or bad web design?
- 08 60-Seconds: Accountability
- 09 Fred goes to Washington
- 10 &Else! for April
- 11 Mailbox: Quark from OS/9 to OS/X
- 12 Mailbox: Quark Error -34
- 13 Mailbox: Quark crashes on "Save"
- 14 Soapbox: Fred's Rules of Computer Survival
- 15 Mailbox: T-Maker Clip Art AGAIN
- 16 Mailbox: Will Photoshop Elements do This?
- 17 A matter of importance to parents
- 18 Here's to Thomas Jefferson, and April
- April is for ART, and Accountability
- Along with all the typical April calendar items I would normally mention, this is a special month not only because of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, but because the "powers that be" are finally waking up to he problems associated with UCE, or Unsolicited Commercial Email (spam). While the literary arts are important (National Poetry Month, www.poets.org, Reading is Fun Week - 3rd week - and National Library Week www.ala.org.), and humor is certainly important (National Humor Month, ) and we really shouldn't forget the great outdoors, (Natural Outdoors Month, National Lawn & Garden Month, and Earth Day), the whole UCE thing has become a very pressing issue. But more on that in a moment.
"Take Our Daughters To Work Day." This is part of the national education campaign sponsored by the MS Foundation For Women where girls from 9 to 19 should accompany a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or friend to work. ( www.worklifemontgomery.org/) It's important for children. Equally important for children is the need for parents to monitor not only their computer use, but their intake of media from TV as well. See my "Important Note to Parents" below.
- The "Designing Women" feature continues
- We've got a fantastic month shaping up -- in fact there's lots of content that is yet to be uploaded to the site. So, keep your eye on the 'news' page as we add new articles and goodies!
In March we posted the annual call for entries into our "Designing Women" series, and we got a lot more than we bargained for. So, new ones will continue to appear in the Gallery, or Folio sites as we can get the samples prepared and uploaded -- possibly into May as well
We are most fortunate to have Ilise Benun on board this month with a lively and enlightening chat about designers. But more about that in a moment.
All in all, it's great to be here, and great to have you along.
- Feature: Ilise Benun interview: "Heads in the Sand Design"
- How do you design? With your head in the sand?
We are super pleased to have Ilise Benun with us this month! This milestone interview opens the gates to discuss what's in the minds of designers.
Ilise is a recognized expert on marketing for creative professionals and author of "Designing Websites for Every Audience" from HOW Design Books. Ilise has written many articles about online marketing and published The Art of Self Promotion, a quarterly newsletter of nuts'n bolts for manageable marketing, for 10 years. Her landmark book "Self-Promotion Online" (HOW Design Books, 2001) carved out new standards for design and creative community survival in the new world of online marketing.
This is a superb addition to our "Designing Women" theme, and I hope you enjoy it.
http://www.graphic-design.com/Web/benun/ - Meet Designing Woman Mary Baum
- Mary Baum is Managing Director of Herbert Baum Integrated Marketing in St. Louis, MO -- she designs with elegant simplicity -- but drives a persuasive message to her loyal clients. Visit with Mary as part of our "Designing Women" series and take a look at her superb design samples!
http://www.graphic-design.com/Gallery/baum/index.html - Photoshop 911: analyzing X-Rays
- Although the Photoshop 911 response line continues with brisk traffic, most are quick fixes, tips and how-tos too numerous to publish. However, one letter really got our attention and became a full page article: "Can you analyze x-rays in Photoshop?"
Which led us to not only answer the question, but to learn some interesting new aspects of Photoshop's histogram as well. Check it out. Check it out.
http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/Tips/histogram.html - "Faulty Tower" web site gets a second look
- D. Burns is back with us again this month with a 2nd critique of the "Faulty Tower Computing" website! (This time without the "American Idol" slant.) The author made changes and requested we return for a second look! While a step in the right direction, Faulty Tower still has a long way to go.
That's what WebDesign & Review is all about, folks!
Web Design and Dev http://www.graphic-design.com/Web/Critique/index.html - Web Design Critiques for April
- 1. Nethermind site ... hurt by javascripting and aliased graphics
2. Creativity Coach ... found not very "creative"
3. Stickman Murder Mystery Games ... gets a thumbs up review
4. Cambridge Custom ... shows much promise
5. Bauer Photography ... arrival page betrays site's depth of beauty
6. Targhee Sheep Assoc ... good site, needs "calming"
7. Tempest Harding ... redesign of site gets the once-over
Lots of fun and information for all... don't forget: we're looking for your reviews and critiques of our reader's web sites.
Web Design and Dev http://www.graphic-design.com/Web/Critique/index.html - A reader critiques our critiques
- From time to time we get an email from a reader who isn't quite as pleased with what they find in the Design Center as most others are. Obviously with the number of visitors the center gets, it would be unreasonable to expect them all to be glad they came. An early lesson learned on the web is that you don't even attempt to please everyone. Nevertheless, we read them all, and when a negative one appears we look closely.
One such critique came last Saturday from a reader identified as 'Mark' who commented:
"At first I thought your whole site was a little basic for being about web design. Then I took a look at your critique page and clicked on the first site, Faulty Tower and thought, what an awful site. I'm talking about your site (The Faulty Tower site is even worse though)."
I've published the entire critique, along with some of my own comments. I also invited Mark to return to the page and give his views on specific design rules broken there.
http://www.graphic-design.com/Web/Critique/critiqueus.html - What makes a good or bad web design?
- How do you know?
The weekend's reevaluation of our layout, and careful checking of the style sheets and layouts lead me to begin wondering about web design criteria.
2004 will mark the tenth anniversary of our first set of design criteria. Could it be time to give the criteria a face lift. WebDesign & Review came back in 1996 and ran a survey to readers to find out what their top ten peeves were. This gave us another set of criteria.
But ten years later technology as well as tastes have changed. In some respects, changed dramatically. In 1994-95 the top peeve was "anything that blinks or moves" today people no longer seem to mind "screen spam" as it was called. The second top peeve was pages that load slowly. At that time, 30K was the recommended ceiling size for web pages. Today, sites like Cnet and About.com routinely run 156K pages, with another 100K of graphics on them. Their readership seems to grow and grow. It seems people don't mind waiting for long pages.
So, I'd like to ask if you would take a few moments and jot down your top ten most important criteria for judging web page design.
Just send it over to http://www.graphic-design.com/contact.html - 60-Seconds #152: Accountability
- What would it be like if automobiles didn't require a license or registration? Sound crazy? Why did we let the online world get that way? This month's column applauds ICANN for their new online policy regarding false or delinquent registrations in the whois.
read it at: http://www.60-Seconds.com/articles/152.html - Fred goes to Washington
- The big news for April is the Federal Trade Commission conference in Washington at the end of the month -- which I'll be attending and participating in.
As many of you already know, for years I've been passionately involved in the fight against UCE (spam). Most recently the cause has taken me into an advocacy position in The Association of Apple Computer Users & Groups (AACUG) to research, report on and publish information toward the UCE fight. This trip to Washington is part of that program, and it promises to add a lot of steam to the crusade.
Part of my involvement is developing an anti-uce "Self Regulatory" initiative we hope to introduce into the ISP industry. The concept is to return "accountability" to the online world, as regulated by the industry itself. Remember if each email sender is a legitimate account user, with authentic credentials, there would be virtually no spam!
Since government is so sluggish, and ultimately incapable of dealing with UCE, the industry must step up to the plate and regulate themselves. It's the only way.
That event will be held at the Federal Trade Commission building, in Washington on April 31, and May 1 and 2. Here's a link if you're interested in attending and adding your voice to the cause.
http://www.ftc.gov/ - &Else! for April
- Xenofex 2 is here! * SW: Better iPhoto web exports * Free chapter from "Self Promotion" book * Calibrate that (Mac) Monitor * The return of the Color Wheel * BildeFinder eye candy, clip art, and more * Sending photos via email made easier, safer * News from the Anti-Spam front... * Save your assets when disaster strikes... * Groups oppose state copyright restrictions * The Web Wasp Flashes You! * Switching to the Mac... * Twilight Utilities PhoneServer and WebServer * Puzzle game for Windows * WinXP Manager tweaks Windows XP * Tough copyright restrictions meets opposition * Michael Clark Font Collection * National Archive Documents Go Online
Editorial: News & Else http://www.graphic-design.com/news/2003/ - Mailbox: Quark from OS/9 to OS/X
- When using Quark at home I save my work to Quark 4.0 since I need to work in a lab that is not 5. When I open my documents at the office they do not open readily it seems that they do not have an extension and even when I rename with extension it sometimes won't open. I can get some of them to work if I open Quark and then open the program. Would love to just double click? Checked quark site for update to add extensions couldn't find anything appropriate
Dear Quark User:
Quark under X has an incorrect file "Type" and "Creator" so it won't double-click. Remember, Unix doesn't support file type and creator as did previous versions of the Mac OS. When moving files, don't forget to add the dot-qxp extension -- what Unix looks for -- and you should be okay.
- Mailbox: Quark Error -34
- What does it mean when you get an error -34, would not open a document (in Quark Xpress 4) that we had just saved and collected for output. There was no way that we could open the document, it sat there without the typical icon, previous version had the quark icon but it was not complete...?
Dear Quark User:
-34 Error means "Disk is Full"
Remember that "Collect for Output" gathers everything into MEMORY prior to writing it to disk. Either the scratch areas of your drive are too fragmented to write the WHOLE "Collect" or you've overrun your allocation buffer.
I found "Collect" also copies all the darn files over again. Wouldn't it be nice if it MOVED the existing files rather than copying them. If you have some rather large images, or lots of them it simply may have not found enough drive space to work in.
A second reason for getting the -34 error is "No Such Disk Exists" ... for instance if you HAD a removal mounted, and it comes unmounted, but the icon is still there, and you say "put it there"
- Mailbox: Quark crashes on "Save"
- My Quark projects seem to be going ok, however today whenever I tried to save my document it crashed os9 and closed it down. It looks like it made the save before it crashed which is nice however...this is a pain.
Dear Quark User:
Again, a disk problem of some sort.
Set your "AutoSave" for every couple of minutes. It's saved me so many times I've lost count.
Also -- READ MY LIPS: ADOPT THIS POLICY:
Make incremental saves on a regular basis. Every so many minutes -- or, before a major move like importing an 80 megabyte image file, or deleting a bunch of pages -- "Save As" and change name sequentially. This forces Quark to write the file into a new location on the hard drive.
This is of paramount importance if it's a file you've worked on, saved and closed, then opened to work on again. In bigger projects with lots of saves, and re-openings to make corrections or client changes I'll even copy the entire file to a different partition, then change the name and copy it back into the original directory.
This defragments the file, gathers up all its parts scattered over the bit chain and writes it to new blocks on the hard drive. Always faster. Always safer.
- Soapbox: Fred's Rules of Computer Survival
- People have a way of forgetting all of the math, bit crunching and code that goes on in the background in huge programs like Quark, Illustrator or Photoshop -- and the bigger the data file, the worse the load on the CPU. People assume it's just a click here and a click there -- when in reality the CPU and the software are moving millions of bits of information per second, and performing millions of computations on the fly. It's a wonder the darn thing works at all.
So we have to learn to help accommodate the rigors of this kind of computing.
Any time working on a big file, or one that's very important, I'll use the above "Save As..." and name it incrementally, BEFORE making a major update to the file. You get the same benefit if you Duplicate the file in the Finder (or Windows) prior to opening the application. Then open the duplicate rather than the original file.
Okay... I'll get off the soap box.
Any time I can look up something for you just chime into the list, or send private email. I have virtually every book on the shelves regarding these programs and the Mac. (Limited PC/Windows help. Sorry.)
Remember too, I build articles and help information on PHOTOSHOP problems posted to: http://www.photoshop911.com/emergency.html usually helping several people a day. :-)
I could also use a little help, if some of you war hardened Photoshop veterans would volunteer to field some of these questions.
Thanks for reading!
- Mailbox: T-Maker Clip Art AGAIN
- Folks, it's no longer necessary to write trying to find the T-Maker people. I think I'm going to remove the review from the web site. T-Maker is out of business, and the art has been disseminated to other companies.
You do NOT need to request permission to use the art. You bought it, you can use it. If you still have the book, read the licensing page. You can use it in publications that you produce and publish.
- Mailbox: Will Photoshop Elements do This?
- JB from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, running Windows ME writes:
> Can you use adobe photoshop elements 2.0 , to take 2 photo's
> and make one photo , all so can you take someone out of one photo
> and put them in the other photo, if so, and if the person in one
> photo is taken closer or farther away can make it smaller or larger
> to fit in the new photo you are making, and when you print it out on
> to photo paper will you be able to tell that person was put into
> that new photo ?????
> How good is adobe photoshop elements 2.0 I
> do not what to buy it on less it can do this ?
> Thank You!
Dear JB:
Yes, yes, yes and yes. (LOL) Yes, you can do that and very much more with Elements. If you don't own Photoshop, yes, you should buy Elements FIRST.
ALL Elements users should check out Richard Lynch's new book: "The Hidden Powers of Photoshop Elements 2" wherein he reveals all the hidden stuff I've been talking about since version 1 -- that makes Elements very much like Photoshop with the exception of the high-end CMYK output stuff. (Which most people don't need, particularly web developers.) It comes with a super-duper CD packed with killer plug-ins, paths, calculations and best of all recipes. Don't miss it!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0782141781/ref=ase_thedesignpublish - A matter of importance to parents
- I just published this in the AACUG web site, but it also applies to all parents of K-12 children, so I'm publishing it here as well:
Many children may be adversely effected by the media's coverage of the war. Regardless of your position on the war, be aware of the situation and what you can do.
I've compiled a listing of "Help" web sites that address the problem, and I'll update the page(s) as research continues. Let me know which links are found to be most helpful, or contribute your own links. Thank you.
Go to: http://www.ugnn.com/index.html - Here's to Thomas Jefferson, and April
- As you probably know by now, Thomas Jefferson has always been one of my all-time favorite heros. He was architect, engineer, inventor, author, gardener and statesman. He was the third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of American Independence. But he was also a bit of an oxymoron -- standing up for the unbridled freedom of individuals, yet owning slaves. An outspoken believer in personal rights, yet an avid proponent of government. If he were alive today, he would probably be going to Washington on the 31st, to speak out against the injustice done to computer users by the purveyors of SPAM -- while at the same time insisting on the individual's right to freedom of speech. He would applaud any individual who stands up for their rights -- ass he once proclaimed:
> "One man with courage is a majority."
Precisely the slogan I'll carry along when I go to Washington for the FTC's forum against SPAM.
Jefferson was born very near here in Albemarle County on April 13, 1743 -- so, during April we'll celebrate the life of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville Virginia, along with those wacky guys from the Publishers Warehouse.
Enjoy April, and come to see us in the Design & Publishing Center -
Fred
your loyal editor
http://www.graphic-design.com/news/index.html
- Oh, and don't forget my BEST BOOKS FOR 2002
- GO TO: http://www.Design-Bookshelf.com/BEST/
- ...also don't miss these. . .
- Folks, we can't help you if you don't cooperate...
Each month accesses (looking for that new EPS clip art disk) and prize registrations are denied in the Publishers'Warehouse.
Why? Because the email address keyed into the Loading Dock request was incorrect, or no longer in use. I find it hard to believe that people would register for something and then drop the address.
Remember: no spaces, correct spelling. Dozens of AOL users didn't put in "@aol.com" -- remember: name@aol.com, no spaces. (We assume they were AOL since they had no "@" indicator.)
Remember too, that the loading dock changes locations each month. You'll find the clue you need to the new location in each issue of this column.
Don't forget to write.
- Join us for discussions:
- Here's an invitation to you all to join us in discussions about graphic arts, design, illustration, or just about whatever might be on your mind. You can take your pick of the Design Cafe, or the WebDesign Review list, or both. We'll be looking forward to meeting you there real soon...
* Go To: http://www.graphic-design.com/subscribe.html - Help the community do something about spam...
- Do you get spam? Do you wish you didn't?
The Design Center is helping sponsor a SPAM SURVEY conducted by the Association of Apple Computer Users & Groups. The organization is chartered for community service, education and legislation advocacy for technology. SPAM is one of the big issues they hope to take to Washington D.C. this year, and they need YOUR help. Go there and fill out the simple, secure and safe SPAM SURVEY. It will help them gather data for their UCE Presentation.
* Go To: http://www.user-groups.net/submit.html - Speaking of spam... read this:
- Top Ten Signs You're About to be RIPPED OFF
Fred tracks the illusive spammer! With the influx of thousands of new UCEs ('Unsolicited Commercial Email" -- aka: SPAM) hitting the Graphic Design Network servers, our spam-hunting team decided to track a few of these low-lifes down, and find out where it's all coming from.
* Go To: http://www.60-Seconds.com/articles/130a.html - Keeping in touch
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- Contact us: http://www.graphic-design.com/contact.html
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- The Info Managerhttp://www.user-groups.net/InfoManager/
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