C3 has a new website!
Posted on May 15, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Design | Leave a Comment
Considering that I’ve been waiting over a year to be able to post that headline, you think I wouldn’t have waited nearly a week to write this blog.
A bit of an improvement over the old one:
The new site was well over a year in the making. Not because it’s all that complex, but it’s been difficult to focus a very small organization on all the moving parts that had to go into a ground-up rethinking of a website on a small budget.
Some details…
I am no longer a graphic designer
Posted on April 5, 2008
Filed Under Design, Life | 5 Comments
That’s a news flash, considering that I took a fulltime job in nonprofit operations 2 years and 9 months ago. Still, somewhere deep down a part of me identified myself professionally in the world of graphic design and design-related technology. Who wants to put a college degree in a drawer?
This afternoon, I removed all the design-related feeds from NetNewsWire. It had been months since I looked at them anyway.
The realization that the design phase of my life is over and will likely never return came to me during Call-on Congress, C3’s grassroots advocacy training and lobby day we held last month. I designed the Cover Your Butt logo last year.
That logo was everywhere, including on shirts our advocates were wearing. Someone commented on the logo (positively) and I nearly forgot in the conversation that I designed it. It didn’t matter to me personally. I designed it to save C3 the time and money of having to find someone else to do it. A few years ago, I would have identified myself as part of the project by the role I played as a designer. Now, I’m fully involved in the project for reasons the least of which is for the design of a logo.
It’s been an evolution over the past 2.5 years, moving me slowly from one world into the next…a world where I’m more focused on colorectal cancer advocacy, nonprofits, and the strategic and practical applications of technology than I am about image resolution, CSS and layouts. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have to be creative anymore. My job(s) are still very much about taking fragments of ideas and strategies from different sources and pulling them together to solve a problem.
I completely outsourced the redesign of our website to Hiten Shaw of ACS. Can’t wait until the new content is in place so we can launch it and I can show it off. It’s gorgeous. And far better than anything I could ever do even when I was at the top of my graphic design game. We’ve also outsourced the redesign of our print newsletter. I’ll still produce it, as we turn it around quickly and it’s easier and cheaper to work with someone in-house on rapid-fire editing. We all agreed it was time for a visual refresh, and we all agreed I wasn’t the person to take that on. I was surprised at just how much that didn’t bother me. If anything, my overwhelming feeling was relief.
Now I can be honest: I never felt completely comfortable in my skin as a graphic designer. I had what can only be compared to stage fright on every new project. Once I got going on it, had a vision, a plan, and got to producing that vision, I was fine. But getting to that idea never got easy for me. Never felt natural. And I never felt I was good enough.
I never have that panic/anxiety feeling in the work I’m doing now. Sure, there have been days where I’ve been stressed beyond belief and have struggled for solutions. But it’s different. I can’t quite explain it. Even when I’m the most stressed, I’m still professionally at peace at my core in a way I never felt before. I’ve said it on this blog before…this feels like what I was meant to do.
Adobe CS3 at last
Posted on April 20, 2007
Filed Under Design | 1 Comment
This morning, I had a bad scare with Laini’s blood test results. Everything’s fine, but it took an hysterical phone call to the pediatrician’s office to calm me down. After my heart returned to its normal rhythm, I did what I’ve been known to do when life caves in a bit…shop tech. Always does the trick. I’m just grateful I’m no longer a stress eater or I’d be 400 lbs. by now.
I had Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium upgrade on order at Amazon. It was due to ship today and arrive on Tuesday. It hadn’t shipped yet, so I canceled that order and downloaded it from Adobe instead. Not much difference price-wise.
2.52 GB download! Remember when it would take an hour to download a few megabytes? Nonetheless, the Adobe hamsters are running wildly on their wheels, because it took just under an hour to get the whole thing.
I had the Photoshop CS3 public beta, and I was beta testing Fireworks so I had some housekeeping to do before installing the package. I’ll be honest, I was very nervous about Adobe’s new installer while testing. It’s not exactly fast and it was prone to some strange errors. But Adobe pulled it out, because the final version installer worked just fine. I do miss the little teaser splash screens that used to come up while the applications were installing in CS2, though. The new installer is nothing to look at.
Overall, I’m pleased with the CS3 applications. I love the new interface in the Adobe Adobe applications (Dreamweaver and Fireworks still look like Macromedia). Since I know InDesign best, I’ve spent the most amount of time getting familiar with its changes. The control panel is much improved. In CS2, you were constantly switching between the character and paragraph sections of the palette. In CS3, you can change the font even if you’re on the paragraph side, and you can change the alignment even if you’re on the character side. The difference in speed on my Intel Mac is incredible. Launching and quitting no longer take an eternity.
There are a few things that I had hoped would make it into CS3, but didn’t. This isn’t meant to be a whine…it’s still a great suite…but…
In Fireworks, I was hoping for more Adobe-like interface improvements…such as the ability to change values by clicking on the field’s label and then using the keyboard arrow keys. Or moving an object 25 pixels to the left by appending “-25px” to whatever number is in the “X” field on the properties bar. Font handling in Fireworks still leaves a lot to be desired. I use Fireworks to comp web layouts and optimize graphics, so none of the new features are all that interesting to me. Maybe I’ll be more excited about Fireworks CS4. For now, I’m just glad that the application survived and is Mac Intel-native, and I’ll be satisfied with that.
In InDesign, I was hoping for better integration with Adobe Acrobat review and commenting features. I can’t be the only one who exports layouts to PDF, then uses Acrobat’s Shared Review feature to send a PDF out to colleagues for comments/editing on our WebDAV server. They use the free Adobe Reader to mark up their comments/changes. When they save the file, it publishes their changes back to the server. I then have a file with all the comments in a layer over the PDF. It would be cool if I could take that comment layer and bring it in to InDesign so I can make the changes right in the file, instead of having to bounce back and forth between the marked up PDF and the InDesign document in two completely different applications.
In Illustrator, I’m disappointed that there’s still no “rubber band” for the pen tool. Photoshop has it. Makes no sense to me that the application that “invented” the pen tool doesn’t. What am I talking about? When you use the pen tool for bezier paths, a rubber band feature shows you where the path will land before you actually commit to it. You spend far less time correcting your drawing, especially when you’re tracing around something.
Just in time for C3’s Summer 2007 newsletter that I’m starting to lay out this week.
Adobe CS3’s mix & match menu
Posted on March 28, 2007
Filed Under Design, Macintosh | Leave a Comment
And they came down hard on Microsoft for having too many package options when Vista and Office came out? Puh-leeze. Adobe announced Creative Suite 3 yesterday, and as expected it’s a mess of options. 12+ different applications, 6 different packages and multiple upgrade and a la carte choices.
InDesign CS3 looks fantastic. I saw the demo where you can apply a gradient mask to a placed image right within InDesign and Adobe, you had me at hello. The new find/change options and styles on table cells sweeten the deal. Illustrator’s changes aren’t quite as exciting for me, since I tend to use Illustrator only to get logos and vector graphics in and out of InDesign. But still, it’s painful to open and close Illustrator CS2 on this Intel Mac so that alone will be worth the upgrade.
I know I want InDesign, Photoshop (can’t even think of going back to CS2 after using the beta these few months), Illustrator and Dreamweaver. Fireworks would be nice to have. So it looks like I have to spend $599 on the Design Premium package which gives me those applications (not Fireworks), plus Acrobat 8 which I already have. Plus it’s the Photoshop “extended” version which I’m not quite sure I have any use for, but I’ll take it. I looked at going for the Design Standard package of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign and adding Dreamweaver separately, but that’s $399 + $199. So looking at it that way, I’m getting Photoshop Extended for $1 by going for the Premium package.
I may end up having C3 buy it instead to take advantage of nonprofit pricing. That is, after all, how I use the software 98% of the time.
As far as Fireworks goes, that’s a mixed bag. They’re only offering the software separately. There are some really new and interesting features, like multi-page support. But for the most part, this software is a distant cousin. It looks and feels like the old Macromedia product, warts and all. Dreamweaver gets away with this in areas that Fireworks has a little more difficulty pulling off. I was a Fireworks beta tester and while “disappointed” is an easy word to grab, it’s not entirely accurate. This article sums it up nicely:
In short, Fireworks CS3 is pretty much the same Web image creation and optimization product it’s been since at least the beginning of the century. What that ultimately means, however, largely depends on who you are. If you go way back with Fireworks, you’ll likely be relieved at the continuity (not to mention the fact that it beat out ImageReady). However, if you’ve been using the newly deceased ImageReady, you may be thrown for a bit of a loop when attempting to grapple with the old-school Macromedia interface.
Beyond that, I find some basic interface quirks truly annoying. For example, I am very used to clicking on the field name and hitting the up and down arrows to adjust a setting in a palette or dialog box. In Fireworks, the keyboard shortcuts are rudimentary at best. You’re adjusting settings with sliders. I like the ability to do basic math in the “X” and “Y” and “width” and “height” fields to move objects around. Want to position something a quarter of the way down the page? Just click in the “Y” field and type “11 in/4″ and voila! Want to make a box 1/2″ wider? Just add “+ .25 in” to the “width” field, even if it’s displaying the width in pixels. Fireworks does none of these things. It may not seem like a big deal, but it’s often a deal-breaker in my workflow.
And don’t get me started on how Fireworks handles text.
Fireworks still does a far better job of optimizing images for the web and visualizing web layouts than Photoshop does. That’s why I use it. And it has many fans. But those fans are a small minority of Adobe’s customer base.
Adobe Photoshop and Bridge CS3: First impressions
Posted on December 15, 2006
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment
I’m sure by the now the blogosphere is full of posts about the new Photoshop CS3 beta released this morning. I’ve been having too much fun playing with the new software (and working) to read what other people are saying.
For a really good overview of what’s new, visit NAPP’s website.
Quick thoughts:
I’m not in love with the new installer. For starters, it informed me that I needed to quit Firefox and my TWAIN driver (for the scanner). Fine. But the dialog box only allowed me to cancel out of the installation. Most installers offer a “retry” button, rather than forcing you to go back to the beginning. Second, the installer is slow. Very slooow. Took about as long to install Photoshop CS3 as it did to install the entire Creative Suite 2. I know this installer is common to the new CS3 apps, I hope it improves before release.
Bridge CS3 was a nice surprise in its improvements. Bridge is a stand-alone file browsing application on steroids. I use it a lot while InDesign is running as a fast way to get files in and out of my layouts. It’s also a better way to preview images before opening, run Photoshop batch commands and other goodies.
Bridge CS3, like Photoshop CS3, is fast! Now you can download photos directly into Bridge (haven’t tried that), group similar photos together, save preset views, see information about InDesign files without having to open the file (fonts, swatches, etc.). There’s also a device preview features which looks like you can get profiles for different phones and then preview (and download?) images and files to the device. Didn’t seem to be feature complete yet.
There’s one annoying bug in Bridge CS3 that hasn’t been fixed yet…
Put Bridge in compact view by clicking on the button in the toolbar as shown:
Then click the button to go to ultra compact mode:
And you end up with this nice and tiny window which you can move to a corner to keep it out of the way, sitting on top of your InDesign windows.
If you click the “Ultra-compact” button again, the window expands up. Click again, it expands back to where it was at the edge of the screen. Great.
What’s the bug? Well, if you expand the ultra compact view back to compact view, and then click to another application and back again, then click the ultra-compact button you’d expect the little window to go back to the corner like it did before. But no, the compact view window scrolls up to ultra compact view, not down. So instead of the little window sitting down at the bottom of the screen, it’s floating up your window where it can get in the way of your work. Annoying. I want ultra compact view docked to the edge when closed.
I love the interface changes in Photoshop CS3. If this is how the Creative Suite applications will look, I’m all for it. You can see where Adobe borrowed from what Macromedia started, and does it better. The edges of all the palettes are more subtle, refined. They are completely out of your way, yet accessible for when you need them. I really like this approach and I can’t wait to see how it will help InDesign and Dreamweaver which are the biggest sufferers of palette-itis in the team.
So thank you Adobe for this nice holiday gift, especially for those of us suffering through Rosetta’fied Photoshop CS2. First thing I did after I got Photoshop CS3 running was click back and forth between the Finder and Photoshop a few times just to enjoy how quick those windows popped up. 
