Quote of the Day
Project Runway
Season 4 - Episode 7: Prom
The Challenge: Make prom dresses for Catholic high school girls.
“When I had a girlfriend, I actually made her prom dress. That should have been a clue right there…right?”
Ricky Elizalde
Talented Gay /Lingerie Designer
Project Runway - Season 4 Contestant
We’re live at last!
Laptop not included…heheh
Yay! I was able to work on this one despite juggling a full time job and a new business venture. We are still in soft launch. Don’t forget to participate in our Laptop Bag Survey to get a chance to win this fab fab laptop bag! We’re hoping to incorporate a e-commerce site in the near future. But do get stay tuned as we have GREAT and AWESOME things coming along this year, including a full featured online shopping site that features the country’s best designers and independent artisans. Watch out for that!
Bookmark! Bookmark!
Protected: Jack
The Death of Polaroid
It’s the end of an era for Polaroid devoted fans. Polaroid Corp. has announce they will stop producing the camera and film that has been part of pop culture.
Polaroid, the company behind the iconic instant camera has announced it is to stop making the film, because there is no longer a market for it.
Three factories will close in Massachusetts, Mexico and Holland, resulting in 450 job losses.
The company stopped making the cameras for commercial use in 2006 and halted production of the consumer models last year.
It will make enough film to last into next year, but after that the legion of Polaroid fans will find their cameras useless.
Protected: Metrosexuality bordering on the gay side.
GIF & JPEG
Question: Isn’t standard that a web designer/web developer is supposed to know how to optimize web images? Specifically when to use GIF and JPEG?
I got a little bit “high blood” ba. This morning I asked our online job posting company if we could replace the HTML template we’ve had for our postings since it was really old. I’ve been trying to figure it out with their online CMS and discovered it cannot be done but they could customize one HTML template for us for a ridiculous price of a 5-10 pages static website. I wanted to send a template that we designed which is not an option according to them. We are a web design company and a number of our products are templates, I find it odd to pay for something we do everyday. Second, I’m not sure if they’re templates would be up to our standards. Last, the price is just ridiculous. In fairness to them they have given us great results with their service for the last five years and they are a business entity so they have to make a profit. It just happened that I would never pay that price for one HTML template since I have a clear knowledge of web design related prices here and in the U.S.
I asked anyway to have our logo replaced with the uniform format we have with our email footers. I sent our account executive the logo and he replied within 30 minutes that the new logo was uploaded. Our AE provided a link and when I saw it I was disappointed because it was a very blurry JPEG logo. I have already sent an optimized GIF version. I used the GIF format since our logo only used two web safe colors, a practice that is known to every living web developer on earth. Hayyy, so I edited the header and copied the same exact size that was on the live website and re-sent a crisp GIF file. I clearly instructed to upload the same file and not change anything. Our very efficient AE immediately sent the new header to their IT group. Only when I checked the live site again to see our logo more blurry and still in JPEG! Frustrated, I talked to our AE over the phone:
“Hi ______. Yeah, about our logo, thanks for uploading it. But I have one little itty bitty request can you please inform your IT people there to upload the EXACT file I sent because the logo right now is worst than before. It’s optimized too much. I don’t mean to be obsessive compulsive about minute little details but you see we are a web design company, although it may not be our website, it can reflect on us if we don’t even know how to optimize our web images. So please inform your IT team to upload the same exact file I sent over.”
I checked the site after a few minutes they finally got it right. Maybe I’m being too anal about it. Our HR Consultant was laughing and I was laughing at myself too for going gaga over a logo. Eh kasi naman no ang pangit talaga ng pagka-optimize masyadong tinipid sa bandwith. LOL. Come to think of it, the GIF file I sent has a smaller file size. It’s quite ironic for a website that built their business on hiring the right people to have to explain to their web development staff why the logo must be in GIF format. *sigh*.
Edit: I checked the live site again. Ugh. Hindi pa pala ayos as I initally thought it was. Ambot.
Furniture Wars
SallyTV’s Ask A Random Pal About Furniture is a series of hilarious interviews about different people’s opinion on designer furniture. Most of the interviewees are non-designers. Sally is correspondent for one my favorite design site, MocoLoco.
I’ve had a few furniture and home design related differences with family and friends. On top of them is my mom. I love, love, love my mamsy dearest. Just that sometimes she has a knack for picking the cheesy and tacky stuff for home. For example, plastic flowers, small angel figurines, annoying wind chimes and the list goes on. Since I live now on my own I let her have her way and try not say much about her choices. Except! when it’s beyond logic. Once she wanted to put a lighting fixture in the master bedroom. The lightning fixture was something you would use for outdoor posts, to make matters worst it was just one lighting fixture on the left side of the bed. She argued since my father and I love reading we should have a light on that side. Well, we could buy a reading lamp for that. We don’t have to stick that deadly pointed Victorian incandescent lamp in there.
We had our home renovated a couple of years ago every tile and paint had to go through my approval. When the house was done it really looked neat and then one day I got home only to find a ceramic fish wind chime hanging in the living room — it was like a fossilized Flounder (a Disney character in The Little Mermaid.) I begged it to be removed immediately. I suggested she could hang in the mini-garden in the front yard, right in the corner where nobody could see them.
I was semi-control freak lang naman so I let my brothers choose the paint color for their rooms. The last one who picked his paint choice was my youngest brother, Alex. I gave him a color book that had thousands of color swatches. After a week, I saw his freshly painted room - WTF? It was in Cyan! Awful bright basic Cyan! He picked a color from, literally the first page. Right off the Introduction chapter - How Color Happens. o_0. I tried to explain to him that if you mix Black, Magenta, Yellow and - Cyan there are thousands of better options rather this blinding Cyan. It was his room so I let it be. Sometimes I wonder, because my brother is an epileptic, if that color was responsible for his frequent seizure incidents. Hmmm just that gave me an idea. Next time we have the house painted I’d make that excuse to my mom - “But Ma, according to a scientific study Cyan can induce seizure — it’s so bright it sends waves to the brain!”
My friends know me well, so on my birthday I requested this cute chic urban clock I found at Living Well in Podium for my present. J and Joyce threatened me. They were thinking of giving me this anchor design clock they saw at SM. The kind that you would see in many seaman’s homes. I think my brother has one. LOL. Anyway, if I got that anchor clock I told them to shove it up their beautiful asses or better yet I would place it right in their cubicles in the office to remind them of the shabby home decor choices they made in life. Of course they didn’t buy it. They had a hunch I would get even by giving this to them as Christmas present:
Gold framed Last Supper. This is one is pretty decent. I’ve seen tackier ones.
Hel-fucking-vetica
Don’t mistake legibility for communication.
David Carson | Helvetica, The Film
Last January 25 , via Google Video people had a chance to watch the documentary, Helvetica – the Film. Only to be taken down after two days because it wasn’t a legal upload. I was lucky enough to get a DVD copy from a friend who just came back from San Francisco. A one hour and 15 minute movie about a font – great, imagine if they made a film about Comic Sans!
Seeing the old pioneers of typography and hearing what they have to say about graphic design was reason enough to watch it – and the film was right, I thought they were all dead. It was a movie of old vs. new. Modern vs. Grunge. The Familiar vs Experimentation. At end of the day, it is not the tools that you have but how your final output will get your message across to your target audience.
Some graphic designers go through a Helvetica obsession phase, some get over it, some don’t. I like Helvetica but I’m not obsessed with it. Variety is the spice of life.
One of the best decisions of they made was change the former name of it - Neue Haas Grotesk. I can’t even pronounce that name without phlegm coming out of my esophagus. Helvetica literally means — the Swiss font.
Paul Scher was amusing in her anecdote, I like the way that she associated certain fonts with memoirs. She didn’t like Helvetica because not conforming felt like being rebellious with her mom. According to her the font was responsible for the wars that have happened in the past years, it was the type face of choice for WWII and the recent wars in Iraq - hilarious and weird but she may actually have a point. On the same note, when I was choosing a type for my logo I choose the font, DIN Light. I originally wanted a serif font but I preferred the look of this:
For a certain period I always used this type in my design studies and I had no idea why. It dawned on me why I love this type so much. It was the font that my brother used in his draft plans when he was still an architecture student. The German brand Steadler had a lettering template for this font. The smooth, straight, black outlines , the clean spaced letters and titles of the finished drafts looked charming to me. Thus, began with my fascination with art instruments. Whenever one of his pens disappeared the culprit would be me. I had no idea that they were that fragile and expensive — hindi pala sila pareho ng Panda ballpen. When I took up Fine Arts in college I inherited what was left of his drawing instruments.
This film also made me realize that I miss designing so much. And I mean soooo much in 72pt Helvetica Bold. When I took on a management role I had to leave the design part. As much as I want to practice it when I get home I’m just too tired and too sleepy to do anything.
Stumbled upon this alternative Helvetica shirt to add in my shopping list:
Not-so-blind item:
One of the design legends pictured above, who has a semi rock star status, reportedly has a 5 figure US$ design talk talent fee. The total cost of bringing him/her in one of our local, and probably, only design conference would amount to quarter of a million pesos.
Plastics
Me and my gang bought a few items today at SM. We took notice of the new color of the SM Plastic bag.
It’s now a bright cheerful blue instead of the old dark blue one. In fairness, this year’s big color trend is blue according to Pantone, so nakikiuso lang naman diva? Inscribed in all caps and bold letters in the plastic bag is the word - BIODEGRADABLE. Huh? Since when polymer become biodegradable? So I did some Googling and found out that there are indeed biodegradable plastic but as always there is catch:
From Wikipedia:
Research has been done on biodegradable plastics that break down with exposure to sunlight (e.g. ultra-violet radiation), water or dampness, bacteria, enzymes, wind abrasion and some instances rodent pest or insect attack are also included as forms of biodegradation or environmental degradation.
A potential disadvantage of biodegradable plastics is that the carbon that is locked up in them is released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas carbon dioxide when they degrade, though if they are made from natural materials, such as vegetable crop derivatives or animal products, there is no net gain in carbon dioxide emissions, although concern will be for a worse greenhouse gas, methane release.
The real challenge lies in the discipline of recycling plastics and the accessibility of recycling technology locally. In the office, I’ve been wanting to put a separate garbage bin for the PET bottles. I just hope people will be caring enough to properly dispose it in the assigned trash bins.
Last Friday I scored this book from National Bookstore for P100.00. It originally retails for P1,700 so I’m more than thrilled to purchase the book:
It’s an interesting read about alternative sustainable materials that can be used for hundreds of products. Most, if not all the technology, like various types of recycled polymers are only available overseas in first world countries. But, but, but as a country bountiful in natural resources, a couple of materials mentioned in the book are coconut husks, hemp and abaca are widely available here! We just need a lot of research and most importantly, support from the government.
Remember our very own Coconets won the The World Challenge in 2005. Coconets are nets made from waste coconut husks and are proven effective for soil erosion. The production of this ingenious product also provides income and jobs to many of our countrymen in rural areas.
Located in Ibajay, Aklan is one of the companies pushing forward for promotion of coconuts in a variety of use such as biodiesel. If you take the scenic land route from Kalibo to Boracay you will pass by this town. Aklan is also my mom’s hometown. I have a few ideas of an alternative raw material for one of the products I will be producing soon. It’s a long shot, but I think it’s feasible. So probably on my next visit to relatives I’ll do some research of my own.