Zen Coding is “a set of tools for high-speed HTML or CSS coding”, and is basically a shorthand to make your coding go even faster. Anyone who codes HTML and CSS for a living (or just very much as a hobby) ought to check this out, though at the moment there’s only full support if you use Aptana, Coda or Espresso as your coding tool.
The Cat Piano (in HD), directed by Eddie White and Ari Gibson and narrated by none other than Nick Cave, is on the just-announced Oscar shortlist for Best Animated Short Film. I’ll be rooting for it to get a nomination.
Also on the shortlist is Pixar’s Partly Cloudy and Aardman’s new Wallace & Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death, as well as seven other films.
“Blue Girl with Wine” (1997) by Tim Burton, from his new retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As if that’s not reason enough to schedule a visit, there’s also the upcoming typography exhibition and recently opened Bauhaus exhibition, all of which are making me very envious of those who can go.
I got preferential treatment in Wisconsin.
(I realize I’m about a year late to the CS4 party, and this is old news for most but I just have to get this out of me.)
In Illustrator CS3, if you used Smart Guides, grabbing a shape at any part of a line and dragging it to any point on another shape’s line it would show you when you’re intersecting the other line, and it would snap against it.
With the “improved” Smart Guides in CS4, Adobe has replaced this with a new alignment system that wants to align your shape to edges and center points of other shapes at even angles, a clusterfuck of alignment guidelines popping up as you move a shape around, especially when you have a lot of other shapes in view. Used properly, this can be very useful but it comes at the expense of what you could do in CS3, a decidedly different thing altogether. And just like with the gray canvas idiocy, Adobe offers no legacy option to change this, again showing a baffling arrogance on their behalf. Apparently it’s Adobe’s way of the highway.
Now, this was originally going to be a far more damning post, but by sheer accident I figured out that if you hold down the Command (⌘) key in CS4 while moving a shape, it’ll function the way it used to in CS3. It’s ridiculous that you have to hold down an extra key to do something so fundamentally basic and useful, but at least it’s not completely gone (as I’m sure it will be in CS5, when Adobe surely will have come up with even more ways to make the simplest things harder to do).
I need a cookie.
So I’ve just upgraded from Illustrator CS3 to CS4 and the most obvious change is that the area outside of the artboard has gone from pure white to a off-white color, with no apparent way to change it in the preferences. As someone who has as much stuff outside of the artboard as inside, and considers something like color to be important in the realm of design, this is majorly annoying since Adobe thought it was okay to change something but not offer a setting for it.
Hiding the artboard(s) in the View menu removes it, but also removes the artboard frames, plus you have to do it manually. The other option I’ve found is to make each new document start in Overprint Preview mode, it’s the closest I’ve come to getting rid of the off-white background without having to manually do it for each new document, but it’s ridiculous to have to do a hack just because Adobe can’t be bothered to offer a setting for something so simple.
Anyone know if you can make a more permanent change anywhere, or a better method?
I’ve finally upgraded to Photoshop CS4 (yay), meaning I can finally edit my 5D Mark II’s raw files without having to convert them first, which was a huge hassle and free space guzzler. I also get to enjoy the added features of the latest version of its Camera Raw plugin, which I’ve used on this test shot — namely the gradient tool to make the top part a bit darker, the crop vignette tool to add some vignetting and most notably the adjustment brush to make the center part stand out a bit more. Gotta say I’m in love with the adjustment brush, non-destructive dodging and burning — my black and white photos will love that.
Michael Beirut’s seven tips on how to be successful as a designer even if you’re “lazy”.
Christmas Wishlist Item: Cardboard hunting trophy from Cardboard Safari.
I love the aesthetics of the hunting trophy, but even though I’m not a vegetarian or have any objections to hunting I don’t think I could ever actually have a real animal’s head on my wall, staring at me, whispering “You killed meeeee” as I sleep. One of these cardboard trophies would make a pretty good alternative, and they have a clean, modern look about them.
Possibly even cooler would be if someone took the fake hunting trophy idea and melded it together with this guy’s papercraft skills. Now that has the potential to be even more amazing.
White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. View bigger.
White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. View bigger.
New York Public Library recently unveiled a new bolder logotype and identity, and here’s a great video showing the evolution of its creation (skip ahead to 35 seconds to bypass the text scroll).
For more, check out this article from Brand New.
