Friend of NoD and New York Fine Artist Annika Connor (Instructor of Watercolor at Sessions Online) has invited all NoD readers and subscribers to attend the Company Launch Party for ACTIVE IDEAS PRODUCTIONS.

AI Productions, Inc. is an innovative corporation whose mission is to serve the artistic community by facilitating the presence of emerging artists and educating the public about their work.

This event is free and all interested parties are invited to attend, though RSVP is required. At the party, there will be 100 gift bags for VIP guests and donors to the Point Suite project.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008
8pm - Midnight
Mr. West
559 W. 22nd St. & 11th Ave., NYC
Sponsored Bar from 8pm - 10pm
Cocktail and festive attire

Please RSVP to: annika@aiproductions.org

For more information about AI Productions, please visit:
www.aiproductions.org

For information about AI Productions current project, please visit:
www.pointsuiteartbook.com

Currently AI Productions is creating a fine art book entitled Point Suite whose purpose is to enlighten the public about the ever-increasing artistic activities of our international contemporary art community.

The Point Suite art book is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions on behalf of Point Suite may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are
tax-deductible to the extent permitted by the law.

To donate directly to Point Suite, please visit
www.fracturedatlas.org/donate/883

Please feel free to share this information with your friends and colleagues.

The term “professional designer” can apply to anything from a service provider to a strategic partner, depending on a person’s individual experience, their approach to problem solving, and their relationship with a client. At one end of the scale, a design vendor simply responds to a specific request made by a client and provides them with a commodity. They perform tasks that can be easily replicated by others. Competition at this level is based primarily on cost. In the middle of this scale are design professionals who offer direction and some degree of specialization. They bring not only expertise to the table, but also a degree of professionalism. At the far end of the scale stands the design consultant. They are able to serve in an advisory role, guiding the client through the design problem solving process. As design problems become more complex and require broader collaborative thinking, advisors provide not just solutions, but actually lend insight and depth, and help synthesize information amassed or created by collaborators.
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Extracting detailed objects from a background can be a tricky thing in Photoshop, particularly when dealing with fuzzy edges like hair, fur, and leaves of trees. The Quick Selection tool and the Refine Edge feature introduced in Photoshop CS3 go a long way, but there are more powerful solutions…

Personally, I’ve been a fan of the Extract filter for a while. With it, you use a “highlighter” to roughly define the edge of the object you wish to extract, and Photoshop comes pretty close to what you’re looking for. The results can be a little rough or jaggy, but usable or easily fixable in many cases.

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The World Wide Web Consortium is planning to implement a new version of the Web accessibility guidelines this year, and it seems like many people have had negative things to say about the version 2.0 update (not official yet). These guidelines affect the way designers and developers build sites for the disabled, so it’s more important than ever as the Web becomes the de facto repository for information, commerce and entertainment.

People smarter than I think the project is confusing, long overdue, and that the process of revision is broken.
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Steven Heller’s latest tome, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-century Totalitarian State, is an intense read. As an object, the book is an impressive chunk wrapped in black striped plastic, with the vibrant colors of propaganda peeking through the stripes from the inside cover. Yet the book structure and narrative are highly accessible.

Part coffee table artifact / part required design history reading, the book is a must for anyone interested in branding. Read the rest of this entry »

Ebay has created a new sub-site where “shopping shapes the world.” World of good offers products designed with sustainability in mind. Lately, I’ve been thinking that my choices as a consumer could be as significant as my professional ambitions to take on responsible clients and projects. And what girl doesn’t like to learn that a shopping spree can help others?
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You’ve probably already heard the news that Adobe announced Creative Suite 4 tv.adobe.com on September 23rd, the latest versions of its ubiquitous design apps. As usual, there’s plenty of excitement surrounding this announcement, as every Adobe release brings cool new features, better cross-product integration, and (hopefully) speed improvements that make for an easy transition to your usual work flow.

There wasn’t much chance that Adobe could beat the buzz surrounding last year’s CS3 announcement, since that was the first version of the suite to include applications purchased from Macromedia, like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. And, realistically, CS4 isn’t the type of update every designer and her mom will run out and buy right away, but for you antsy early adopters, let’s have a look at some of the features that will get you ready to hit the preorder button…
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If you are not actively involved with any social networks you need to stop reading this and sign up for a few. If you are not using social media to get your business out there and interacting in a new way with your clients, you are missing a huge opportunity. Now with those big words out of the way, I admit I went into the idea of social marketing my business a bit skeptical. But here is what I quickly discovered: talking to my clients about social media marketing was a great “in” to talking about a larger piece of their marketing planning.
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I was already a pretty ambitious designer when I went to the Aspen Design Conference years ago. Mary Catherine Bateson, Margaret Mead’s daughter, spoke and I heard things that hadn’t occurred to me. She talked about designing life and how to create and build the rituals that celebrate the journey of living.

Then, I met Milton Glaser. From him I learned to take everything personally; to connect with the things I create in a real way. His definition of design has always stuck with me: Read the rest of this entry »

Rebecca works her magic with a soup can arrangement in her favorite space in the studio: a harvest table that doubles as workspace and office desk.

Rebecca Cole thrives on creating unique floral, garden and interior designs with a rustic, natural aesthetic. She’s best known to the public as co-host of all 200 episodes of Discovery Channel’s “Surprise By Design” with fellow designer and studio neighbor, Robert Verdi. She continues to educate on a national and global scale through a weekly radio show, “On the House,” regular appearances on shows such as “The Today Show,” as a “guru” on Howdini.com, and as the author of 3 books. From her studio in Manhattan’s flower district, Rebecca Cole Design delivers her unique style to a growing clientele of New York area celebrities and aficionados. Wall-to-wall windows lend an airy greenhouse feel to the space overlooking W. 30th Street.

We stepped into the middle of the proceedings to find out what makes her space so inviting.
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