providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world
Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
Xyle Scope: still a good tool for CSS
Two years ago I reviewed Xyle Scope. This nifty tool lets you view a page using Safari's rendering engine, and then lets you roll over page elements and see the CSS styles that are being applied, and in what order, to those elements. Pretty neat, eh? Here's the other nice thing you can do with it: you can fine-tune your own code by loading up one of your pages, and then change the CSS variables in Xyle Code's inspector window, and see the rendered results immediately. It integrates nicely with BBEdit, and is still a good deal at $19.95.
posted at 2:49 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
5.28.2008
Busy Busy Busy
Just like about this time last year, things are heating up for us here. Lots to do. A sampling of this week's events:So apologies to all you folks who come here for design, branding, marketing and photography musings...I have a couple of things I want to talk about, but they'll have to wait until I can get up from under the aforementioned pile of projects!
- rebranding proposal for a statewide non-profit organization
- branding proposal for a new upscale product line
- build-out of a website for a structural engineering consultancy
- user interface revisions for a local non-profit organization's website
- book cover design for an author
- content intake for another non profit website project
- designing a lenticular postcard for a state agency project
- and about a half-dozen other things!
Labels: work
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5.23.2008
Musical odds and ends for Friday
Ok, there's about 45 minutes left before I head out and grab a beer. So why not mention some music-related news that I thought you, tender reader, might find useful or at least illuminating:David Byrne can't be drunk and ride a bike at the same time. Nor can I, for that matter. Best wishes to my favorite art student turned music star/cultural commentator (with apologies to DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) for a speedy recovery.
Lou Reed finally made an honest woman out of Laurie Anderson. Hopefully now they'll stop getting the evil eye from all the old romanian ladies in their neighborhood when they go out at night.
The best Friday afternoon music is undoubtedly Burning Spear's album Marcus Garvey. The worst Friday afternoon music? That would be Britney Spear's cover of the album Marcus Garvey. Wait, she never did one of those.
But I had you worried for a minute, didn't I?
Happy Friday, everyone!Labels: music
posted at 4:18 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Make your own Photographic Film
Sad that the original Tri-X isn't being made anymore? Don't fret: just build your own film coating machine, and make as much as you want. Of course, being a retired chemist with a lot of time on your hands helps, too.
Unfortunately, it looks like the film base being used on this machine is just four inches wide, so I'll have to look elsewhere for custom-made 5x7-inch sheet film ;)Labels: DIY, photography
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5.22.2008
Interested in Mined Land Reclamation? A student? Need money?
This is a bit out of my scope as a design professional, but my dad was the director of the Inactive Mine Land Reclamation Program for Colorado for a number of years, so it's a topic near and dear to me. And if you are a college student who is interested in pursuing a career in mined land reclamation, the National Association of Abandoned Mine Lands Programs is offering a $1500 scholarship, plus travel and registration expenses paid to the 30th annual NAAMLP conference this fall in Durango, Colorado. This is different from the David L. Bucknam Memorial Scholarship, but aimed at many of the same people (that scholarship is still soliciting applications as well, so go here and download one and send it in too!).
posted at 5:11 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
5.21.2008
Data Visualization: Making traffic patterns understandable
Steph Thirion, an interaction designer, has been creaeting some elegant tools for visualizing data dynamically. My favorite so far is Cascade on Wheels. One version (shown above) shows traffic flow overlaid dynamically on conventional aerial photograph...and then lets you turn that photo on its side, revealing a three-dimensional bar chart of the flow through the streets of a city. Another shows traffic flow on an overhead map, but allows you to also hear the data: the denser the traffic, the louder the white noise. Bringing in not just your eyes, but your ears, is brilliant.
Tip o the cap to Jay Parkinson for bringing Steph's work to my attention.Labels: information graphics, interface, visual information
posted at 10:14 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
5.19.2008
actually, I will point it out to you
Since my earlier scan was so crappy.
posted at 10:01 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Can't wait to try the drinks at this place
If there's one reason to hire a good copywriter, or at least one to proof your marketing before you send it off to press, it would be exemplified here. I won't point it out to you, but have a look at the featured drink on the front page of this menu I received in the mail, and see if it doesn't make you throw up in your mouth a little bit.
posted at 9:51 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Bad Legislation Alert for Creatives: the Orphan Works Act of 2008
Andy reminded me that there is some important stuff going on in DC this year, despite it being an election year.
There was some noise made earlier in the year about an orphan works bill that was supposedly making its way through Congress, and fortunately it turned out to be one uninformed blogger (Mark Simon) bloviating and stirring the pot. But now, his sky is falling cries are proving prescient. The Orphan Works Act of 2008 would make it hard, impractical, and nearly impossible for the average artist (or any generator of original content) to register and copyright their works, past and present. It would require mandatory registration of works in a privately-held registry, for a fee, and you would have to register all previously-created work in order to protect it from someone who might want to use it without permission or even attribution.
Current copyright law protects your work from the moment it is created, regardless of registration (although registration has some legal advantages, especially for published works). Previous attempts in 2006 at an orphan works bill died on the vine, thankfully, and we in the creative community should write our lawmakers and explain why the current proposed legislation is a really, really bad idea. I've quoted the full text of my letter to my congressperson, Ed Perlmutter, below. Feel free to use it as a template for your own letter. Remember, don't yell at your lawmakers; just tell them that this legislation is extremely boneheaded.But, you know, with better vocabulary than that.
Some other good references on this from the Graphic Artists' Guild and from the desk of Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, Illustrators.
My letter:
Attention: The Honorable Ed Perlmutter
United States House of Representatives
415 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Date May 7, 2008
Re: The Orphan Works legislation
Dear Representative Perlmutter,
My name is Alan Bucknam, and I am one of your constituents in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. After reading about the Orphan Works Act of 2008, I am angered by and worried about the current legislation that is being considered in Congress regarding copyright law.
This Orphan Works legislation, if passed, will severely impact my income and life as a photographer, graphic designer, and artist. Not only will it give license for others to legally steal and use my work for free, it will be virtually impossible for me to afford the time and money to register my creations in all of the potential new registries.
As current copyright law stands, any work created by anyone is protected under copyright from the moment of its creation. There is no need to register the work (although registration can sometimes prove beneficial in court cases where creation and authorship are at issue, the provenance of work has also been upheld for non-registered work). I create literally hundreds of new works a year, and my clients pay for the right to use those works--not for the right to own them; the copyright remains with me, and allows me to re-sell or re-purpose the work for other clients, if I desire. A requirement to register every work I create--every brand, every brochure design, every website interface, every photograph--would place an undue and unnecessary burden on me. I would have to either spend literally hours each month registering my creations, or hire someone to do it on my behalf. I would also end up spending possibly hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on registration fees. I would also have to register all my previous work to protect it under the proposed legislation.
I currently have over two thousand works created in just the last five years that would require registration--not to mention all work created before that date. Multiply my story by hundreds or thousands of people in your district, and you can see that this is not just an abstract issue about intellectual property; it's an issue that will negatively affect many of your constituents.
I strongly urge you to vote AGAINST the Orphan Works bill and protect my rights, my copyrights, to all that I have and will create.
Thank you for your consideration of this important matter.
Sincerely,
Alan Bucknam
professional member, AIGA
owner/principal
Notchcode Creative
3300 Ingalls Street
Wheat Ridge, Colorado 80033-7432
303.915.5459
posted at 9:12 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Red and Blue makes the Southwest Landscape
I got back from the four corners area of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado last Friday, where I was working off-site. I was able to spend some time touring around Monument Valley with some compadres who know the place well, and it was eye-opening. I made some interesting images with my large-format camera, which I had along on assignment, and hopefully I'll hit the darkroom in the near future to see what became of my vision. I'll post any good results here. Bad ones, well, we don't talk about where those go.
Labels: photography, travel
posted at 9:00 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
5.18.2008
SIghtseeing
I was down in the Four Corners region of the US this past week, and had the opportunity to photograph some down in Monument Valley and southern Utah. I had a great time, spent with great people. It's nice when work becomes more than work, isn't it?
Anyhow, I made this image with my digital camera, and wanted to share it with you. I made a few other similar images with my large format camera, but those are still latent, so I offer this instead.
posted at 10:41 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
5.17.2008
The Republican Party's new brand has the same tagline as an antidepressant? How, um, ironic.
Since I've been out in the field all week, I haven't been as watchful about branding slip-ups as I usually am. But when I came home tonight, I was relieved to find that Jon Stewart was temping for me while I was away. Kudos to the Daily Show for doing my work for me, by finding another example of why brand research matters.Labels: branding, humor, video
posted at 9:00 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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:
- did you grow up in the age of learning BASIC in school?
- 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?
- 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!Labels: coding, productivity, W3C, XHTML
posted at 9:00 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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.Labels: branding
posted at 12:00 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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.Labels: licensing, small business, work for hire
posted at 9:00 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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.Labels: humor, performance
posted at 9:05 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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.Labels: photography
posted at 8:50 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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.Labels: music
posted at 10:00 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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.Labels: information graphics, newspapers, visual information
posted at 4:35 PM Leave your comments here: 1 comments
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.Labels: blogs
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?Labels: marketing, social networking, software
posted at 10:48 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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 takeitezLabels: photography, travel
posted at 10:30 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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
- advertising,
- Website development and design, and
- 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.Labels: advice, branding, graphic design, web design
posted at 7:30 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
5.01.2008
The Designer as Chef
Khoi Vinh's site, Subtraction, has a nice post about the virtues of smaller-sized design studios. He argues that it's impossible to have 100% excellence/creativity/wonderfulness in a large design agency, since
This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish—a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist—maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.
My comment on his post is worthy of cross-posting here, since it's a metaphor that I use all the time with my clients:
I always give clients who are leery of working with a small studio (or a lone designer) a metaphor for the small shop/single designer experience:
A designer is a chef. The client is the diner.
Diner tells chef: make me a four-course meal.
Chef and diner then discuss what they'd like that meal to be, what the diner's tastes are, how it meshes with the chef's style and competence.
Chef goes to buy ingredients (sometimes the diner comes along, or has already brought the ingredients with them. Interesting restaurant, eh?)
Chef retreats to kitchen. Cooks.
Presents meal.
Diner eats.
If the chef and the diner have chosen each other well, then the diner should leave satisfied.
Perhaps a strained metaphor, but for me, the content are the ingredients, and the designer is the chef who puts it all together to make something palatable.
And we all know the old saw about too many cooks. If you want a (perhaps) more predictable meal, go to the Olive Garden. Or Burger King. You'll get served faster, but your meal will taste a lot like the one served at the next table. And it won't be made just for you.
photos by ericmcgregor and katayunLabels: design, small business, writing
posted at 8:35 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
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