2011
2013
We’re back home from the beach. It was awesome. We are all exhausted and refreshed and sad to be away from the water and sand and fresh air.
Yahoo unveiled a new logo last week. Their CEO wrote a post about how she and a bunch of the company’s designers threw it together over a weekend. It looks like shit. I get asked to design logos all the time, and I’m greeted with amazement when I tell people how long it takes to do correctly.
Designing for mathematical consistency ignores three related factors: that identical widths and shapes appear differently to the eye in different combinations within a letter or glyph; that identical shapes blend together and are harder to differentiate across words and lines; that letters in a typeface are placed alongside each other, and one must adjust to deal with common juxtapositions.
via Yahoo’s Logo Reveals the Worst Aspects of the Engineering Mindset.
I’ve been spending a little time during my lunch breaks looking through old photo archives from 2002-2003 and finding the original shots to repost on Flickr. It was inspired by this page on my other website, which was an incomplete compilation of shots I took about five designs and ten years ago.
A good portion of these shots were taken with my first real digital camera, a Kodak DC3400, which, for its time, was a pretty good camera but is hopelessly outclassed now. Still, looking back through these shots, I was managing to get some decent depth of field, motion blur, and effects shots from a f/3.1 lens and a 2 megapixel sensor.
I’m also noticing that I used to shoot almost every day. If it wasn’t something interesting it might have been a simple shot of my house or the cats. I don’t have a ton of shots of that house, which is kind of disturbing given how much history I had there, but I just discovered a series of pictures I took right before the place went on the market which document what was where before it all got packed away.
Having gone through the last ten years of photos for completeness’ sake (I just found and restored all of 2003 from a catastrophic hard drive crash a year ago) I’m noticing that I’ve been consciously or subconsciously returning to certain subjects and places for updated photos. It’s time to shake things up, I think. More portraits, less objects.
I really don’t understand why more agencies don’t give exposure to the people who do the actual work.
“Ad agencies hide the people actually solving the client’s needs, the creatives, behind bloated layers of account management to ensure maximum billing whilst everyone plays agency snakes and ladders, to the client’s detriment.”
Tuesday after Labor Day has been a 2-cup-of-coffee workday. It was relaxing and we had lots of fun, but I need a vacation day to recover from my vacation.
We were lucky for the opportunity to visit with lots of old friends; Saturday night Finn and I went to a barbecue with the Flynns while Mama stayed home to catch up on work. Finn was shy at first but within about 30 seconds was engrossed in playing dress-up with the girls, while Tim and Betty and I drank and caught up on the deck outside. She was on her best behavior, even after a bowl of chocolate ice cream, and when it was time to leave we drove home under the stars with the top down.
Sunday we drove to Lexington Park to meet Grand at the Naval Air Museum where he showed us around the planes and told Finn about the ones he’d flown and worked on. It wound up being sunnier and hotter out there than we bargained for, so we had to skip the last couple in order to escape to air conditioning and an early dinner. After rehydrating, we made it home in time to move the mattress out of our bedroom, lay new carpet down, assemble an IKEA bedframe, and replace the bed. We’re getting to the point at which all the improvements we made in the house 8-10 years ago are needing touchups. This past week, the entire room got patched, sanded, and a new coat of paint throughout, and it looks dramatically better.
Monday we drove up to Pennsylvania to visit with the Beatties and have another barbecue. Finn was again on her best behavior, and we adults let the kids play while we (mostly) relaxed. Chris and Alison have a beautiful house stocked with mouthwatering mid-century furniture and two excitable Boston Terriers, and it was great to catch up with them. It’s amazing to consider, looking back at who we were 20 years ago, how far we’ve come, and how much the same we are in a lot of ways. As we stood in his driveway chatting and watching the kids ride bikes, leaves fell gently into the yard. Fall is coming soon…
On our return, we “did a teamwork” in Finn’s words and started assembling a new dresser for our room. We’re both tired of waiting around to get things done (we’ve had new carpet and furniture sitting out on the porch in boxes for months) and we couldn’t help ourselves. With some careful maneuvering and strategic use of a hammer in the quiet corners of the house, we got everything put together by 10PM and fell exhausted into bed.
Genius: WTF Visualizations. All kinds of charts and graphs that make no sense.
