The Wall Street Journal is throwing their hat into the user-generated content ring with the relaunch of their “creative leaders” ad campaign, a series of meta-interviews in the weekend “Pursuits” section that get advertising creatives to talk about advertising, to promote the sale of ad space in the WSJ, and specifically the weekend edition. Originally launched in 1975, the...
Have you met Otto? Otto is a robot inside your Mac (OS X Tiger and above), and you may have ignored him up until now. OK, Otto’s not really a robot, but he’s the mascot for Automator—a program that (as you may have guessed) automates tasks for you. In its simple drag-and-drop interface, you can create “workflows” that run...
Our friends at the Freelancers Union, the independent workforce advocate non-profit founded by Sara Horowitz, is making group insurance plans available to self-employed workers in 31 states starting June 1. Check their site for details. – From the NoD Sponsor: Sessions Online Schools of Art and Design is an accredited online graphic and web design school offering design career...
Many, if not most, freelance designers work from home to save on overhead costs. Even designers who work for agencies or larger companies may get the option to work remotely. If you tell someone you work from home, you typically get the response, “You get to hang out in your pajamas all day!” Or occasionally, “Wow, I could never...
An exhibition of work by Artemio Rodríguez. Featuring prints, illustrated books, skateboard decks, short animated films Last Friday, I attended the grand re-opening of La Mano Press, an artist-run printmaking collective in the arts district of downtown Los Angeles. The night featured the travelling print exhibition, ‘Graphic Reality: Mexican Printmaking Today,’ curated by La Mano frontman Artemio Rodriguez, as...
In my recent post about the most exciting new features in Adobe Creative Suite 3, I mentioned Spry for Ajax, found in Dreamweaver. If you’re attuned to Web buzzwords, you might have found this intriguing… or you might have just glazed over it because, truthfully, it sounds scary. But, in fact, the Spry framework for Ajax exists to make...
You’ve redone your homepage, chosen artwork you’d like to show, and decided how you’d like to display it. Now comes the grunt work – getting it all done. Coding it yourself In a perfect world, you would code everything on your site yourself. It’s frustrating at times, but ultimately very satisfying when you can tell a prospective employer that...
Stock Image? Indeed. In a recent article on Designobserver.com, Jesse Nivens makes a great point about stock photography: since it’s predicated on a standard business model of supply and demand, it provides images that reflect the dominant worldview in order to sell. For Nivens, this meant a dirth of images portraying overweight individuals (let’s say ‘fat’, unfortunately it produces...
“2 is the new 1.” What I mean is that because we get so much email and voice mail, I’ve noticed that even my good friends and clients often don’t respond unless I ping them a second time. That’s how they know I really want to talk to them. Just one more reason not to be discouraged by a...
Amid all the hype about Web 2.0 technologies and trends, many experts feel that human perception, the way we gather and process information, has literally been changed by use of the web, and web design must adapt by providing a more active user experience, more opportunity for user participation, even a shift of image-to-text proportion. Dr. Jakob Nielsen, known...
