Bragging Rights...

One of things I love about being a graphic designer, is the people I come in contact with throughout my life. I thoroughly enjoy bragging about my friends! I had the privilege of working with Drew Dunlap for a few years back when I was doing in-house print work with a company called Group Imaging. Drew is a talented sketch artist and designer. He just posted some new pieces on his blog that blend his sketching ability with his photoshop know-how. I really like the unique style and personality that he put into these. Great job Drew- these pieces look phenomenal!

Of Twitter and Good Books

You may have noticed an additional 'function' of the blog in recent days. There now is a twitter updates section located directly to the right of these blog posts. Twitter is a great little service that was developed by the same guy who originally created Blogger before it was bought by Google. Twitter's entire existance is reliant upon answering one question and one question only, "What are you doing?". The skeptic in me ignored this service when it first launched, but after hearing more and more reviews, I decided to give it a try.

Users can update their twitter accounts via the web, email, or by phone through text messaging. Every user can have a 'network' of friends who can choose to 'follow' them throughout the day. When you follow a user on Twitter, you are messaged via whatever medium you choose (web, email, phone) when one of your friends makes an update.

There are several design firms who are currently using twitter extensively in the workflow. This is useful from a corporate standpoint when you employ cell phones as the messaging agent. Rather then sending out a mass email to your creative team, you can update your twitter account and have text messages automatically deploy to anyone set to follow you, letting them know you're heading out of the office. I'm using twitter to provide on-the-fly updates on this blog using a nodule that was developed for blogger by the development team of twitter. So now, you can be caught up with all of the non-important, trivial details of my life when they happen... yes, I can hear those screams of excitement ("Oh, this is what we've wanted for so long... to be bored by more details of your impeccably nerdy life!").

I also received two books recently which I'm pretty excited about digging into. Vicente over at Xaris Studio suggested "CSS: The Missing Manual" to me as an excellent resource to help defeat my CSS shortcomings. My mom, who is a faithful reader of this blog (hooray for supportive parents), read Vicente's comment and picked up the book for me as a gift- awww thanks mom (see Vinny- I didn't even have to steal it!). I also received a book entitled "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" from our in-house web marketing guru, Kevin, at Food for the Hungry. Looks like this print designer may have to dust off his web stigma and charge back into the world of online development.

The Comedy of Design

There is a hilarious blog post over at graphicPUSH regarding the interaction between a designer and his 'special' client. The laughter has been helping me through my day; the sad part is that clients like this exist... abundantly.

My favorite excerpt:

ME: “This is great feedback. Thank you. I really think we should avoid most animation all together. Studies have shown that it really distracts from the rest of the page and makes it harder to read. I honestly feel the blue Helvetica really conveys a sense of professionalism, which is what we want to establish with your offshore banking operation.”

THEM: “I talked to my wife and my friend and this guy I used to work with and looked at some of the drawings my son did for the website design, and I really would like the headline in neon green and set in the typefontface Comic Sans. I use if for my church newsletter and I think it would be perfect. I think it really makes a statement about the brand’s market leadership and being a disruptive post-Web 2.5 startup.”

ME: “OK sounds like you have some experience designing so let’s try the idea. Here is a new comp with the headline in Comic Sans. As you can see it really clashes with the rest of the design. I think sometimes it works great like your church newsletter, but might not be the best option for an offshore bank targeting senior Mafia members and corrupt hedge fund managers.”

And you hired a designer... why?

So...

The new blog format is taking a bit longer to get working than originally expected. I blame this mainly on two of my own personal shortcomings- 1) I keep tweaking things so that it will look 'just' right, and 2) my lack of experience in the coding and CSS styling world is rearing its ugly head. I just make things look pretty for goodness sake, what is this coding business?!? Ah, but that is the nature of the gig, you have to dive into the tools in order to get good results. Here's to hoping that I can complete a successful dive into this blog design restructure...

A couple more notes about the redesign:

I've change my mind yet again... Pulse of Thought and Vigilant Studios will no longer be two separate entities (I know, I know... how many times now has this been debated...). The current trend in graphic design seems to show that more and more designers are making their personal home pages a platform for blogging. This was something I had been trying to do for awhile, but it didn't seem generally accepted up until a year or two ago. Now graphic designers are using the blog format as a way to draw in potential clients and to share insights and thoughts with their fellow desigNERDs. All this to say, the new format will be much more 'Vigilant Studios' in theme and less 'Pulse of Thought'. Rather, Pulse of Thought will become a subtitle name of my blog which is under the Vigilant Studios name... thoroughly confused now? Good.

Two Quick Things...

1) Iron Man definitely lived up to the hype. I don't even need to say any more than that... go buy tickets- NOW.

2) The site look/feel is about to undergo major changes (goodbye yellow color scheme!). My apologies to those of you who may be viewing this site while I'm in the middle of messing with the CSS and trying some 'live' edits. This is the one big downside of using blogger as my primary interface- there is no testing environment to drive the edits on before launching them. See you on the other side...

Ironman Hype

Let me be the first to admit it- I was excited about the Iron Man movie when I first discovered that it was in production. The trailers only furthered that excitement and I have to admit that I'm partial to superheroes who are self-made, not just blessed/cursed with power. I'm also partial to those superheroes that don't get as much publicity as the 'Big 3': Superman, Batman, and Spiderman (though as an aside I must say that Batman Begins was incredible, while Spiderman 3 was one of the most disappointing, over-hyped movies to hit the big screen in quite some time).

Regardless of your perspective and biases towards certain characters, from the buzz, Iron Man is looking like it will be a noteworthy addition to the comic book movie line-up. Rotten Tomatoes has early reviewers putting this movie at the 95% mark (for comparisons sake, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ended up with a 94% rating).

My original worries were that this movie would buckle under the pressure and try to put too much action and not enough story in the mix. However, early reports seem to indicate that Tony Stark doesn't dawn the Iron Man suit until a decent length into the movie. This reminds me of Batman Begins, in that the director Christopher Nolan didn't rush the plot in order to give us Batman; he invested an equal amount of time in Bruce Wayne showed how this broken man becomes the dark knight. I love that- it should be every director's goal to get his/her audience invested in the character before we are expected to cheer for them.

Needless to say, I've ordered tickets for the first showing tonight (which amazingly starts at 8pm... a very welcome 'pre-viewing' time that breaks the traditional midnight debut for movies like this). Who knows- I may be disappointed, but its sure worth finding out with reviews like this abounding.

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.