Affordable Storage: Solutions for the Present and Future

As a designer who is used to using up computer storage space quickly, I was happy to stumble upon a unique, inexpensive storage solution recently. I'm speaking of the Thermaltake BlacX USB Hard Drive Dock which enables you to use SATA hard drives as if they were USB cards or plug and play enclosed hard drives. Why is this so great? Well for one thing, the price is unbeatable. With a buy price of $40.00, you really cannot find a better storage solution. Currently 500GB SATA hard drives run roughly $90-100. That means that, with the Hard Drive Dock, you can purchase 1 terabyte of space for just under $200. Wow- that's phenomenal!

From a functional standpoint its a great option for the designer looking to back up or create duplicates of his/her own work. Rather than having to purchase expensive enclosed hard drives where you are paying extra for the enclosure, housing, and power source, you can simply use 'raw' drives that would normally have to be installed inside your computer. Furthermore, you don't have to shut down your computer to remove the drives like you normally would. Just plug the drive in, do your copying, and then store the data safely.

Designers working in large formats will understand the benefit of running a system like this. Those many-layered PSD files start to really crank up the size when you are working on a high-resolution banner or display project. This system is probably even more beneficial to video editors. Given the current industry shift towards High Definition, demand for cheap storage space is at an all-time high. If you are running your own freelance company and do not have the resources or money available to purchase some of the more expensive data backup solutions, this is a fantastic way to start. Don't get me wrong, this is no alternative to a redundant array; this is no RAID setup. However, if you need to store footage or files quickly, cheaply, and efficiently, this is definitely worth looking into.

But what about the future?

To be honest, I believe the above method is pretty much the cheapest way to store data currently and I don't expect that to change for at least 4-5 more years (just my own opinion). However, Blu-Ray disc backup will inevitably replace this method if technology prices drop significantly. For now though, its just not worth using Blu-Ray for your backup needs.

A Blu-Ray burner will run you anywhere from $350-600 and write speeds are still fairly poor in proportion to the disc quality. In addition to this, the media is still incredibly expensive! At the very best you are looking at an individual disc cost of $30-50 for 1 (one!) dual-layer disc that holds 50GB. If you have a Blu-Ray player for your HDTV at home, you know how expensive those discs are to buy. This is why my wife and I use my XBOX 360 to 'rent' HD movies rather than investing in a Blu-Ray player and spending money on these overpriced discs (as an aside: You can also rent HD movies for relatively cheap using an iTunes enabled computer that is hooked up to your HDTV or by using Apple's Mac TV device.).

No thanks... I'll glady wait for this technology price point to drop- it's inevitable (for proof of this, look at DVD trends and how that technology price point dropped tremendously as it became more and more standardized). While it's really not a viable technology for anything outside of HD Movies right now, I do think this is the way of the future provided the cost falls significantly.

Branding Samples

My previous post regarding Starbuck's recent branding move reminded me that, while I'm constantly designing on the job and at home, I'm rarely posting examples of projects. I've been working on quite a few logo samples for an upcoming conference that my work is putting on. The details are still fairly vague so I'm taking pretty broad stabs at it right now in an effort to pin down the direction we will end up going for this particular brand. These are by no means finished, and pretty rough, but a good place to start in order to get a better idea for what the requester does and doesn't like.

Brand History: Starbucks

I saw our project manager drinking coffee from an unusual starbucks cup this morning. Upon closer investigation I discovered that the logo was strangely different... and brown; definitely not the iconic green and black emblem that we've all come to know (for better or worse) on virtually every civilized street corner in the United States. My good friend Mr. Google quickly told me that this was Starbuck's original logo from the 70's. A further investigation had me digging up this cool article written by John Moore of Brand Autopsy. It details the development and evolution of the Starbuck's logo- pretty cool information. As a designerd (yes, that's right, I'm making up my own words now), I think its really cool to see how time and history effect a company's branding. Just some graphical food for the thought.

EDIT: I found this article in business week that further discusses the temporary logo switch on select cups of coffee. Check it out here.

The REAL Cloning Brush

My friend Garrett sent me this cool video illustrating a concept design of a '3D Film Brush'. Essentially its a real life cloning brush (a la photoshop). The developer says this about it:

"...a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by “picking up” and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special “ink” they just picked up from their immediate environment"

There's more about this cool little novelty here. Thought it was cool!

BTC Conference

I'd like to encourage you to pray for (and consider attending if you are a young adult) the upcoming BTC Conference which will take place in August. My home church, Grace Covenant, is the one heading up this conference and we are really excited to see what the Lord will do with our efforts. This conference was the original idea of my good friend David Giarizzo, who has been spearheading the efforts to develop and implement the conference. David is currently at the ARBCA General Assembly and will speaking to the pastors and assembly there to follow-up the official announcement of the conference during last year's GA. Here's so more info on the conference itself:

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• What? Reformed Baptist Young Adults Conference
• When? August 8th - 11th, 2008
• Where? Prescott, Arizona
• Speaker? Pastor Bob Selph
  

The goal of BTC is to help young people understand the importance of the local church. Our hope is that this younger generation of Reformed believers will grow in love for Christ and His Church and will pursue active involvement in the local congregation.

BTC is not a “single’s conference.” This conference is geared towards all young adults, 18+ yrs old, regardless of marital status!

We hope to see the BTC conference become a regularly anticipated and attended conference for young adults across the country for many years to come!

Soli Deo Gloria!

Loving what I do...

Anyone who knows me, will be able to tell you that I love my day job. Working as a graphic designer for Food for the Hungry has been an incredible experience thus far. I feel so very blessed to be able to utilize my creative talents at a non-profit organization who is dedicated to being the hands and feet of Christ. I have a wonderful team of brothers and sisters in Christ who make my job an absolute joy and the departments I work with here are fantastic (they are known as 'requestors' in an in-house design environment as opposed to 'clients' in a production-based company).

One of those departments that I get to work with is our Artist Ministry. It really is a blast to be able to create promotional materials for Christian musical artists who have partnered with FH to help get hungry and hurting children sponsored. In my time here I've come to really appreciate the artists that truly give back to society and the world at large. Just to name a few: Leeland (this band is amazing and is definitely up and coming- I predict them to be headlining some big name tours in the near future), 33 Miles, Sara Groves (I'm currently developing a display graphic for her to use at shows, see right), Tammy Trent, PCD, etc. These guys and gals are the real deal, and they let their faith shine through their music AND their actions.

Not to jump on a soapbox, but I really do believe in the organization I work for. Food for the Hungry does make a REAL difference in lives throughout the world. We know that, as an organization, we are completely dependent on God. We seek to follow him always, we strive to do His will. We live by the the words of Micah 6:8, "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." If anyone is curious or wants to know more information about Food for the Hungry, please don't hesitate to contact me. I'd be happy to give a tour of our facility here in Phoenix and to get you more information.

Please, consider sponsoring a child or getting involved somehow. We have been blessed with so much here in America; may we never forget to share that blessing with those who are less fortunate then ourselves.

InDesign CS3 VersionCue Woes

I hadn't experienced any trouble at home with InDesign CS3 before, but at work I've been fighting it ever since I upgraded the platform to OSX Tiger. It seems that there is an issue with the way Adobe updates Adobe VersionCue (or rather, doesn't update VersionCue... ahem.). Never mind the fact that VersionCue is essentially useless in a single-designer environment (not sure about VersionCue's purpose? Click here.), Adobe saw fit to integrate it into the very core functions of 'save' and 'save as' file commands. What does this mean for someone with a corrupted version of VersionCue? Saving doesn't work... oh but it doesn't just not save, it crashes the entire program. Yikes.

Thanks to a blog posting by Joe Maller I was able to remedy the problem- thanks Joe! Now I really should cut Adobe some slack, in all my years of using their products, never have I once encountered a bug like this. However, I thought I should bring some attention to Joe Maller's blog post since it was one of the only places on the web that I can find a viable solution to the problem. Hope that helped for those of you who reached this post by desperately crawling Google in hopes of finding an answer.

My Best Friend

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"A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.

Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.

Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised."

-Proverbs 31:10-12, 29-30

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"Her"

Deep brown, flickers of joy and laughter

echo in those beautiful eyes that look upon mine

How can I, just a simple man, be so fortunate

to claim the affections of this intoxicating beauty

Lord may I never forget to count my blessings

And this, second only to your very son,

May I guard, protect, and cherish her

As the very beating of my own heart.

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I love you Celeste- thank you for making me the happiest man I know!

MAC's in the House

Rumor is, Three-23 Media has a new rig in the house. My feelings are that video production may be in full swing before long. My goodness those new iMacs look nice, like REALLY nice (I was a big fan of apple bringing in the black accents to their product line)... I think S.O.M.B.S. is in remission, at least for the time being... I'm taking this screen shot to mean that Darryl's visits to my blog are a truce, albeit a shaky one. Many congrats Darryl- here's to many more wonderful films!

iPhone's Competition: Google Android Platform

Wow- this definitely ups the competition for Apple's iPhone. You're going to be seeing a lot of innovation and expansion in the cell phone technology market very soon me'thinks. That's a snappy interface!



Speaking of iPhone competition, check out this "iClone"... basically, it's a direct knock-off of the iPhone, but for MUCH cheaper at around $150-200 (some sources claim that this phone actually came out 6 months before the iPhone however). It's made by a Chinese company called CECT. They actually have quite a few iPhone knock-offs in their line-up (P168, A380i, S688, 599, U8800). If having an iPhone is completely a status symbol for you, these might be a nice alternative and would save you money. They work with any SIM card style mobile service (think T-Mobile and AT&T). However, these really aren't TRUE iPhone knock-offs as many on the web would have you believe. The reason the iPhone is amazing, in my opinion, is due primarily to the way it handles Web (a true browser, not WEP), integrates music and movies (these knock-offs have inferior frame rates), and deals with e-mail.

And while we're on the subject- my biggest complaint about these new touch-screen phones? The keyboard. Touch-interface is great, but how in the world is anyone supposed to compose email comfortably on that interface? For that matter, why do most of the PDA-style phones on the market right now have a small vertical-style keyboard smashed into them at the very bottom? That's just not comfortable my friends! In a time where cell phones are becoming more and more used for email, you'd think that providing a horizontal-style pull-out (or slide-out) keyboard interface would be a primary objective in the design phase. Weird!

Has anyone noticed a growing trend? My posts have been geeky recently... really geeky. I need to regroup and post something 'non-nerdish' soon...

Magic Bullet Looks vs. Photoshop For Video

Okay, so just before I left for Photoshop World last week, I become incredibly enthusiastic about Magic Bullet Looks. Rather than try to describe to you what Magic Bullet does, here is how Red Giant Software (the developer) describes it:

“Traditionally achieved with filters, filming techniques or chemical processes, a "look" was any treatment applied to film stock to lend it a color, appearance, or mood. With digital editing, many more sophisticated effects are now possible. Often referred to as color correction, the process is similar to working in a virtual darkroom. Ordinary footage can be made to look like old films or TV, colors can be adjusted to turn a daytime shoot into film noir, and camera tricks can be simulated digitally.”

I can honestly say that Magic Bullets does a great job at helping you achieve that ‘filmic’ look. I was impressed with the designer’s interface and ease of use. I downloaded the demo version, which plugs in to After Effects. After playing around with it and spitting out some footage I decided that this would need to be an eventual ‘must buy’ for my future film endeavors. However, at a price tag of $399, I realized that this was something that would have to wait for a while. Its hard to justify an expenditure like that when its for just a plug-in (albeit a cool one). I resigned myself to saving up the money and waiting.

Then I went to Photoshop World and learned a lot about using Photoshop CS3’s new, powerful video editing capabilities. The skills and techniques I learned at some of the classes opened my eyes to a few new possibilities.

I began to realize that, while Magic Bullet Looks is indeed a fantastic program, I could achieve the same effects for free using Photoshop CS3 Extended (let me re-emphasize this: this will only work in CS3 Extended, not standard) by importing the footage and editing it. Furthermore, I could create my own personalized ‘looks’ (much like Magic Bullet) and make them reusable by recording actions in Photoshop that would ‘process’ the footage the same way every time. I was thrilled to discover this because, not only does it save me $399, but it also allows me to be more precise in the way I process my footage. I can now dial in my edits using the interface that I’ve come to know and love over the past 10 years.

Don’t get me wrong, Magic Bullet Looks has a wonderful interface for editing and it is extremely customizable. If you are a beginner to intermediate user of Photoshop, you may still want to stick with Magic Bullet. However, if you are further a long in your Photoshop knowledge, I’d suggest you check this alternative method out. Smart Filters, masking, adjustment layers, advanced color adjustment, etc. all make this a very enticing option for editing the look of your footage. The great part about this? If you set up your workflow properly, you can nondestructively edit your footage, so that you can go back and re-edit the look of it at any given time. For the advanced Photoshop users out there: just think about what you could do with actions and batching files. Imagine shooting all of your footage, editing it down in your editor of choice, and then running a batch command in Photoshop to apply your customized film effect to your footage. With a click of a button, Photoshop would apply the same effect to all of the designated pieces of film and you could walk away while it renders. Pretty cool.

I am posting a video below for your reference. Please forgive the poor quality- the upload utility in blogger severely degrades quality. This video contains 1) the stock, unaltered footage, 2) a customized look I created using Magic Bullet (notice the lovely, red ‘x’ that stripes the footage due to the fact that I’m using the demo version for this), and 3) a custom setting I created using Photoshop (I tried to somewhat match this look to the MB one, though it is not a perfect copy). Anyway, these are rough, but hopefully they give you a better idea of what the new Video capabilities can do in Photoshop.

Pandora vs. Last.fm

I had, until recently, been unaware of the existence of the music service Last.fm (thanks Brett for showing me this!). Basically, Last.fm is the direct competitor to Pandora. As many of you know, Pandora has been my online music service of choice for creating customizable and adaptable radio stations. So when I heard that there was another service doing the same thing, I was excited to check it out. Let me preface this post by saying that there is already an excellent posting written by Steve Krause concerning the differences between these two services. If you want the nitty-gritty details of what is different between these two services, check out his post first.


While I think Last.fm is a great service, I am still going to stick with Pandora. I say this lightly, as it is only a personal preference. It really depends on how you like to listen to music and what fits your musical personality.

Something that Steve Krause touches on in his article is the way music is picked and added to the radio stations you create. Pandora relies on comparing musical characteristics of a song to pick music that it ‘thinks’ you will like. Musicians at Pandora listen to each song and then diagram it into ‘genes’. These ‘genes’ are the qualities of the song that give it shape and form. Examples of these qualities are speed, volume, voicing, key changes, tonal quality, genre styling, etc. On the flipside of this, Last.fm uses social nuances to classify and suggest music. This means that songs are picked for you based on how society in general groups them, not how they musically correspond. As a musician I prefer Pandora because it is not influenced by social likes/dislikes. It looks at the raw music and does not account for popularity.

As far as aesthetics and interface go, both have their strong points. I tend to opt for the simple, straightforward approach of Pandora. Pandora can be accessed through any web browser, does not have standalone software, and every part of the service can be accessed through one static panel. Last.fm is much more robust in the options department, but borders on chaotic and confusing at times in my opinion. There is somewhat of a learning curve getting used to it’s interface. There are many, many ways this service can be used and there is also standalone software that can be downloaded to run the service outside of your browser window.

Both seem to be amazing services and for those of you not yet utilizing one of these, I’d strongly suggest you check them out. However, this blogger is sticking with Pandora for now.

Expect an influx of blog postings soon...

Wow. I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Orlando. There is so much to talk about; so much to discuss. A quick recap: Photoshop World was a blast and was extremely informative. I will post my own person insights and opinions in an upcoming blog. My initial take is this- the new abilities gained by Photoshop in CS3 are amazing. Some classes were a bit remedial, but doing research on the instructors and the classes themselves really helped me to plan out my course schedule. I feel like I definitely got my money's worth and would do it again in the future in a heartbeat.

So until further blogging occurs, here are a few random (yet extremely cool) things to check-out:

1) Intelligent elephants that paint self-portraits!

2) Flying motorcycles that allow you to hop traffic jams!

3) Designer Geeks recreating the D-Day battle! Thanks go to Celeste's cousin, Brett, for showing me this while in Orlando- this is amazing stuff.

4) Photoshop express- eat your heart out Flickr! Do yourself a favor and register for an account here- it'll change the way you upload and display photos online. This was also one of the big 'reveals' at Photoshop World this year.

Look out (Photoshop) World, Here I Come!

My plane departs in less than 4 hours... the wife and I haven't slept at all this past night due to the fact that we have been forced to pack last minute (guess what we'll be doing on the plane- sleep... that or catching up on Battlestar Galactica episodes... oh did I mention that I'm geek?). Its surprisingly difficult to move into your new place, attempt to set up everything you own, and then turn around and pack for a week long conference visit to Orlando! Oh, but its so worth it. I'll post updates as I have wi-fi access... hopefully.