Web design is going through a change. Maybe it’s already changed, and I’m just behind the times, which is not beyond the realm of possibility. I’m an old timer in terms of web design. I remember the days when nested tables were a new thing, and GoLive was the name of the company, not the name of the application.

These are the days before Dreamweaver. Yes, I’m old. We had to trudge through the snow sixteen miles to make our web pages. So what’s all this CSS table-less stuff? Through my jaundiced eyes, this looks like the web geeks are taking web design out of the hands of designers. All of it looks the same to me. It looks like drapes. It’s all design in columns, and it’s all code design, not design design. It’s not organic, it’s homogenous.

So I’m just going on record to say here and now that yeah, I’ll end up doing it, but I won’t like it. I’ll make my version of those web pages without tables, using CSS and I’ll be unhappy doing it. I’ll probably just find some kid who isn’t even old enough to remember when Macromedia was Macromind, and Aldus owned PageMaker to do the code for me. Ah, I’m just getting old, and this Web 2.0 stuff is not showing me anything that looks like an improvement. Just hurry me along to my death…go ahead. CSS…bah humbug.

200 Words on design
Andrew Shalat

The word on everyone’s lips, in everyone’s heart, and on everyone’s shopping list is THIN. The new MacBook Air, or as some of us fondly refer to it, the SliceBook, has taken our collective breath away. The whole Keynote at Macworld Expo 08 in San Francisco was lean and mean. Even Jobs was looking extra thin. I suggested he’d been on a diet as a prototyping experiment, a sort of proof of concept for the new MacBook Air, testing to see if you could be so thin, and still wield power. But that’s not what was so impressive. What impressed us about this product introduction wasn’t what you’d think. Sure, the display is bright and sharp. The weight is half of the sibling MacBook. The keyboard is a merging of the best of the MacBook Pro with the clean comfort of the MacBook not pro. All these are wonderful, but what strikes us as the most attractive feature, and maybe I’m crazy or have suddenly uncovered some odd fetishistic tendency I heretofore wasn’t aware of in myself, but the thing I like the most is the little latch door to the USB and Micro DVI ports. It has a solid, almost automobile like quality. The kind of door-slamming thunk that you expect to hear when you close a luxury car. And this little door is the Macintosh equivalent. It speaks of solidity, of solid state, of durability, and reliability. And Apple really got this one right. 

Andrew Shalat - 200 Words on Design 

Well, we can all let out our breath now. The year is new, last year’s gone. And Pantone has announced its color of the year for 2008. It’s a boy. An ambivalent boy, it seems. Blue Iris, or as we in the biz like to call it, familiarly, PANTONE 18-3943, is the color. Leatrice Eiseman, one of those color wonks at Pantone tries to justify the choice,

          o “As a reflection of the times, Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspect of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic. Look for it artfully combined with deeper plums, red-browns, yellow-greens, grapes and grays.”
          o And this is what I come away with after that. What kind of name is Leatrice?
Blue Iris is a purpley color. I’m not so sure about its soul-searching capability, but it does remind me of one of those colors I might see on a live link on a web page. So I guess we may just see it a lot in that sense. It’s a little too grape meets aubergine (that’s eggplant for those not in with fashionable words), and it seems a bit heavy. I think it was back in the nineties that we were working through eggplant purple and deep leaf green. Ah to be able to go back to those innocent times. Too late, I’m afraid. But, at least the color of the year is blue, which says some good things about the election.

Andrew Shalat   

andrew@shalat.com

Writing | Design | Illustration | Instruction

I’ve been working with Leopard now, since its recent release. I find it fast, efficient, and filled with dozens of new improvements that are making my daily adventures on the Mac easier, and dare I say, more enjoyable. Who’d’a thunk it? But, if you will pardon the bad cross over phrase, I’ve also bitten my design tongue for some two weeks now.

It’s cheesy. The design is cheesy.

It’s kitschy, and kind of ugly. Do we really need a spiral galaxy and Star Trek moving stars to get the extended metaphor of “Time Machine”?

Read the rest of this entry »

With OS X 10.5 Leopard’s hundreds of new features, we’ll be reading about different tweaks and hidden commands for months to come. Forums will be awash with what’s the most useful, what’s the most useless applications and innovations. I must say that one of the most important updates I see coming is with iChat. Now I know most of us use iChat as a social thing, and the majority of us don’t leverage its instantaneous file transfers and quick response via voice, video or text, as much as I think we should. I use it for soft proofing with almost all of my clients, sending files, working through the comping process with designs, and text process with articles. I’m looking forward to being able to consult freely using my desktop instead of  my image, sharing desktops, changing backgrounds so that I can look like I’m on vacation rather than sitting glumly at my desk. Or perhaps the other way around. iChat, if you haven’t read yet, will add a plethora of new features in itself, that will make it a contender for your computing and business time. Blue screen, sharing desktop, showing videos, all these things that can help save us time as we design, and get approval on work. t will probably generate a whole new level of online adult entertainment as well. And that, as we all know, is what really drives technology.

200 words on Design… by Andrew Shalat

Combining the power of OSX’s ability to print directly to PDF with Illustrator CS3’s fluency with PDF is a guerilla designer’s dream. Everyone knows that any document you can print from your Mac you can instantly make into a PDF. That’s easy stuff. But it really becomes interesting when you realize what you can do with that PDF once you’ve captured it from the world wild web. Using Adobe Illustrator, you can then open your PDF as a native .ai file. Within that file all the objects from the page you captured are now separate objects in your new ai file. So you can take out the banner ads, put your own in, rearrange or edit out fields and elements. Why do this? Well, for one, it’s an easy way to prepare mockups for design. For another it’s a nice way to study different approaches to composition layout. Mind you, all the objects are flattened, non-animated versions of their former selves, but they are great for comping designs, as FPO (for position only) elements. So all in all, that simple save as PDF command in your print dialog is more useful than you might think.

One new feature of Adobe Illustrator CS3 that is fast becoming this designer’s favorite tchachke is the Color Guide palette. For those of you who haven’t checked out adobe’s Kuler (kuler.adobe.com) Color Guide is an in-app short utility palette to help you create and explore color combinations. Having trouble with finding the right contrast for text against a background? Check out the Color Guide palette. It will give you a choice of color patterns, like complementary, tints, shades, Warm/cool, Vivid/muted, harmony and disparity. All these variations can be saved as swatches, or just applied directly to your elements. You can save as Coor Groups, edit them, explore them and finally use combinations that are classic, or completely unexpected.

This is a great boon, and a great insight on the part of Adobe’s development team. For those of you not yet on the CS3 platform, check out Kuler (http://kuler.adobe.com). Although I’m not sure how we’re supposed to pronounce the name, something between Kool and Kull, I suppose, this site from Adobe is another great way of developing color harmony and color groups for your designs. Make sure to take the test demo. You can save your colors directly to Illustrator, as well as share them with others on the site. So whether it’s “cooler” or “culler” it’s cool.

Is the new iMovie ’08 one step forward two steps back? Or maybe just one big misstep. Many of us who have jumped in and had our hands on the new iLife 08 suite may have been seduced in that rush of the moment by the speed and fluidity of iMovie 08’s interface. But after getting down to business on it, we’re quickly finding a bunch of things missing. I’m not just complaining about chapter markers, or unnecessary transitions. I’m talking about real working methods and needed tools. One of the most glaring is the inability to split audio from video clips. That means it’s virtually impossible to slide a
video clip over  a lead-in audio to the next clip. It means you can’t take out unnecessary or wrong audio and lay in synchronized new tracks. This dumbing down of a great tool (iMovie) is an apparent big oversight in the great mind we know out here in the hinterlands as Apple. Were the engineers so taken by their new interface with its Events classifications and sorting, that they forgot that we also need the basic nuts and bolts to make the thing work for us? iMovie 08, at least at this point, seems like a new electric screwdriver without either Philips or Flathead attachments. It whirrs nicely, but it can’t do anything useful.

-andrew shalat

The degree to which we are designers is the degree to which we can recognize and decipher the design around us. If you’ve ever set a table, then you’ve created design. It’s not necessarily art, and it’s not necessarily commercial, but it is design. Design is moving something from an existing state to a preferred one. That something could be an idea, a message, a color or a shape. That something is an element of language; a form of articulation.

We’re all of us like tourists in a foreign country. At first, we can’t speak the language. The signs tell us nothing, and the sounds we hear are strange. The words are unfamiliar and we have to point at what we want like children. After a while, however, we start to pick things up. Words that were once unrecognizable now begin to make sense, gain meaning to us.

As we start to learn the language of this foreign place, it begins to be less foreign. We know where to turn right, where to go straight. We begin to understand where the train station is from the signposts that say where it is. We see the address numbers and they make sense. The map is readable.

Well, design is like that. When we begin to speak the language of design, when we start to understand how the various and previously unintelligible forms combine now to show intention, and meaning, we begin to take control, take ownership of our surroundings.

As a designer and illustrator it’s your job to translate the world into a composition. You must constantly, or at least while working, break things down into forms you can use when you’re drawing. So you have to train your eye to see things not always in a three- dimensional way, but rather as a flat canvas, where objects relate in geometry more than space. So if you’re looking at, say, a glass of water on a table, you should try to see the glass as a rectangle, of sorts, with a convex top and convex bottom. The opening at the top isn’t an opening, it’s an ellipse. The shadow at the foot of the glass is a sort of crescent.

You are breaking down the visual input in front of you and translating it into a different format. By doing this, you can then layer things in whatever application you happen to be using, manipulating the forms to create an effect, or simply a look and feel.

How do you do this, you ask? Here’s a simple method to training yourself. Get an eye patch. Seriously. Put an eye patch on your eye for about ten minutes, and look at your subject. After a few minutes the nausea will subside and you’ll be able to focus. By using only one eye, you will lose your depth perception. Things will flatten out.

When you get to the point of actually seeing the geometry of your subject in this way, it will be time to remove the eye patch. Now examine the same subject and remember those shapes. Through practice, you’ll be able to break down a scene into forms and geometry, without any pirate accoutrements. And it will help you when you’re designing a composition. Especially if your composition involves using the built-in geometry of Illustrator’s tools.

-andrew shalat

(Topic of converstaion for InsideMacRadio’s tip airing next Saturday.)

Many savvy Mac users already know that if you want to send a powerful link via email using Safari, all you have to do is press Command + I  while viewing the page you’d like to send.  Apple’s Mail app will automatically open, with the complete page included as an HTML email. That’s easy stuff. But do many of us exploit it? Not really.
But here’s a cool way to make it work for you.
Create a page in iWeb, or if you’re more deeply involved, in Dreamweaver. I’m just suggesting iWeb for those of us who don’t want to go crazy with this. But be aware, this will work with any HTML page.
Put that page on either your own web server, or your .mac account. Now, browse to that page live online, and then employ the Command + I key combination. The beauty of this is that it’s now so much easier to create simple great design using CS3’s Fireworks (which Adobe has now repositioned as a “web prototyping tool”) and exporting the images as HTML.

It’s a great way of sending out promotional material, or just annoying friends who are foolish enough not to block your email. In the words of another old-school annoying advertisment, Try it, you’ll like it.

-andrew shalat