Notes from Notchcode

Blogger now not so FTP-friendly

2010-02-26T14:22:00.001-07:00

I know probably none of you really care, but in March Google will be discontinuing their FTP support of Blogger, the weblog platform we use to post our thoughts here.

This means that at some point we'll be unable to continue this blog as it is now. The good news is that our content management system is basically one big blogging tool itself, so we'll just use that instead. All the current posts will be archived here, forever. So there's still time to make some really inane comments that your descendants can laugh at in coming eons.

By the way, if anyone can point us to a good migration tool that will take Blogger-generated posts and push them into a Joomla CMS, let us know. That way our archives won't look like they are stuck in 1990.

Crowded

2010-02-11T10:22:00.001-07:00

For the record, InDesign's palette interface makes it very clear why you should only use their software on a two-monitor setup. One for the layout, and another for the palettes. I'm working on my 15" Mac lappy away from the office right now, and it's none too easy to see a screen-ful of design-space when you've got a fifth of the screen width taken up by this:

Yes yes yes, I know I can collapse these, but when you're manipulating color, typography, and strokes over and over and over, it doesn't really make sense to do that, now, does it?

home-made charts

2010-02-10T20:34:00.001-07:00

home-made charts
Originally uploaded by bucknam

Doing some work for a client and the look of the piece calls for all home-made, high-school-style charts. These will get scanned and the different shades of gray will break out into different colors, thanks to the magic of tritone magic. Stay tuned to see the finished project.

Now with more infographics

2010-02-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Betsy and Heather, I've got me a shiny new account over at Behance. It's the official online portfolio of the AIGA, as well, so I'm super-duper covered now.

Not much up yet, seeing as I can't even get time set aside to get my work on the new notchcode site up, but you can check out a dozen or so information graphics and such that I've put up. Let me know what you think of them.

The best analogy I've read about spec work and graphic design...

2010-02-05T22:14:00.001-07:00

...comes this past week from AIGA Executive Director Richard Grefe, who wrote a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, admonishing them for requesting designers to create a logo on spec for a new program, "Art Works". Go read the whole article, as it's filled with bon mots like this:

It would seem to me that the analogue in theater production would be for producers to invite dress rehearsals of a variety of productions before an investment or commitment was made on any one production.

One more reason to stop using Internet Explorer 6 and upgrade already

2010-02-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

Google announced that it's discontinuing support of Internet Explorer 6. This is welcome news, as it's one of the largest resource sinkholes any web developer has to face when working on site design and development. And there are some much better, more compliant browsers out there for people to use, in any case. Now, some organizations' audiences still skew heavily toward IE6, and I (and others) will assuredly continue to develop sites that are IE6 compliant when necessary; but I think it's safe to say that it's no longer a standard that most developers will hew to automatically.

Google is the latest, not the first, large web-based concern to move away from IE6 compliance. IE6 accounts for just over ten percent of total browser usage as of January 2010. That's down nearly 50% from January 2009. At this rate, IE 6 will account for something just north of 6% total user share by January 2011.

IE6 denial message image courtesy of RobotJohnny

Bauhaus: why I love her.

2010-01-29T14:40:00.001-07:00

I'm a bit sentimental, especially when it comes to things related to Colorado. And even though Herbert Bayer isn't a native son, he came here and made Aspen his home, and we consider him one of our own.

Is it any wonder, then, that I had a poster of his Articulated Wall replica in my bedroom as a teenager? And is it any wonder that we use a modified version of Bauhaus as our logotype?

I had been using Gill Sans, prior to our redesign a few years ago, as our identity face, but I've always liked Bauhaus, and the simplicity and nostalgic modernism inherent in it, so that's where we went. Until recently, though, I had kept Gill Sans around for report headings, and so on, because I like how readable it is; how cleanly it scans with your eye, and how even its proportions seem to me.

This week I went totally nuts and set all the headings and subheading for a Brand Brief in Bauhaus. I was going to set the body copy in it as well, but after looking at it for about ten seconds my eyeballs went crazy and I reverted to Bembo, always a safe choice for longer runs of copy.

The end result was nice:

Bauhaus is an early 1970s re-expression of Bayer's universal face, created in 1927. One reason I think some people have an aversion to the Bauhaus face has to do with its introduction in the early '70s, and its use all over the place in popular culture at the time. I happen to like it, despite this. I am enamored with Bayer's reductive minimalism, of which his typeface is a great example. Design often can get in the way of the message, and Bayer strove to make design serve it, instead.

Generous Servings to expand to dessert service and evening hours on February 20th.

2010-01-28T10:54:00.001-07:00

One of my fave cafés, Generous Servings, is all set to expand their operation to desserts and drinks. They'll be expanding into the old Happy Cakes space, adjacent to their cooking school and current café space, on Newton and 32nd. Hours for both the café and new space will extend until 10pm. Excited to try the Dutch Donuts with Caramel Sauce!

For all you former SCAD photo majors out there...

2010-01-27T22:33:00.001-07:00

...The Photo Monitors at Bergen Hall have a Blog. When I was there, we barely had computers. And they were made of stone tablets. The internet was a series of volcanic lava tubes....

I'm just tickled that the people there, nearly 20 years after we installed the department in the "new" Bergen Hall, still call the darkroom checkout office "The Cave".

Color Theory From the Archives

2010-01-26T13:58:00.001-07:00

I made this ~~ten~~ TWENTY years ago, in my freshman Color Theory class at SCAD. I always liked it, despite it resembling absolutely nothing from my Colorado upbringing. I only knew two kids who had a pool, and we were in an older 1950's-era neighborhood, less uniform than the mid-'80s tract homes seen here.

I'm sure it's not what Don Draper drinks, but it works for me.

2010-01-21T22:12:00.001-07:00

the Sunset Gin Cocktail
Originally uploaded by bucknam

After a long day bent over the light table, and no beer on hand, I whipped up a little something that cooled me down and made me forget about all the little pieces of finger my X-ACTO left all over the client's mockups (good thing their corporate color is Pantone 201). Check out the recipe for this little gin number over at MadeUpFood.com

Third post in a row about the Times? This must stop. Right after this:

2010-01-20T23:11:00.001-07:00

The day after I post about Baekdal's analysis of what traditional periodical print media needs to do to stay relevant (along with my own two cents), The New York Times announced their metering policy, which will start in a year.

On a possibly-related note: the Times Reader section of the NYT site is still broken; not sure what's up with that, if it's connected with the upcoming Apple news (as I've speculated earlier), if Times Reader is just being re-tooled, or if it's simply dead.

I hope the NYT is listening to Baekdal

2010-01-19T06:15:00.000-07:00

Thomas Baekdal wrote a thoughtful analysis of what traditional periodical print media needs to do to survive the death of traditional periodical print media. He uses the difference in traditional book publishing costs versus e-book costs to illustrate some fundamental ways to get at the issue. It's a nice breakdown of costs, and seven simple points of advice. One of my favorites:

Separate the cost of creating news, and the cost of producing news. Do not set your online price based on what it costs to produce the printed paper.

I get the Sunday New York Times because I enjoy the ritual of taking a morning to do nothing but read the paper and sip my coffee. But getting the same (or, actually, a richer) experience is just around the corner, via a good e-reading device (My laptop with an AIR-enabled version--the Times Reader--is a close runner up right now. note: all links to the Times Reader software on the NYT site seem to be down as of today. Getting ready for their rumored announcement with Apple re: their tablet device?). And if I can pay the same $26 or less for this experience, delivered exclusively online, every day, you can bet I and a lot of others will take it.

The things I love about my current print-based experience:

The resolution. 1200-2400 effective dpi for type, and actually quite good lpi for color photographs are hard to beat with existing, on the market tech.

Editors. The fact that the edition of the paper I am reading has been curated by professionals has great value. I may not read every article, but they are there for me to choose from, and having them there expands my horizons more than a self-curated RSS feed list in a news reader.

Size. I actually grew up with the late, lamented Rocky Mountain News, which was a tabloid-size paper, and preferred the ease of use of that size. The NYT, as more of a broadsheet (although it's been getting a lot smaller lately) is more unwieldy, although I've learned the veteran readers' trick of folding the broadsheet in half lengthwise, and then in half vertically, to make it fit in my lap, or holdable above my head, or sit atop my empty breakfast plate. Any news- or publication-purposed device should have enough room to show you about eleven inches by seven inches of layout space at a time, if you want it.

Things I hate about my current print-based experience:

It's stale. A lot of the articles I get in the morning paper I've already read online the night before. An electronic version's most salient selling point is its up-to-date-ness.

Not enough imagery and information graphics. The online version of the NYT, for example, has many more images, interactive maps and graphics, and so on, than the print version. This is because paper is expensive, advertisers need column inches, and written reportage usually takes priority over graphic reportage. In e-news, you don't have to worry about column-inches for ads. You want to enrich the written content with additional graphic reportage.

It's paper. I am a print guy from way back. I remember Zipatone and waxers. But dealing with the paper artifact you have, once you've read the paper, is cumbersome. They pile up, have to be taken out to the recycling, and my print and paper rep friends tell me that there's such a glut of paper out there to be recycled that manufacturing recycled paper is more expensive than ever.

In the end, I am sure that we'll still have quality reporting, based on the essence of papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times, well in to the future. I think they'll probably be produced by highly decentralized newsrooms, overseen by editors with iron fists (who bring them down via phone and IM rather than around a conference table), and distributed via electrons, without a printing press, paper mill, or elderly guy throwing papers out into my lawn.

New York Times' Times Reader site seems to be "Unavailable"

2010-01-18T22:59:00.001-07:00

In getting info ready for a story, I noticed that all links to the New York Times' Times Reader application (an Adobe AIR-powered desktop news reader app) are unavailable. And it's not just one URL. All the URLs leading to any mention of the Times Reader, even those linked within Times stories about the Reader, are busted. Might just be some late-night maintenance, but any hiccup involving the Times' online delivery of news at this point, with a rumored deal between the Times and Apple (of the rumored soon-to-be-unveiled slate-newsy-reading device) in the works....makes you wonder.

User experience nostalgia

2010-01-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

I was installing a driver for my Epson scanner last night, and noticed that while some of the progress window elements were using OS X-styled elements, there were a lot of elements in there that come straight from the OS 9 days. Keep in mind OS 9 was in vogue over ten years ago. The progress bar, in particular, is a straight holdover from OS 8.6.

So, are the folks at Installer VISE lazy, or nostalgic, or nonexistent?

Why typographic consistency matters

2010-01-05T08:03:00.001-07:00

Check out this billboard, spotted near Santa Fe and 6th Avenue in Denver. It's for a local lingerie boutique, Sol. All the print and outdoor advertising I've seen for Sol in the past has carried across their typographic style from their brand identity (which is typographically-based) into their ads. And the photos have been very consistent, too.

So what's up with the LARGE TYPE below the image, where it states that Sol is your "YOUR BRA FITTING DESTINATION"? It's completely out of character for this brand, and for the tone that Sol has worked so hard in the past to cultivate: sexy, understated, yet somewhat risky, and always fashionable. The color choice for the background (a bright red) is also out of character for Sol; in the past they've used earthy, or metallic, secondary colors that matched the duotone photographs. Now, the image here is in color, so maybe someone decided to key the background off the scarf worn in the model's hair. But it's a bad call. It reminds me of a car commercial. A local car commercial. Or maybe an ad for a Snuggi.

I can assure you that Sol is NOT selling Snuggis...so why the new direction for their look? My hope (if you can call it hope) is that someone at Sol was offered a discount on this particular piece of outdoor placement, and someone at the outdoor company designed it for them. I could imagine in this scenario that Sol's agency would not be pleased, either. On the other hand, if Sol's agency was responsible, I'm very interested to know how this fits into their current branding strategy for Sol, and why they've taken this turn. Maybe the old campaign isn't selling bras they way that it should, and this is the start of a new direction. If it is, they need to reconcile the stylistic differences between the Sol brand and the new look. Right now they just don't fit together, and that's what's so jarring.

I don't by much (any) lingerie, so I am not the target audience for this outdoor campaign; but the color and typographic choices here are far outside the brand identity that this company has worked for years to create. I hope it's a one-off, because they aren't doing themselves any favors with the dissonance served up in this piece.

HOORAY FOR 2010

2010-01-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Amazingly, the typography in this image was not photoshopped

2009-12-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the signage and experience design folks in Amsterdam, who created signage for their airport that really jumps out at you.

photo:Evert Elzinga/Associated Press via the New York Times

Faxing is SO 20th Century.

2009-12-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally pulled the plug on our fax line. We hadn't had a fax machine for years (opting to port incoming faxes to our mac, which then printed them and saved them as PDFs). Truth is, we haven't sent a fax in at least three years, and the only things that are faxed to us are signed contracts. While we love signed contracts, there are better ways of getting them: say, as a PDF, or via mail, or in person (my favorite, since I get to thank the client in person, too).

So, for anyone out there who just absolutely has to fax something to us, you're out of luck. Feel free to send us that document another way, say carrier pigeon, PDF via e-mail, upload it to our secure project management site at Basecamp, etcetera.

photo via Flickr by Justin Hawthorne

Heartbeat City

2009-12-21T09:48:00.001-07:00

Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop by Peter Phillips, 1972

It probably was indicative of my future career path in art and design and that it would eventually move away (slightly) from music when as a young teenager I got my copy of The Cars' Heartbeat City LP and was more interested in the cover art than in the music. Although I thought (and still think) the music is pretty good (and fun) too.

James Rosenquist had a retrospective down at the Denver Art Museum in 1985 (just a year after Heartbeat City was released), and I thought the cover art on the album was cut from the same cloth as Rosenquist's F-111 (better detail view of the painting, which is huge, here), which to this day remains one of my favorite pieces of art. Both the painting on the album cover and F-111 were visually explosive, fun, odd, and full of symbolism.

detail of F-111 by James Rosenquist, 1965, installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Photo by t_a_i_s

Later on, I found out that Heartbeat City's cover art was a painting called "Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop", and was painted by British pop artist Peter Phillips, who has some strong stylistic ties to Rosenquist. So at least I wasn't too far off the mark back in the '80s. Phillips' use of typography, symbolism, cars and exploded views of car parts (and, not incidentally, a Vargas-style pinup girl) make for a dynamic image that recalls the macho muscle car culture of the late '60s and early '70s as well as Pop Art's objectification and elevation of everyday objects into the realm of "art".

Plus, as a teenager, I just thought it looked really cool.

You can see Rosenquist's 1965 F-111 at MoMA in New York, and Phillips' Art-O-Matic Loop di Loop in your record collection.

Happy Holidays

2009-12-18T16:50:00.001-07:00

We just sent a few of these out to some of our clients. If you want one of your own, just ask. Have a great holiday! We'll be working some during the Christmas week, and out of the office between 12/25 and 1/3. See you in 2010!

"The Power of Four". Is Aspen Snowmass an economy car, or a ski area?

2009-12-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

SRSLY, PPL. This slogan I am sure is referring to the number of ski areas that are a part of the Aspen/Snowmass family, or maybe the number of gondolas that run directly from the top of the mountain to the Caribou Club, or perhaps the number of martinis it takes for you to think that their season pass rates are affordable....right?

Ok ok, I know that it's a reference to the four mountains you can ski up in the Roaring Fork Valley. But I have to think that there were half a dozen better slogans out there in the creative ether that would be more effective. "The Power of Four" is short and succinct, but it makes you take the last semantic leap yourself ("four what, exactly?") rather than tie it all up in a nice little copy bow for you. I know, accuse me of wanting to have it all spelled out for me, but I think sometimes simple is better. Simple and clever is ever better than that. Simple and clever and sellable to the client is always the challenge, I suppose, right?

New microsite design for the Environmental Defense Fund is live

2009-12-16T13:14:00.001-07:00

I worked with the fine folks at Fenton Communications last month to create a web page UX for the Environmental Defense Fund's Catch Shares advocacy program. The site went live late last week, and it's full of good info on how to take action to support this important effort.

The site design was done via a Photoshop master file, which took into account elements of the end-user's CMS that would be strictly CSS and php-based, as well as strictly graphical elements such as icons and the larger call to action image used in the main section of the landing page. I worked with Fenton to ensure we complied with EDF's new brand identity guidelines, and to make sure the graphics, language, and presentation stayed on-message and appealed to the target audience.

To see how things can change, subtly, between the final design phase and the coding and implementation, here's a side-by-side comparison of the final interface design and the executed, coded page. The fact that the CSS and PHP elements so closely match the design file is due to attention to the details of sizing, color, etc. on the design end, and the great follow-through on the coding end at the EDF.

Here's the design:

And the final site rendering. Note the change in language in the call to action image:

Cost versus Value: Why Your Design Intern Can't do a Designer's Job "for Free"

2009-12-15T14:18:00.001-07:00

A colleague in the graphic design world told me the other day his position in an in-house marketing department was being eliminated. In this economy, this is unfortunately not unusual. And even more unfortunately usual, the company decided marketing was the first place to start cutting (because, you know, it makes so much sense to hamper your advertising and outreach efforts when you need to find more revenue).

The thing that was really galling, to him and to me, is that the owner of the company decided that they would be replacing this designer (who is not a newbie, mind you), with an intern who will--wait for it--work for free. Free, as in beer. Now as a business owner, I get all excited whenever I hear that I can get something for nothing. The problem is, you usually get what you pay for.

I'm not here to say all interns are worthless as replacements for designers; some, who are talented, very self-motivated, and have prior experience in both the techniques and application of those techniques--those interns may do a good job. But in my experience, this is a rare occurrence.

Interns can be a valuable addition to your staff. It can take production and some design loads off your design team and allow you to increase your capacity. And I've had good interns that not only helped with production but were creative as well. But the problem with an intern is inherent in what they're there for: to learn. If there's no designer, and the intern is doing all the work, the boss is going to be spending a lot of time training that intern in how to do basic stuff--and not just the finer points of using software, etc. And who will the intern learn from if there's no designer there?

The real learning curve an intern will go through when thrust into a graphic design job is in how to create effective design efficiently. I have yet to see an intern pop out design work that is effective at getting the audience to respond without literally scores of iterations. Seriously, I wanted to throw the computer out of the window when I would come back after an hour and see the intern staring blankly at the screen, with one, maybe two, elements on the screen. And the "tutorial" screen up on the window. (This, by the way, is when the designer steps in and helps the intern with whatever is stymying them.) In the time a designer with even one year of real-world experience would have a dozen variations on a concept completed, and be refining them down to half a dozen or so to present to me, the average intern would typically have three or four ideas completed. It's not a knock against the intern, because as I said, they are there to watch, learn, and practice in a real-world environment. They're not supposed to be banging out stuff super-fast.

Add to the design issues a lot of hand-holding and over-the-shoulder watching the boss will have to do in order to get a product that doesn't make their company look like they just fell off the turnip truck, and you're talking about a Bad Idea. I know in his mind, the boss is thinking "this is great! I just saved all this money by having an intern do the design work!" But in the long run, he'll suffer for it, in time spent managing the intern, and in the loss of revenue poor quality work will bring to the company. Can anybody say "incorrectly preflighted layout file that will result in the company having to pay thousands of dollars for a new press run?"

So: first off, interns take a lot of time and attention to get something approaching a similar result that an experienced designer could return more efficiently. The intern will cost money: your boss's time is money, yes? The revenue lost by creating designs that are less effective can be measured in dollars, yes? An intern "working for free" is not free. It will cost, and cost more than you think.

Secondly, there's the issue of a designer's experience; both at the company and in general. Designers are hired because the company liked their work, thought they could create designs that would resonate with their audience, and make them money. They looked to the designer's past work, and past experience, when making that decision. That's a big part of the value a designer bring to a company: leveraging that experience and know-how to create effective communication materials.

Aside from the experience and training a designer brings to the table, there's the weeks, even months of in-house training and learning once the designer is hired. This time spent learning the company's marketing and advertising strategy and utilizing that knowledge to create effective design for the company is worth a lot, both in the designer's value to the company and to the bottom line. That training is going down the toilet if they let a designer go. They'll have to start from scratch.

Here's the bottom line: interns are great assets to any organization. They help carry the load and learn a lot at the same time. But they are not replacements for experienced, qualified design professionals.

Accurate color reproduction of your brand image is important.

2009-12-10T22:43:00.001-07:00

I was quoted in this article over at Steve Duncan's blog about why accurate color is vital to maintaining your brand image.

Bottom line: it's all about consistent impressions, people. Learn it. Live it. Love it.