Enjoy traversing through
October 2008

If a tree falls

Oh overnight success, why do we long for thee with such desperation? Why does ignorance plague us as we cry a thousand tears in search of receiving something for nothing? To us fools, the kings of the wise bestow upon us an illuminating guide of words to save us from ourselves — ‘Snap out of it. It isn’t going to happen’.

Instant success is a scary idea. For starters, if you were to gain a louder voice than you currently have, you wouldn’t know how to use it properly. Imagine going from an audience of ten to one of 10,000. Without knowing how to talk to 10,000 people your audience will dwindle back to ten fairly quickly. Any one who has been struck by an arrow shot by the archer that is on the team of the social networks knows this. How often can you sustain the numbers you get from a social network spike? Yeah, exactly.

When you start a creative endeavor, be it illustration, design or blogging, it isn’t going to be a case of instant popularity — it takes months and years to build a base which will lead to ‘overnight success’. It’s this base that you build that will lead to recognition—not being ‘discovered’. This is a great time to learn and explore that which you are passionately starting. This is a phase which should be embraced, not ignored or rushed through.

This is a phase which should be embraced,
not ignored or rushed through

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An Interview with David Airey

Chances are, if you’ve been following the design wing of the blogosphere, you know the name of logo designer David Airey. He’s been writing inspiring content for just over two years and has developed quite a following, inspiring many to start their own blogs. He’s also the person behind one of the web’s best logo blogs — Logo Design Love. David was kind enough to answer a few questions about his home, his process, blogging and thoughts.

AC: Hi David, thanks for taking the time to have a chat. Let’s start with your home of Scotland. You’ve said before that you find inspiration in the Scottish outdoors—can you provide any photos or describe some of your favorite spots? What is it that you love about it and how do you find it stimulates your creativity?

DA: Hi Alex, you’re more than welcome for my time. Thanks for asking me to contribute to your website.

I did find great inspiration in the Scottish outdoors, though for the past couple of months I’ve been living in Northern Ireland, my birthplace. There’s an equal amount of beauty in the Irish countryside though, so I spend a fair amount of time in the fresh air.

My creativity is stimulated by everything around me. Nature, architecture, people. There’s no one source that’s greater than others.

A photo of Dunluce Castle from the North coast of Ireland

AC: When you think about your first job as a designer, is it a fond memory or a terrifying one? How would you have done the job differently now?

DA: My first employed design position was one I greatly enjoyed. I was responsible for the branding and marketing material for a small Scottish cancer charity, and I learnt a great deal about the print industry by being thrown in at the deep end. If I was to take on the task again, I’d be more confident in expressing ideas, although back then I knew a lot less than I do now (still a long way to go, however).

By treating my clients with respect from the outset,
I find they’re much more likely to do the same

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The Hallways of Adobe.com

Isn’t it funny? You spend hours upon hours staring at the software of Adobe, yet how often do you think to yourself that it might be worth exploring the Adobe website? Yeah, me either. Their software hides many passages often left unexplored, only to be discovered one lazy afternoon, leaving you wondering how you didn’t know you could do whatever it is you just found. The website isn’t much different, so I thought I might provide a few shortcuts.

Video Workshop

The video workshop is a great place to learn a thing or two or five about the most common Adobe programs. From how to prepare files for output in InDesign to how to use the Vanishing Point in Photoshop, it’s a great spot to learn. The videos are provided by online-education super-power Lynda, so they’re of the high quality you’d expect from the pairing of the two companies.

Design Center

Think of the Design Center portion of the Adobe website as a hub for all that which is worth looking at. Split into four parts, the Design Center is really a starting off point. A starting off point that would do well to have an RSS feed.

Starting with the Gallery, which showcases the work of creatives from around the world (spoken about more in depth below), there is also Think Tank, Dialogue and Tutorials.

Think Tank is the thinking-creatives section. Providing meaty articles on creatives and how they use technology to develop their art, it works well as a trigger-presser for the senses. It’ll get you thinking, it’ll inspire, stun and leave you mumbling “… why didn’t I think of that?” Then there is the Dialogue section which for the last few months has mostly been resupplying articles from the now defunct Adobe Magazine (a PDF magazine with past issues still available) and if you go a little further back in the archives is more of a “hey, this is cool, check it out” type posts either showing tutorials, the always great HillmanCurtis videos, almost-random notes or articles ranging in lengths from 150 words to 500. And lastly, there is the Tutorials section which is disturbingly lack-luster and to be honest, not worth the trip.

Design Center – Gallery

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The Windmill Turneth

Having been cleansed through cleaning and learned through study, my kingdom of a press was without an army. A mighty force it appeared, but with no energy coursing through its muscles of steel, it proved to be nothing more than a farce. What is a press without a motor if it is not a kingdom without an army or a man without a heart? The winds have changed and now the sweet fruit that my lettepress bares I have tasted.

After a few weeks breathing in the bitter fumes of turpentine and going through reams of sandpaper, my Heidelberg Windmill letterpress finally got the heart transplant it sorely needed—a new motor was installed. Going from the industrial setting it use to be in to our garage was something I’ve written about before. I mentioned previously that the power requirements weren’t something we were able to provided in our house, so a new motor which we could handle had to be ordered. A birthday passed and I was lucky enough to receive a new motor as a present from my wife’s family.

What follows is a series of photos showing what was done to pull out the old motor and replace it with a shiny new one. A few roadblocks were hit along the way, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

Motor

The new motor, right out of the box awaiting to be installed, heavier than one might think.

This is the old motor, with the large band that wraps around a large wheel. When the wheel spins, everything is in motion and the press is usable. Only electricity to get the motor going is needed, not for the actual press – which means you can run the press without a motor. Not a great idea, as the vacuum wouldn’t work and pressure probably wouldn’t be an easy thing to work with.

The two large discs on either side of the band come off and will be applied to the new motor. A dial on the front of the press controls the speed by moving the motor back and forth, loosening and tightening the belt. You can see that it’s about in the middle here.

Clearly I didn’t get to the discs to give them a clean.

The old motor and discs. The spring on the left of the shaft push the two discs together, to ensure they are always tight on both sides of the belt so the belt doesn’t vibrate back and forth too severely.

The problem with the spring is that it closes the discs closed when a belt isn’t present, making it harder to get to a pair of screws that needed to be undone to slip the disc, spring and shaft off the old motor. Nothing a little prying didn’t fix.

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The Typographic Commandments

“Understand the rules before you break them.” A mantra we become all too familiar with when studying. Something many of us found bothersome as it implied subjecting ourselves to a rigid framework—and what creative wants that? Then we learn the rules, realise that they actually do work and start to use them well. The rules make it easier to play the game. The Ten Commandments of Typography serves as a reminder of these safe, warm guides. The second half of Paul Felton’s fun little book reminds us why performing Type Heresy is so devilishly satisfying.

Paul Felton’s The Ten Commandments of Typography/Type Heresy weighs in at a quaint 80-pages and is one of those books that makes you smirk and return to. It’s also one of those books you get excited about introducing to your typography-loving friends because of its wit and easy-to-digest size.

As the title suggests, this is a book of ten rules and why they should be obeyed and why they should be broken. For most, it’ll serve as a reminder of school days past, something Felton seems to have kept in mind. More than a guide book on typographic basics, Felton gives us something fun and enjoyable. It takes something which we love (typography) and something we’ve all grappled with (‘the rules’) and pushes them to extreme ends of the spectrum.

Ten Ten Commandments of Typography

The rules of typography serve as guides to ensure legibility for the audience. They help messages be heard and ‘prevent mistakes’. The first 37 pages is a good reminder of what they are and gives straight forward examples of each.

It would have been easy to make the book bigger by the nth degree, employing piles of examples to show the rules in use in the wild. An easy way to make the content superficially prettier when flicking through and a easy way to pad out the page count. Easy, but stupid. There is a commandment and a justification or expansion on the left page, example on the right. An elegant and restrained design becomes the ideal vessel for the enjoyable content to travel in.

An elegant and restrained design becomes
the ideal vessel for the enjoyable content to travel in

The writing is quirky and fun and is where the real power of this book comes from—rather than those piles of images left on the cutting room floor. The quirkiness of the content is strong enough that the text does all the heavy lifting and the design mostly fades into the background – the way it often should.

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Hidden!Hidden!