if adobe creative suite were your high school________18 July, 2010
for you design+grafiks g33ks out there like me.
L-to-R, T-to-B: photoshop, illustrator, indesign, premiere, bridge, aftereffects, flash, dreamweaver, soundbooth
apple: producing beautifully-designed, well-marketed, highly-controlled garbage________2 June, 2010
dear steve jobs:
you make truly beautiful and often innovative objects, but reasonable users have some complaints.
- don’t release products until they’re ready and then pretend the problems with them don’t exist / aren’t your fault / etc.
for example: the “you’re holding it wrong” comment in response to the fact that iphone 4 will drop calls when the phone is held in a certain way (or variants thereof such as the “our algorithm for displaying service bars is inaccurate”). also, what about the fact that the update to ios4 has (appropriately enough) quartered the battery life of my ipod touch? also, every app on the device runs about twice as slowly. wow. - don’t engage in personal vendettas (however well- or ill-founded) against other members of the tech (or literary, or … whatever) community.
points which spring to mind are your senseless war against flash predicated on some late-coming updates for mac systems back in the 90s. it’s especially distasteful to me that you defend this one based on the rationale that flash is not an “open standard”. apple, once the icon of open systems and user customization, has become a giant, greedy, information-aggregating machine that doesn’t allow users (or even coders and app-designers) to perform the most basic acts of personalization. your clunky OS and buggy mobile devices need help sometimes. why insist on ridiculing users instead of including them in your efforts to improve on good products? or, you know, bad ones. let’s also not forget the time you banned james joyce from the app store because it was “pornographic” and the embargo against wiley based on your personal pride (see iCon). or your little spat with michael dell that drove you to release petty little emails to all your employees. - don’t make crappy mistakes in your “pretty” OS/hardware that a first grade could tell you to avoid.
let’s simplify: it should be one keystroke to rename a file or folder–not a maze of menus. mice should have at least two keys. holding delete should delete things quickly. ctrl+left arrow should jump you back a word. shift should be a drag select and ctrl should be a point select, rather than having just one way to multiple-select that’s (let’s be honest) kinda broken. when i have a word selected, clicking on it again should put my cursor inside that word (so i can delete a letter from the middle) rather than … doing nothing! the “delete” key should … uh … delete things. i should not have to right-click and “move to trash”. i could go on, but you get the idea. - itunes genius is spyware, plain and simple. while you’re at it, take a look at foobar to see how a media platform can perform better than itunes at about a quarter of the memory usage. oh, and it’s totally customizable too.
that’s all i can think of off the top of my head. i feel much better. i don’t think very much of you, mr. jobs / applecorp.
we don’t truck with none a that________5 March, 2010
actual new-news first: i’m putting some illustrations & prints up for sale in the vericon art show, so if you’re in the boston/cambridge area, you should check it out. SWEEEEET.
greetings from sunny florida where we are currently experiencing record-breaking low temperatures. this is something it has been doing since we (the fam and i) arrived here and (i am assured by weatherpersons) will probably stop doing immediately pursuant to our departure. i thought, since florida is a land of interesting and exciting differences from those i have lived, i would relate a particularly awesome incident that occurred to me today:
i was in attendance at a juried gallery opening here in vero beach; one whose entries ran the gamut from incredibly (humorously, really) amateurish to very artful and expressive. at one point, upon introducing me to a local artist, my gran remarked that ‘he just published a graphic novel‘. this, given that it was self-published, is a bit charitable but (frankly) i’m just going to stop drawing the distinction whenever people mention it because it’s more trouble than help to explain. this is particularly true when i consider that it’s usually a distinction that’s detrimental to however i’m perceived anyway, so it’s kind of a win-win to leave it alone. but (as usual) i sidetrack myself. upon mentioning this, the woman asked me, “oh, a graphic novel. is that like, all full of sex and stuff?”
i am fully aware that (even in these enlightened times of graphic novel mass-marketability) a time must come in every comic artist/author’s life when s/he must explain that graphic novels are not badly-drawn porn but in fact are books with plots and things. but still, it was shocking and hilarious to find myself at that moment. i replied as simply and inoffensively as possible: “no, it’s more like … a really long comic book.” which seemed to satisfy her. then i meandered over to look at her art piece. it was, in fact, a vaguely biracial, child-sized (by barbie standards) plastic doll denuded and glued to piece of wood (redundantly painted brown). it had a black afro and its shoes were also glued to the board, squirreled away in the corner like some strange product of a deranged fetish. its other clothes were nowhere to be found. the price was $75, i think.
elementary, my dear watson________2 October, 2009
for some reason, i decided to reread some of sir arthur conan doyle’s the adventures of sherlock holmes. it’s a pretty entertaining read–for the treadmill. it’s also an interesting window into early 19th century society. take, for example, all the clothing that does not even exist anymore:
“…when last seen, in black frock-coat faced with silk, black waistcoat, gold albert chain, and grey harris tweed trousers, with brown gaiters [wtf?] over elastic-sided boots.”
elastic-sided boots? first of all, boots made out of elastic? secondly, only the sides? what’s the rest of the boot made of? sherlock also seems to have some interesting fetishes (warning, taken out of context):
“i can never bring you to realise … the suggestiveness of of thumb-nails.” dirty, dirty, holmes.
meanwhile, in the real world, i’ve been working full time at pelli and full time at the graphic novel. the september xeric deadline was two days ago and i had been keeping rather odd hours (i.e. graphic novel 6AM-8AM, work 8AM-6PM, then graphic novel 6PM-2AM). good times. but i got what i feel was a decent grant proposal out (just under the wire), and i’ll keep my fingers crossed. my bosses at work were extremely understanding about the deadline and the PR folks even helped me bind and print, etc. so a huge thank-you to all the pelli folks enabled me to meet my deadline instead of being a giant work-related cock[grant]block like a lot of other firms might have done.
for those of you who didn’t already know that, by the by, i’ve been working at pelli clark pelli architects here in sunny new haven, CT for a few months now. it’s terrific and all the buildings are tall.
anyways, i’m going to try to get some photos up of the draft edition of the book (with covers!) because i finally remembered to keep one copy for myself. unfortunately, i did not yet manage to trim / bind it. i’m also going to start trying to get photos up of the work i’ve been doing here at pelli. it’ll be helpful for preceptorship reports and / or portfolio documentation. so far there has been a lot of vague jello (click through to see a bigger version):
worm's eye view, santa rosa
