All entries from November 2007

Frustrated by a lack of vector illustrations of current political figures, and inspired by campaign fever, Matt whipped up ten speed-illo vector-heads.

Matt is offering this vector set, dubbed “Politics As Usual 08”, to the world free-of-charge.

Download ZIP

Depending on the reference, Matt Owens can render a vector illustration of any head in under 5 minutes. Want a vector rendering of your family/dog/child? He’s your man.

We’re big fans of Faul’s work.

After Paul’s death in 1966, Faul (aka Geoffrey “Billy” Shepherd, aka Neil Aspinall) really stepped into the character and helped produce what many consider to be the group’s finest work (Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Abbey Road).

Faul also went on to enjoy a very successful solo career. From AllMusic:

Out of all the former Beatles, Paul McCartney by far had the most successful solo career, maintaining a constant presence in the British and American charts during the ’70s and ’80s. In America alone, he had nine number one singles and seven number one albums during the first 12 years of his solo career.

It’s surprising that someone as talented as Paul McCartney could be replaced with another equally talented individual with strikingly similar features.

While Paul deserves a lot of credit for his ’63-66 years, there’s really no contest: Faul is the real talent. His sweeping body of work over the past forty years firmly establishes Faul as one of the great career musicians.

If you’re in NYC, check out this week’s Village Voice. Wes illustrated the cover story, and the cover:

That’s Wes about to be run over by a bus. It’s not the first time he’s worked himself into a cover.

If you’re doing commercial design work, you’re likely running Adobe software. If you don’t want to be left behind, you’re always upgrading to the latest gear. Even if you don’t care about new features, an entire industry is working against you: Apple keeps releasing machines and operating systems that ditch one thing for another (OS 9 for X, PowerPC for Intel), and the commercial design world is always graduating to whatever Adobe’s latest offering may be. It’s a never-ender.

The CS3 Experience

Last week I purchased Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. That’s a bunch of stuff. Being a model citizen is expensive: $1,841.00 with tax from Adobe.com.

During checkout I elected to download the massive 16GB package (the equivalent of ~24 CDs of data).

After completing transaction, I was ready to start downloading my 16 gigs immediately. Instead I received the following email confirmation:

You will receive an email within the next business day confirming the status of your order.

Really? One of the biggest software companies in the world can’t figure out how to automate my order? Fortunately, a human emailed me a few hours later providing me with my serial number and instructions for downloading. I navigated the complex Adobe html-flash-hybrid-web-world and started downloading.

Activation

Adobe introduced activation with CS2. Activation forces CS owners to verify the product’s serial number within 30 days. By verify, I mean Adobe collects identifying information about your computer (the physical computer, not you personally), which it sends, along with your Adobe serial number, to the Adobe activation database super-brain. With this data, the super-brain enforces the term’s of Adobe’s license agreement, which states that the product can only be installed on two machines.

Two machines – that’s it. If I want to install the software on another machine, I need to deactivate one of my other machines first.

Considering that it’s still not very difficult to acquire a cracked copy of CS3, Adobe’s strict enforcement of a strict software license is just sorta gross.

Trial software odyssey

A few months ago I had downloaded the Flash CS3 Trial to test it out. I was impressed, and it was definitely one of the reasons why I moved to CS3. The important point is that I still had the trial software installed on my machine.

While installing the full CS3 package, the installer detected that I already had Flash CS3 installed on the machine and informed me that, as a result, the installer would skip Flash. This seemed smart to me. I had already tweaked out the trial a bit, and I didn’t want to have to reconfig all my palettes and such.

The installation went smoothly, and after activating the software, I was back to work. I was pleased with Photoshop — much faster on my Intel-Mac than the non-universal CS1 I had been running.

Then I tried to open Flash…

Upon launching Flash, I was required to provide my serial number. Unfortunately, my serial number didn’t work. I discovered that my CS3 serial number is incompatible with the Flash CS3 Trial software. I googled around and confirmed that this was the case.

Next, I tried to uninstall the trial software using the uninstall tool provided with CS3. Amazingly, the uninstall tool was unable to uninstall the Flash CS3 Trial.

Getting frustrated, I started trashing anything Flash CS3 related — the application, preferences, anything I could find. Yet, over and over again the CS3 installer refused to install Flash because it kept detecting that it had been installed already.

I started Googling harder and began finding others with the same issue. Apparently, only the Flash CS3 Trial Uninstaller is capable of removing the trial software. I had to go back to the Adobe site and re-download the Flash CS3 Trial software (another 800 MB). I ran the trial’s installer to re-install the trial just so I could uninstall the trial. So ridiculous. This actually worked, and the CS3 installer finally gave me the green light to install Flash CS3 proper.

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t install Flash CS3. The installer would repeatedly stop responding while “repairing support files.” All I can figure is that something got corrupted with all the trial deletion/installation/uninstallation that was going on. Finally, I uninstalled CS3 in its entirety. Only then was I able to re-install everything, including Flash.

A massive waste of time.

Software is hard, DRM is harder

Globo-chem-level software is bound have issues — it’s spectacularly complicated. And all software is hard. From Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code:

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail.

Yet, punishing experiences like mine are totally unnecessary, and when you’re paying big cash, unacceptable.

Most frustrating is that my trial-software-odyssey is likely due to the limitations of Adobe’s activation and serial-numbering system. If the software wasn’t rolled into a complex activation system, Adobe probably wouldn’t require different installations of the same software, or different types of serial numbers for blanket CS3 packages versus stand-alone products.

Adobe’s activation system is like other anti-piracy technologies — iTunes DRM, Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage, etc. – in that it always finds a way to punish the paying consumers, while piracy always finds a way around it. I can’t recall a single anti-piracy scheme that actually made both vendor and customer happy. If software is hard, DRM is harder.

I’m happy to see DRM nonexistent at the new Amazon MP3 store, and slowly being phased out of iTunes. But, with regard to Adobe, there is minimal competition and minimal incentive for them to do anything differently. After Adobe’s 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, their only significant competitor is Apple with Final Cut and Aperture. If Adobe releases a junk installer, or chooses to enforce a strict software license through activation, few design professionals have the option of taking their business elsewhere.

Recently discovered Sleevage, a blog on record packaging design. Sleevage is still relatively new, and it seems like they’re still working to find their voice. I find many of the reviews to be a little too easy — too brief, minimal commentary, or stories I already knew.

However, today’s interview with David Calderley of Graphic Therapy on the Brendan Benson – Alternative to Love packaging was great.

I enjoyed David’s words on how he eventually arrived at the final product. It’s always nice to learn the back story, see early concepts, and final art for the album and singles in one place.

For those unfamiliar with Brendan Benson, I recommend all three of his records, and that one he did with Jack White as well.

Link:
http://sleevage.com/brendan-benson-the-alternative-to-love/

I had the fortune of seeing the design studio Vasava present their work at the OFFF festival here in New York last week. I have followed Vasava for many years now and was very excited to see them speak. Vasava www.vasava.es is a design studio based in Barcelona. They are primarily dedicated to communication campaigns, interactive, editorial design, motion graphics, events and exhibitions as well as personal projects and products.

Totaling 15 people, the work of Vasava has a wide variety of styles and mediums. Seeing the work presented together, the notion of design authorship came to mind. The way Vasava present their work, it is impossible to tell who did what project. However, you do see specific styles where it is apparent that the same person did one project and then another.

Of particular interest to me were the following pieces:

Diesel Fifty book. 5 Steps to creativity

The Room Flyers

Fotogramas

HP Hamburger

Overall, the type and illustration work as really impressive. Whoever did the type for the 5 steps to creativity in the Diesel Fifty book deserves a pat on the back. Vasava have been working with Diesel for many years and a large portion of the work they presented was Diesel related.

I was taken by how varied the work was. There seems to be an anything goes freedom to a lot of the work which was really interesting. I think in the US, we tend to focus on the accomplishments of individual designers and are generally overly critical.

For Vasava, I think as a studio they work hard but are open to anything and do not take things too seriously. I think this allows them to move seamless between different kinds of projects and different styles without getting too caught up in the details.
The quantity and variety of projects was totally inspirational. I really appreciate the impulse of most of the work and I think Vasava are a very unique example of what is possible in the commercial illustration/design world when really talented people put their egos aside and decide to work together.

Lastly, Vasava run a gallery/store in Barcelona called Vallery. Located in the Barcelona’s city center, It features exhibition by outstanding artists, graphic designers and illustrators.

VALLERY

I think the combination of the studio, great work with tons of variety and a store/space to share their passion for design is a real inspiration.