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A Busy Woman, With Concerns
Artist, writer, unapologetic progressive, LGBTQ+ ally
Art
Photoshop World Las Vegas
Doc and I spent a couple of days last week in Las Vegas for the Photoshop World conference. The conference was really good and I learned a lot about a lot of things, and came home with “The Phone Book,” the name everyone was calling the 2-1/2-inch-thick conference workbook. That thing is amazing; it’s got all the instructors’ notes and presentations from all the sessions, so if you weren’t able to attend a class you still have the materials from it. Despite both of us being sick in various ways (see last post), we still managed to have fun. Neither of us really wanted to “Vegas it up” this time, so we didn’t feel pressured to go to expensive shows or drink or gamble. We did a lot of walking around, taking photos. On our last day, I gave Doc $3 to put into a slot machine and 2 minutes later he cashed out with $43. Not bad! We bought a nice lunch. A few interesting observations: In Las Vegas, it’s sometimes hard to tell the real whores from the regular tourists that are just dressed that way. Everything in Las Vegas is about double the cost that it would be almost anywhere else. “But it’s a dry heat” is bullshit. Adequately padded shoes may not look fashionable, but they’re crucial. I estimate that I may have walked close to 5 miles each day of the conference (in flat sandals…. owwwww my feet). I think it was about 1/2 mile between our hotel room and the convention center, and this was in the same freaking hotel. All the restaurants except for one in the Land of Foodcourtia in the convention center were closed. The one that was open had only greasy fried food, hot dogs, and $9.50 hamburgers. We ate […]
The Galloping Gertie
My friend Stacey lives in Minneapolis and luckily was not on the bridge over the river at the time of its collapse. Which reminded me of the footage I’ve seen of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (also known, ominously, considering its fate, as “Galloping Gertie”) tearing itself to pieces in a high wind in 1940.
Book Cover Design
My friend Arushi owns a publishing company and she entrusts me with designing some of her books. Right now I’m working on one for diabetes. These are four cover concepts I’ve come up with. Thoughts and feedback are welcome.
Ron Mueck exhibit
Saturday Doc and I went out to Fort Worth to see the Ron Mueck sculpture exhibit at the Modern. This…
Microsoft Fucks It All Up
As a professional designer of web sites and e-mail communications, I think it’s very important to adhere to standards. Any designer worth her salt uses the best tools for the job and keeps up with the evolution of standards as defined by the W3C. That’s why I’ve spent years learning to write beautiful, lean, mean, efficient standards-adherent CSS and HTML. One of the thorns in designers’ sides is having to write “fixes” into our code to make up for Internet Explorer’s failings. With the recent release of Internet Explorer 7, a number of those failings were corrected and so we had hope that perhaps Microsoft was finally coming around and using W3C standards and stopping the crazy cycle of developing “standards” of its own, the equivalent of taking its toys from the Internet sandbox and going home. HOWEVER. Oh, and do I mean HOWEVER. With the recent release of the Outlook 2007 e-mail program for PCs (and by recent I mean January… yes, I am a little behind), Microsoft decided not to include the newly developed Internet Explorer 7 HTML rendering engine and instead to use the Word engine to render HTML in emails. The non-standards-compliant, circa-1997-ish Word rendering engine. A huge percentage of people use PCs, and a large percentage of those users use Outlook as their primary e-mail program, and that means that Microsoft has effectively taken e-mail design back a decade. How can designers NOT comply with these arbitrary rules set by the maker of the most popular email program on the planet? We have to. We are forced to play their game, and write bad code to accommodate this brand new, horribly crippled e-mail program, otherwise a majority of our users would receive e-mails that look like shit. And e-mails that look like shit make users […]
Recent photos
Today after lunch I saw a car with a banana peel draped over its door handle: I’ve been playing around with the nightshot mode on Doc’s camera. I like the effect I get when there’s still a little ambient light. My garden is growing! Some of it, anyway. I may not have any tomatoes or morning glories, but by god I’m going to have lots and lots of zucchini this summer.
Make the logo bigger!
At work, we have this cartoon posted inside some of our cubicles. We use it to play Designer Bingo. Top left square is free. Currently I’ve got the entire bottom row X’ed out, although I’ve experienced EVERY one of these at some point. BINGO! However, I think this should have been a square… MAKE THE LOGO BIGGER! (click to listen to pee-yer-pants-funny mp3) A friend of a friend added some verses: “I want my logo different,Something nobody’s seen before!Can you use the font Papyrus?I’ve got it on my computer!”
Photo Walk
Doc and I like to take photo walks when the weather is nice. Usually we just start from our house and head off in a random direction and see what we can find that is interesting. Today we ended up at the YMCA pool in a park a mile or so from our house. As I circled the pool looking for interesting things to photograph, I kept getting whiffs of strong pot smoke from a couple of guys sitting on a picnic bench near the treeline, smoking. Doc wondered aloud what kind of people come to a public park to smoke out. I said, “People who don’t want their parents to smell the smoke coming from their rooms.”