Archives

Dog Day Afternoon

Mister President
Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day, which is a good excuse for me to fawn over my mutt for a bit. Naturally, I brought Mister President with me to Behavior to celebrate the event; it᾿s a two-mile hike from my apartment to the office, and I enjoy it a lot, though I’m not so sure he does. Actually, he comes to work with me fairly often, and by now he knows it’s his job to just sit still and not bother anyone, so he’s no longer so eager to head out the door with me on weekday mornings. I like having him here with me, though to be honest, it’s sometimes difficult to juggle clients, manage a business and a keep an eye out for a dog’s natural and immutable propensity for digging up trouble.

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The Problem with Fireworks

FireworksEvery time I complain about Adobe Photoshop’s handicapped suitability for web production, people tell me to give Macromedia Fireworks a try, so today, I finally did. I spent a few hours in the program re-creating a layout that originated in Photoshop, and, after acclimating myself to the new application’s interface, I was generally pleased. It is indeed faster and more flexible in terms of shifting elements around, and it does in fact match a web designer’s frame of mind better than does Photoshop — I’ll almost certainly use it as the primary comping tool for my next project. However, I’m still not completely sold on Fireworks as the solution for all the problems that web production presents to a designer.

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Back to the Batcave

Batman BeginsAlready, I’ve seen “Batman Begins” twice, which gives you some indication of how I feel about the movie. I wanted to write a long review of it, but time simply won’t permit it — and there’s no dearth of glowing reviews available elsewhere — so I thought instead I might comment on the context in which this new interpretation has debuted.

Watch the very end of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of “Batman” and you’ll see just one of many, many examples of why I found very little of redeeming value in the last major hurrah for this franchise. The scene provides that movie’s resolution: Jack Nicholson’s miscast and misplayed Joker has been vanquished (after a ridiculous showdown in which he shot down the titular hero’s plane with a handgun!). Gotham City’s mayor, district attorney and police chief are addressing a crowd on the steps of an overwrought City Hall set, publicly reassuring the citizenry that the danger has passed.

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The Problem with Photoshop

After trying many times to regulate the manner in which Web site production is organized on the many design teams I’ve led, I’m still not at peace with the amount of control that should be imposed on other designers. On the one hand, everyone works in a unique manner, and it’s counter-productive to shoehorn a single, unified and overly detailed process on designers, who are typically free-thinkers when it comes to this working style. This I accept readily, but there are some things, admittedly low-level things, that I find it hard not to at least want to control.

There are more profound — and touchier — examples than this, but the one that has me preoccupied lately is the relatively trivial matter of organizing Photoshop documents. By and large, most designers approach the construction of a Photoshop document in an ad hoc manner, creating new layers as they are needed, not always naming them properly, or defaulting to Photoshop’s automated, serial numbering scheme, which happens to be generally devoid of meaning. I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of Photoshop documents are created in this way, and more often than not without negative consequence.

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Absenteeism & Apologia

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

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Absenteeism & Apologia

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

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Window Dress for Success

Window ChromeNow that Mac OS X Tiger has given us yet another variation on window chrome — the user interface ‘parts’ that frame windows in the operating system — I got to thinking about how they all work together. Well, to begin with, I’ve more or less given up on the idea that there truly is any kind of overarching strategy at work between the various styles of chrome offered by Apple. For instance, there’s no clear reason to me why the Finder is adorned with brushed metal or that Mail 2.0 looks completely foreign from its logical close cousin, the Address Book. Even saying there was, at one point, some kind of tidy logic governing chrome styles, that original concept has taken yet another debilitating body blow.

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Temporary Insanity

Adobe IllustratorAs spring seasons go, this one has been extraordinarily busy for me so far. Between work, traveling for work and working more, we’re doing more projects and more intensive projects at Behavior than ever before. This means good things for us and our clients, but bad things for the frequency of posts here while I go crazy over work tasks.

Another reason for my slacker performance on this weblog over the past week is Adobe Illustrator CS’s new, bewildering habit of creating dozens of unaccountable temporary files all over my hard drive. There are various explanations for the cause, none of which are conclusive, but the answer seems to lie somewhere between the Creative Suite’s PDF features and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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