It’s been a refreshing change of pace and it’s been enjoyable. In addition to producing artwork, now I’m planning projects, researching ideas, drafting proposals, and even involved in pitching new ideas to the client.

I’ve learned a lot in the past six months, but the most important thing I’ve learned so far is how much I suck at writing. Awkward phrases, odd sentence structure, and poor word choice are themes that have come up in my proposals time after time (as pointed out to me by the agency partner that I’ve worked with on many of these assignments). These errors are always swiftly corrected, but the additional time spent in grammatical revisions would be better spent elsewhere.

So my goal for the next six months is to improve my writing skills. Not just for Gams, but for me. I’d really like to become a better writer. While I’m not sure how I’m going to go about doing so, I do know that it’s going to happen and will probably involve more frequent posting here. Stay tuned…

One of the nicer subtleties in OS X can be found when browsing Windows computers on the Finder. If you look closely, you can see that each icon for a Windows computer proudly shows the infamous BSOD (blue screen of doom).

And this is just one of the many reasons why I love using a Mac.

Tonight I took some time to upgrade to the most recent version of WordPress. Looks like quite a bit has changed since 2.0.x.

Let me know if anyone finds anything broken or garbled.

Although I don’t use Quark on a day-to-day basis, I learned how to use it for some production design tasks during my college years. InDesign has been my tool of choice for a while and though I’ve had my issues with it, it’s always let me do what I’ve needed to do more efficiently than Quark ever could.

New functionality was added to InDesign with each version that usually seemed to make my job easier and the design process a little bit more intuitive. From what I understand, Quark has come a long way since version 4, but I still found it hard to get excited about the new releases. It always seemed that Quark was just trying to catch up to its big brother, InDesign.

Skimming over the feature list in the new version, it seems like Quark may have finally caught up. While some features seem useless (exporting page layouts to SWF …why?), others like the ability to automatically set up flexible grid systems from page to page) seem pretty innovative and could be really useful.

I’m going to download the trial version and maybe I’ll post a review of it after a couple of weeks of actual use.

No idea whether the vodka is any good, but what a great design for a super premium vodka that really breaks through.

It always amazes me how good industrial design can really enhance consumer products–both aesthetically and functionally. A few weeks ago, a friend was visiting from out of town. He had been interning at Apple computer over the past couple of quarters and had all sorts of stories to tell about how ID drives literally everything at the company. Everything. It wasn’t much of a surprise (it is Apple), but I wish other companies had the same mindset.

For too many manufacturers ID seems like an afterthought, and its really a shame. Their lack of attention to it makes for products that are too similar to competitors’, look dated, or have poor usability. It seems when retail sales are down, they’re too quick to blame everything but their product design. Again it’s a real shame.

In any case though, I managed to finish out the rest of the site’s templates today. Now all of the Archive and Search Pages should be displaying properly.

Check out this video by three graphic designers. It shows how they recreated the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan for another project. Seriously awesome. Found over at brandflakes.

It seems like text fields in the toolbar seem to jump around and not work as expected. Once you enter a value, it retains it even after trying to put in a new one. A seemingly minor problem, but really annoying. Makes cropping photos or constrained selections just about impossible. Hopefully Adobe and Apple can sort this problem out soon, as it’s stopping me from upgrading on my G5 at home that I do production work on.

In other news, I went to see Tori Amos Monday night at the Auditorium Theater with Clay and Paige. It was definitely exciting to see her live for the first time, and hopefully won’t be the last. We were kind of surprised that she didn’t sing Me and a Gun (along with a few others), but apparently she made up for that at the Vic the night after. Guns and all. Bummer we didn’t go to that show, too.

The attention to detail in the framework’s default typography is incredible–type aligns to a common baseline grid and there is even support for incremental leading. It’s not even v1.0 and it is already chock full of web design wonderfulness.

Massive kudos to Olav Bjørkøy for a job really well done.

…is the bane of my existence.

They’re time-consuming and tedious to research and produce, but the challenge of designing an arresting map (both visually and informatively) is a wonderful experience. With the potentially infinite amount of information present with a map, even the subtlest of aesthetic changes can vastly affect the information hierarchy and the effectiveness of the map.

A great example is the NYC subway map redone by Kick Design. The map contains massive amounts of information, but its extremely well designed, making the information easy to digest.