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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

5.13.2008

Repost from the desert: Hand-crafted HTML

Now, all serious beer drinkers I know prefer homebrewed beer to Duff. A more hands-on experience in creating the product results in a product that has more character, more personality, and a betterness that is hard to describe; but you know it when you see it (or taste it, in this case). In our second repost from the desert, I talk about how and why hand-coded HTML is better than what you get from a machine, like an HTML layout program (Dreamweaver, and especially FrontPage, I'm looking at you!). This post originally appeared in March 2005. Enjoy. Meantime, I am going to go out to the pool.

Here it is:

I spent the better part of this afternoon doing web production on a medium-sized site due to go live in a few weeks, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about how I like to work.

Now, there are many decent, hard-working web page composition programs out there, most notably Dreamweaver; and I have used them extensively...in the past. But I've come to the conculsion that for 90 percent of all HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, and other acronymed web development work, I prefer to code by hand.

Old School!

Why? Well, once you learn the syntax, it's quicker. Trust me! And it allows you to create fast, clean code, without many of the pitfalls and extraneous bits that GUI-based programs like Dreamweaver can place into your pages without your knowledge. Anyone who has ever waded through Microsoft FrontPage-created webpage code will know what I am talking about.

Pretty much any text editor will do--even Microsoft Word, in a pinch--but I prefer BareBones Software's BBEdit. It's long been the de-facto standard in programming text editors, especially for web code writers. Why? Well, it's no-frills, function-specific approach to its interface is a big selling point.

And it is very user-friendly.

Case-in-point: it color-codes your code so you know if you are looking at an image source element, or a formatting element, or actual content, for example. Their motto: "It doesn't suck", says it all.

Yes, yes, Dreamweaver has a "code view" mode, so you can see the code as you mess about in GUI mode, but BBEdit also has a Preview mode, which allows you to see things as the browser will display them, so that arguement is a wash.

It comes down to this:

  1. did you grow up in the age of learning BASIC in school?

  2. Were you amazed when you found out that you could upgrade from a VIC-20 to a Commodore 64 and get all that extra processing power?

  3. Did you make ASCII art with your dot-matrix printer?



If so, you will prefer to code by hand. If not, you will probably prefer something like Dreamweaver.

Not that I'm judging you.

So if you really want to understand what this web thing is all about, look at some of your favorite webpages using "View Source", borrow a copy of O'Reilly's HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, and learn something new! Trust me, you'll love it!

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5.12.2008

Re-taking the I love NY trademark back from the masses

In today's New York Times, Anthony Ramierez writes that New York is trying to reclaim it's hold on the iconic I (heart) NY brand, designed for free (yes, as in beer) by Milton Glaser in the 1970s.

This is why you don't let iconic trademarks expire, folks. When the mark was allowed to lapse in the 1990s, people assumed it was in the public domain, and the result is having the logo show up on everything from teddy bears to ties to t-shirts.

Parsons School of Design Semiotics professor Marshall Blonsky is doubtful that the logo will be able to regain its former glory, stating that it:
is now an empty signifier, nothing in it, no communication, zed, zero. It moved from poetry to banality, from red to pink, like a coin that has been rubbed smooth from so much usage.

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Repost from the desert: Work-for-Hire, Licensing, and Usage

This week I am out in the Four Corners area, doing double-duty as a photographer for one client and also helping to plan the 2008 NAAMLP National Conference. It's a fun trip, with great clients, and I couldn't be happier.

Since I'm out in the slot canyons and reclaimed uranium mines of Utah and Arizona this week and unable to spend a lot of seat-time in front of the lappy, I am reposting some of my articles from years' past that I think are still relevant, interesting, and worth a read. Here's the first installment, originally posted in October 2002.

Work for hire? Licensing? Useage? What the heck does all this mean?

If you have questions like this, check out this site. It's from the Art Director's Club of Metropolitan Washington, and has a nice summation of what work-for-hire is.


I have yet to meet a designer that prefers to do work-for-hire over transferring right of useage to a client, and there are many good reasons for this, most notably because designers lose control over their image and reputation if the work is changed in the future.

To quote from the Graphic Artists' Guilds' "Pricing and Ethical Guidelines", 9th edition:

"By signing a work-for-hire contract, a freelance artist becomes an employee [of the contracting company] only for the purposes of the copyright law, but for no other purpose. In addition to losing authorship status and copyright, the artist receives no salary, unemployment, workers' compensation, or disability insurance; nor does he or she receive health insurance, sick pay, vacation, pension, or profit-sharing opportunities that a companymay provide its formal, salaried employees."


(I mean, come on, if you're going to treat the designer's output the same way you treat the output of your employees, at least give them the benefits....)

"When a freelance artist signs a work-for-hire contract, the artist has no further relationship to the work, cannot display it, copy it, or use it for other purposes such as displaying the work in the artist's portfolio. The client, now considered the legal author may change the art and use it again without limitation."


I will add here that in stripping the designer of any claim on authorship, it devalues the designer's role in the entire creative process, and further devalues the designer's role by allowing the design to slip from the control of the artist and into the hands of anyone the contractor wishes for future revisions, distortions, or changes.

So why is that a bad thing? It sounds like a boon if you're a client, certainly: you get the right to use the designer's hard work in whatever way you choose, however you choose. Many designers (myself included) usually grant that right in any case, to better serve the client's projected future needs. But take this extremely hypothetical, made-up example:

Say you, the designer, create something in print for a client. The client loves it. You love it. It wins awards. Everyone's happy. Then your client decides to create a website based on the printed material. Wonderful, you say! More exposure for the designer's work, and the client gets to re-use much of the design, maintaining consistency from medium to medium, strengthining their brand.

You, the designer, signed a work-for-hire agreement when you created the printed piece. Didn't seem like a problem at the time. But now the client has asked you to re-do some design elements found in the printed piece for use in the website. You balk at this; those elements they want you to re-do were the cornerstone of what made the piece work, both from an aesthetic and from a functional perspective! After much negotiation, the client takes the job elsewhere, to a designer hungry for work, who (after signing a work-for-hire agreement, of course) proceeds to gut your design according to the client's wishes, and create the website.

The site, while complete, is now similar to the printed piece only on a very superficial level. Even the new designer admits to you later that she's not really happy with the result, either, but "that's the way the client wanted it, and they already owned all the work, so it was either do it this way or leave the job to someone else."

Worse yet, the client has attributed the work, both yours and the new designer's, to themselves. The website, despite its problems, wins many awards. Neither you nor the new designer get any recognition. No new clients flock to your door. And you can't even take credit for your own work.

That's harsh! Would you want ME taking credit for all the hard work YOU put into something?

There is a long-standing concept of something called "moral rights", which assert that the creator of something has the right to claim parentage, to be accountable for it and to take credit for it, and that no one else may do so. Work-for-hire practices take away that fundamental right, and it degrades everyone involved: the designer, the client, and the thing itself.

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5.08.2008

Nick, if you don't watch this, then your education in physical theatre is not complete

Really:



I mean, how do the Dell 'Arte students get into their pants in the morning?


I am watching this at least twice more before I go to bed, so I can smile again and again.

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5.07.2008

Digital versus Film: Like comparing the Avs to the Red Wings at playoff time (and we all know which is best, right?)

I have a client who has asked me for some on-location photography of their staff, in a remote location. I recommended large-format film, because they want to use the images on large exhibition display graphics. For the resolution required for such a display, you'd have to use a 22.8 megapixel camera to get the needed pixels per inch. There is one available, by the way, for about $27K, and if you want, feel free to buy one and send it to this address.

With large format film, you get a functional resolution that (still) beats digital (for now). Notice the caveats? And if you were only ever going to use the images online or in a smaller printed piece, like a brochure, well, digital is fine, in most cases. I think that black and white film has higher fidelity over color-sensor-based digital cameras, so there's that caveat in the other direction. But I am fine (from a commercial standpoint, anyhow) advocating for whatever option fits the project best.

Apparently this client is having to listen to other competing photographers gripe about the large format requirement. I can almost hear them saying "It's sooooo heavvvvyy! And you have to take all this tiiiiiime to set it uuuuuup!" Well, I've been shooting with a large format rig for nigh on 20 years, and I can setup and shoot a scene in about 2 minutes, which is hella fast, at least in the large format world. But there are other reasons to shoot large format film...aesthetic ones, ones which relate to previsualization, that I won't go into here, because this is a discussion about the pragmatics of large format vs. digital. And like I said: if anyone wants to buy me the digital Hasselblad, please please please, send it over. I'll convert immediately.

Except for my personal work of course, in which case you'll have to pry my Deardorff from my cold, dead hands.

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5.05.2008

Mann vs. Isaak



So, Internets: Who should my wife, friends and I see at the Denver Botanic Gardens concert series this summer? Aimee Mann (with Marc Cohn) or Chris Isaak? Isaak's concert is TWENTY BUCKS MORE EXPENSIVE.

I saw both of them on the same bill back in about 1987, at the Coors Events Center up at CU/Boulder: Til Tuesday AND Chris Isaak opened for the Thompson Twins....how ironic is that? Although the Thompson Twins' t-shirt was pretty kick-ass.

We were also thinking of the Richard Thompson / Loudon Wainwright III double-bill, but we can't make our schedule work for it....

Send your possibly opinion-swaying input here.

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A cellular or stained-glass view of the tanking economy, and how it affects the consumer

Amanda Cox over at The New York Times online has a nice interactive graphic of "All of Inflation's LIttle Parts." It shows a snapshot of the average consumer's spending on basically everything, from cable tv to heating oil. Roll over each of the segments to get data on increases or decreases in costs for that item.

What I like: Since we all spend a finite amount of money on everything, it's a closed system; therefore a circle is a good way of representing the whole. What makes this different from a typical pie chart (and better, I think) is that there are main sections (like housing and utilities, versus clothing, for example) and then many little categories within those sections, that we can view here.

Now, you could group your pie-chart slices up and show it that way, but I think this makes the smaller categories easier to view and inspect, especially online. Have a look and let me know what you think of this vs. a pie chart.

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5.03.2008

Hitting the big time

I just noticed that our humble blog has cracked the top 100 blogs for business over at Blogflux. Yay, us! The ranking is fairly dynamic, so I am sure we'll be back down in the cellar tomorrow. But we'll take what we can get.

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posted at 10:54 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

You want me to bug all my friends into loading your crappy Facebook application before you let me use it?

Yeah, it sounds pretty stupid, from a marketing standpoint. Basically, a lot of the newer apps posted over on Facebook take you through the activity involved in the application, then before they let you see the result of the activity, they make you select 8 or more friends in your network to spam about the application. Only then can you see the results.

Hmm. Well, I see how it results in increasing the speed at which your viral application spreads, but at what cost? At some point people will decide their friends are worth _not_ spamming with a new app every day or two. Hopefully, at that point, the viral software distribution model will adjust to make it more, well, friendly. Which is kinda the point of a SOCIAL NETWORK, right?

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5.02.2008

I'll be heading out to Southeast Utah in a few weeks...

...for a photo shoot near Lake Powell. But not close enough to Lake Powell to actually enjoy it. Anyone have any good ideas on where to go and what to do near Blanding, in my spare time? Not that I'll have much (the Canyonlands and Moab are probably out of my range)... send me your fun-in-the-desert ideas and if I do them I'll post a photo here.

photo of typical Blanding activity by takeitez

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Making a case for good marketing...even when the economy stinks

Oh, Closet Entrepreneur, you've just made my morning. Their post from yesterday warns businesses not to skimp on

  1. advertising,

  2. Website development and design, and

  3. Freelance services.


It's like they built the yellow brick road right up to my office door.

If you're in the market for any or all of these items, it just so happens that notchcode offers high-quality branding, marketing, advertising, and website development and design. And since I'm not part of your staff, I guess I qualify as a "freelance service" as well.

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