We Are Designers

If you haven’t guessed it yet I’m all about the ColorMunki from X-Rite and Pantone. But I’m not sure if I can really afford the $499.00 dollar price tag just yet. So being he obsessive compulsive person I am I was back at the ColorMunki site today and noticed this.

colormunki $50 rebate offer

A $50.00 mail-in rebate if I send them a copy of my receipt for the ColorMunki and the UPC from my Datacolor Spyder 2 Plus? Ouhh heck yeah that sounds like a deal. Now if only I knew where I could get some extra cash from.
Yeah know… I’m thinking I should be contacting X-Rite to see if I can get some sponsorship cash out of this.

creative suite 4 release date

No… I didn’t just buy Creative Suite 3, I have had it nearly two years at this point. Yet I do feel bad for anyone that just bought the Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium upgrade.

On August 24th I posted that rumors were floating around that Adobe CS4 was going to be previewed at Photoshop World 2008 in Las Vegas. Well today we can all say that rumor is now false.
In my email today I found a message inviting me to a September Adobe Event entitled “It’s going to be brilliant“. Upon following the link I was taken to a site stating the following.

“Are you ready for something brilliant?
Be one of the first to see Adobe©Creative Suite 4 in a special web broadcast on the 23rd of September, 2008.”

Well after reading this, I don’t know a soul who is not going to sign up. Make sure you get in on the reminder as well so you have the chance to preview the next generation graphic suite.

creative suite 4 live stream

Because we all need to do our part in bringing bad design to justice. If you haven’t had the chance to check out Design Police then there is no better time then right now. You can download a copy of the 5 page PDF for free and start pointing out all the flawed designs that your peers, co-workers or complete strangers have made.
Never fear, Design Police is here to protect and serve the world over.

design police

search engine optimization

OK, so SEO is such a buzz word in the web industry now that it’s difficult to tell when people are peddling real “insider information“, or just letting you thin your wallet for some re–worded — well understood basics. Just so we’re clear, I’m about to do the latter. I have no great experience nor do I have a buddy at Google. But what I do have is occasion to learn from trial and error some of the little things that make a great game–plan for the right people seeing your site in a search. I’m still learning, so as I pick things up, I’ll dish out a few to you.

Qualifiers are officially out of the way.

The topic for today: Landing Pages. Google has been developing and marketing their Adwords and Adsense products pretty heavily. It’s a great way to send focused traffic to your site. So what do you do with your visitors when they get to your site? From an adwords ad do they come right to your homepage? If so — is that the best way to keep them there. Lets develop an example…

You own a restaurant. You also do catering, banquets in your restaurant and provide a space for meetings. Let’s say someone “Googles” wedding reception and your ad pops up. They visit your site and you pay your premium price to Google to have them there. What they see is probably a beautiful shot of your restaurant and a paragraph (hopefully written for search engines), talking about the great atmosphere in the restaurant. That’s not what a the potential bride is looking for. She want to know about reception places, so — on to the back button and a different site.

A landing page is the concept of creating a custom page for your ads to point to so your visitor gets just what they need immediately. Once your visitor has been assured that this is pertinent to their particular problem, then they are free to peruse your pleasant place on the electronic pavement. With so much content out there, users get frustrated easily with being mislead. A landing page is an easy way to make your visitors more confident that their time on the site will be useful. It is also a great excuse to write some copy engineered to attract organic searches. These pages should be simple and packed with SEO basic techniques. Easy modifications are also important. As we know, search engines like to see that we are updating our content. Keep them simple an make one for each of your Adwords ads, (or at least each category of ad).

If you are a designer that has a website peddling your wares. You MUST keep up on the site SEO and SEM. There are so many of us out there, the ones who spend the time on marketing to specific targets wind up on top. Make sure you identify in several places in your site where you are located. Including City, State, Region and Country. This helps crawlers get you the traffic that wants to hire you. Having a landing page for each of your general talents is a good idea. Don’t include things that you would rather not work in. IE – strictly print designers, don’t create a landing page for Flash animation, (this also leaves some work for the rest of us). Use your marketing skills to identify your target audiences and create pages that appeal to individualized markets.

It seems simple, but investigate for yourself. There are quite a few sites out there that aren’t taking advantage of customized pages. Be one of the prepared and serve your visitors what they ordered.

artzmania art magazine

I’m always looking at design magazines, mainly in print, but I thought I would share a really cool one that I’m always looking at online, Artzmania. With over a dozen different issues touching on different topics, everything from Web 2.0 to Graffiti, Artzmania is definitely a source for inspiration.
The only caveat I have with this online magazine is that it is in an EXE. It use to come in both a PDF and EXE but now the publisher’s software, Spotbit, only supports EXE’s, which is a true shame.

goverdose art magazine

Although early last week I stumbled across another online magazine that seemed to have some decent content, Goverdose. There’s only one issue but it could be another winner if they keep pumping out more issues. They use a company called Issuu that uses Flash to display the pages and gives you the option to save a page as a PDF for your archives.

metacreations

Back in “the day” I was a huge fan of Kai’s Power Tools by MetaCreations. Pretty much whatever was release by Kai Krause became an instant success, at least that’s how it seemed to me at the time. Kai’s Power Tools was such a useful set of plug-ins for Photoshop, of course there where a lot of useless ones but still handy none the less. I’m still not exactly sure why MetaCreations sold all of it’s applications to other companies back in the late nineties but something must have happened.

corel

Yet what confusses me even more is WHY did Corel get so many of these programs!?! Even in the late nineties they where a low end company who’s products seemed to be only marketing to amatures. So how the heck did they get the Kai applications as well as Painter!?! I don’t know, but I wish I did. To this day I still think Adobe was absolutely stupid for passing up these apps and not integrating them into the family.

Seriously though… The last update to Kai’s Power Tools, renamed KPT, was back in 2003. Okay sure the software still looked the same, no major upgrade just all the smaller applications bundled into one large pakage, everything functioned just as expect and it actually supported OS X. So why the rant?
Well 2003 was 5 years ago and the blasted software does even work on Photoshop CS3. Heck I don’t think it even worked on CS2. I heard some people getting to run but I never could. I mean like what the heck, this use to be a flagship product for MetaCreations and virtually nobody has heard of it today. That’s a shame.
I’ve called and spoken to techs over at Corel regarding this and they keep giving me the run around. *Shaking my head* I just don’t understand. Heck the interface and apps don’t even need to updated with new features or a new interface, just support for new applications and maybe multiprocessor so I can pump out more mathematical fractals, would be nice.

So is there a company out there could could actually release a decent set of plug-ins reminiscent of KPT? All I know is it sure won’t been Alien Skin. A company that I thinks makes wonder plug-ins for Photoshop is a company called On One Software. I’ve grown to love their Genuine Fractals for enlarging images and Mask Pro for complex image cut outs. They make very fast, very clean and easy to understand tools that keep on winner award after award. I have no doubt in my mind that if they made somethng similar to the old KPT Collection they would have another winning program to add to their arsenal.

colormunki monitor calibrator

So what exactly is Colormunki? Well to be exact it’s a product from the joint efforts of X-Rite and Pantone, the leaders in colour measurement and colour management. In essence Colormunki is a spectrophotometer, a tool that captures and measures colours from the world around us.

Not only does this cute, fits in the palm of your hand, unit calibrate your monitor(s) and printer(s) but it allows you to capture colours from any surface in the analog world and inputs those directly into your computer. These pallets of colours are then imported into Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or Quark for use in any document you want. On top of all is the software that comes included. The colours are sorted and stored in a variet of ways and phots that are imported into the software have custom colour pallets created around them. This alone is worth the MSRP of $499.00 to me.

So before I ran out to replace my outdated Spyder 2 Pro, which I haven’t just yet, I started doing a little more digging and finally found some videos on YouTube that gave some reviews. I’m really finding it hard at the moment not dropped some cash for this little guy and start putting it to some good use.

Jackie Chan and typography both took some time to grow on me in the beginning, but now I’m fully addicted to both. Not a day goes by when I’m not working with typographic elements, so when I stumbled across the video “Enter the Serif“, a short clip spoof from the movie “Drunken Master“, I instantly feel in love with it. Definitely something any kung fu typographer will enjoy.

EXTRA BOLD!

So your wanting to create the next killer app for the iPhone, you have the technical know how, you have the time to dedicate towards it, but you don’t have the skills to mock up the interface from scratch. That’s where iPhone GUI Template from 320480.com comes in handy.
This fully customizable PSD file is ready at your disposal for mocking up the main elements of your kill app at the flick of a mouse click.

Now if you want to add even more customization to your iPhone GUI the fine folks over at Teehanlax, a Toronto based web design firm, have created even more elements. This set of elements works in conjunction with the 320480.com interface design file so you can add even more flash to that killer iPhone app.

And the best part of it all is they are both FREE! Yup… I sure do love free stuff.

Are you ready for Photoshop World 2008 in Las Vegas? Well if you are like the rest of us and the answer is no and your not even attending due to the $699.00 price tag then do I have an a solution for you.
Free Photoshop World Tickets! Yes that right! Free as is no money down, pass go collect $200!
However there is just one catch. Isn’t there always. This deal only gets you into the epxo floor space. That means you will not be able to attend any of the seminars or conferences. But hey, this is Photoshop World 2008, the largest expo to date, so why not just explore the floor. I’m sure theres more than enough to see on the expansive floor space.