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Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode

4.27.2006

Mini-Me

A little 12-inch PowerBook G4 is on its way to my office on May 2nd.

It was time to replace the venerable first-generation Titanium Powerbook G4. I received it two days before the March 2001 national Experience Design conference hosted by the AIGA that year, in New York. I can't tell you how many envious stares it got in the lecture hall, when I'd whip it out to take notes. And watching "The Big Sleep DVD on the TiBook on the plane had the suits craning their necks to get a look at the (then) huge 15 inch screen. It was novel, at the time, to be able to watch a DVD on a laptop...de rigeur, today, of course.

I was salivating over the new MacBook Pro laptops, but with Adobe waiting until at least early 2007 to release full-speed versions of their Creative Suite applications, I couldn't wait. This new PowerBook will last me at least three years--five, if my trusty TiBook is any indication.

posted at 5:00 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.26.2006

If you can read this...

...then we've successfully installed an FTP server at notchcode.com.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, really easy access for our staff and partners, and our clients too. People will be able to upload really large files (as in over 2 Gigabytes, if need be) rather than use those old-fashioned courier services to get things to us. And it also means we're even more savvy sysadmin/IT types than we thought.

Some notes on the new server setup:

Our webserver is running in-house (right next to where I'm typing, and on another machine) on a G4 Macintosh of a certain age...very stable and reliable. It also functions as our in-house fileserver. One of the great things about the Mac OS is that it comes with Apache webserver software already built-in and ready to run. I've tricked it out with acustomized configuration file, perl, cgi scripts, python, php, MySQL, and a few other odds and ends that we use for client site development. And for the FTP end, we're running PureFTP, which is a little BSD app that runs a GUI front-end, called PureFTP Manager, right on top of it. Once we got our routers configured, it works like a charm.

posted at 4:03 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.25.2006

Blogging as an ad metric

Well, duh. It should be obvious, but blogs are often overlooked as a way of measuring the impact of your ad campaign.

Think about it: Bloggers are legion, but they (despite the loggorregic ramblings of some) usually write only about things that they really care about, or that impact them in an unusual way. Like I'm writing about this topic, for example.

So, then you want to measure the penetration and effect of your marketing, try searching the blogosphere for your idea, product name, or marketing tagline. The people at KitKat did, in Japan, and are using it to measure the amazing success of a guerilla marketing campaign they introduced at hotels. Check out the blog post about the blog posts here.

posted at 9:15 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.20.2006

Good Book

Ok, I just made a great sample case from gaffer's tape, bubble-wrap, foam core, and elmer's glue. Doubt it? Well, this is the quandry: such novel sample cases, full of some of your best design work and left with clients, can be seen as either very creative or just plain dumb. I am betting, of course, that my prospective client sees is as the former, and not the latter.

Most design-folk go with the standard black book, or maybe a stainless steel case, to show their wares. And I admit I have both here in the office, full of lovely samples. But when I gave--what seemed to me--a mediocre presentation on what my shop's capabilities were, I felt the need to deliver my portfolio in something a little unsusal.

I just hope it pays off. Even if it just brings a smile to the prospect's face, and lets them know that I mean it when I say I deliver creative solutions, I'll be happy.

posted at 10:33 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

E-mail and webserver notes for Notchcode

Notchcode is transitioning its mailserver to another provider over the weekend. E-mail sent to notchcode.com accounts between Friday 4/21 and Monday 4/24 may be delayed.

The upside to this is that we'll be using a Colorado company, Indra's Net, to host our e-mail. We reccomend Indra's Net to all our clients. They have a great support staff, and excellent hosting options. They cost a bit more than some faceless, bulk hosting companies, but let me know how much you like the cost savings when you can't get anyone on the phone to solve a problem.

We will also be moving our web server in-house, which will allow us to serve our clients better with larger FTP space, a more secure client site testbed, and custom installations of server-side software for specialized client applications.

posted at 7:27 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.18.2006

Coming in for a Landing

Seth Godin has a nice definition of what a Landing Page is. For those of you who are more of the flyer on the windshield and not the Google AdWord type of person, a Landing Page is where you send a prospective customer when you want to show then something specific, like a product you want them to buy. Just sending people to your company's home page is a little passé, nowadays; you send them to landing pages, instead.

Amoung the things Godin says:

"Landing pages are not wandering generalities. They are specific, measurable offers. You can tell if they're working or not. You can improve the metrics and make them work better. Landing pages are the new direct marketing, and everyone with a website is a direct marketer."

I amend his terms with one other thing that a landing page can do:

drive your clients away from your product.

Don't make the mistake of demanding they register for a newsletter or another permission-based marketing handout before they get at least a portion of what you've promised them in your Google AdWord, or e-mail, or (heaven forbid) directly-mailed-to-their-door brochure. If you say you're gonna show them a widget, show them a widget and not a registration page that (once filled out) thensends them to the widget. Nothing will make a turn a prospective buyer into a surefire hater more quickly.

posted at 9:21 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.11.2006

Graffiti Taxonomy

For typegeeks like me, nothing beats looking at overlooked, yet fresh, typography.

And what better place to see some of that than on the walls of Manhattan? The folks at ni9e.com have put together a brief taxonomy (rather, a start of a taxonomy) of graffiti lettering. Once you break down graffiti into separate letterforms, and begin to categorize it by thickness, angle, line dynamics, and so on, you are beginning to reach a deeper aesthetic understanding of what graffiti tags are. And there's a lot of interesting styles out there.

Check out the beginnings of their project here. Lots of other interesting stuff over on their site as well, but for me, this is the most promising exercise I've seen there.

posted at 6:00 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

4.05.2006

Seeing is Seeing

Amy Allcock posted an interesting analysis of her photographic shooting to posting ratio at flickr, and it spurred me to think about how I shoot photographs as well. It's always nice when someone makes you think about somehting worthwhile. Kinda like being back in school, but without the boredom. We talked about the Act of Seeing a lot in college, and it's an important discussion that goes on all the time with photographers, but putting it into context with digital imaging and photo-sharing tools like Flickr is something I haven't seen.

Anyhow, you should read her post, and then read my reply, which I've posted here, for my records (this is my blog, after all, which is where I can put stuff I don't want to lose. Here's the reply:

********
Amy, I have a similar story, with a twist.

I entered the photographic world as a large format photographer, shooting 5x7-inch sheet film with a big wooden camera. I still carry the rig aroud in my car, padlocked against theft, in hopes of seeing something worthy of the fifteen minutes spent setting up, moving around, metering the scene, making the exposure, and breaking down the camera.

Furthermore, loading and unloading sheet film is time-consuming, as is developing it (you can process maybe five to ten sheets at one time--any more than that and you will surely scratch the sensitive emulsion against the edges of the other sheets of film. Then I print on paper that I've hand-coated emulsion onto. Coating and drying takes about 30 minutes per sheet, and maybe another ten minutes to an hour to expose the paper and negative to make a print. Then another 20 minutes in developer and clearing baths.

So, as you can tell, I am very picky about what I make images of with this camera. I might make two images a month, although I generally run through about 100 sheets a year. Out of those, a high percentage--maybe 70 of them--are what I would consider printable. I am editing before I make the image. So I find myself "taking pictures" with my eyeballs a lot more often than I take them with a camera and a lens.

So: a 70% "taken" versus "posted" (or in my case, printed) ratio. Pretty high. But then, remember, I probably don't hestitate to drive right past some shots that I'd shoot with a digital camera.

On the other side of the coin, I have a little digital camera that I shoot about 20 images a week with. Lots of stuff around the house, photos of the kids, the dog, fences on our walks, home-made meals, etc. The interesting thing is that this camera acts, for me, much like the Leica did for photojournalists in the 40s and 50s. It's small, and I carry it in my pocket, and pull it out and make images whenever I see anything even vaguely interesting. Consequently, the ratio of junk to gems is quite high. But it does make for a very interesting set of images that I'd never, ever, catch with a large-format camera. Look at Garry Winogrand's contact sheets some day and you'll see it.

Josef Sudek used a small camera to catch the minutae of his life in his small home and little garden, and ended up with a collection of images which take my breath away. They are very profound in capturing the ordinariness of his life, and his place, and they describe a beauty that can only be captured here and there, as one passes by--and much more easily with a smaller camera.


I post about 30% of those pictures captured with my little pocket camera (and would post an even smaller percentage if I didn't have a Pro account with the nearly unlimited bandwidth). And I think that in some of these images, I've started to see things that I'd never considered regarding photographically, because I've spent over 14 years looking at things from the perspective of a large format photographer. I see a lot of seemingly mundane things become beautiful when I simply look at them. And while this is no less true for what I photograph with my large format camera, these are different things, in a different world, and it is that differentness that I find so refreshing for my personal vision right now.

Thanks for bringing up this point; it's important.
********

posted at 9:56 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments


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