Interesting possibilities in Photoshop CS5

I remember getting pretty excited the first time I saw the Seam Carving technology from a SIGGRAPH demonstration, which eventually made it’s way into Photoshop, The GIMP and Xara Xtreme.  That seemed to happen quickly, and I’m certain because the code was made open to a certain extent. A custom app was built, a plugin for the Gimp was great.  Xara and Photoshop integrated Seam carving really well. And it works. It’s actually one of my best new tools I can make use of probably once for every web project I do.

Now things are evolving even more with what may be upcoming features that will help with fixing and doctoring photos.  I don’t find doctoring photos that enjoyable really.  I love helping customers, but I wish most of this wasn’t necessary.  That being the case, if you have to doctor a photo, it might as well be pretty easy to do.

Here is a video of Improved Seam Carving and PatchMatch, both of which were part of an Adobe/Princeton/University of Washington project.  To my knowledge, nobody said explicitly this WILL be in Photoshop CS5. But it is shown operating in the Photoshop interface and take from it what you will. As an aside, I like this website I discovered.  CS5.org. Despite it’s authoritative look, it appears not to be an Adobe site. Granted I could be wrong, but it’s showing Youtube Videos rather than using an Adobe player, and it’s showing a white paper using Scribd rather than an Acrobat-esque flash paper embedded PDF viewer.  Still that doesn’t mean it’s not all great information.

Adobe does have a video from a few members of their user experience UX design team re-published on the CS5.org website.  It features some discussion and examples of multi-touch and how they can leverage it for their graphics creation tools.

October 4, 2009 at 5:10 am | computers, design, graphics, media | No comment

Xara Xtreme Pro 5.1 graphics software

If you’re into the digital graphics for a hobby or work, you’ve been told that Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are the industry standard. This is certainly true, but the “standard” doesn’t mean better in all aspects. Xara Xtreme is one of the few lesser-known alternatives that in some areas measurably outperforms Adobe’s offerings. I’ve been using it for several years. I fell in love when I saw the speed and clean interface of the program. Multiple updates over the past couple years have made it even more flexible. I always enjoy telling people about it because it’s simplicity and performance is surprising.

Some notable favorite features for me including some new ones out with the latest 5.1 version:

• Much easier learning curve than Illustrator for drawing and manipulating vector path objects
• Great interface, cleaner menus and simple tool panels, not overcrowded, with easy access to everything for a faster workflow.
• Can handle more intricately detailed vector drawings faster, (Zooms to an insane 25,000%)
• Dead-simple live gradient editing
• Multi-page documents (5.1 now has master page objects too!)
• Beautiful gradient transparency, now multi-stage
• Can utilize Photoshop filters as plugins and has it’s own library for many effects
• Cleaner pathfinder style tools such as cut and combine (Illustrator is simply harder to learn in this area, with little reward)
• Exports and Imports dozens of formats including vector and bitmap. Notably, layered PSDs, EPS, PNG, TIFF, HTML, PDF and more.
• 3D extrusion tools
• Creates Exports Flash Animations
• Complete Web design and creation tools included.
• A variety of bitmap image controls (cropping, feather, built-in filters)
• New Seam-carving / content-aware image resizing. (you need to see this feature to believe it, also in Photoshop CS4 and GIMP as a plugin)
• Reasonably complete PDF print export options

There are limits to Xara’s superiority. Looking at Illustrator, you can tell it has a great deal more features, just look at Illustrator’s Effect menu. But if I had Xara when I was learning vector graphics instead of Illustrator or Freehand, I think I would have enjoyed the process much more. I also believe if Adobe Flash had Xara’s tools for vector drawing it would also be a better program by far. I’ve often composed in Xara just to export to Flash in order to bypass some of Flash’s clumsiness. In short, I want Adobe to be more like Xara, just as much as I’d like a few things in Xara that Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and even the new and free Inkscape has. I have other “underdog” programs that I swear by, but this is the big one that I happily pay for.

Downsides of Xara, first it’s only on Windows. Linux users can use an older open source free version of Xtreme, but is hasn’t been feature-developed since 2007. This free version is fast and certainly good, but it’s missing some terrific features that Windows has. Mac has no Xara and I wish it did.  Also there are some file import issues I’ve found. Fore example, sharing SVG and EPS files has given me plenty of frowns. Sure it’s not a big deal when you control everything, but when you need to collaborate with others, or send files to print, you need reliability. Also despite the type features having massive improvements over the past few years, you will find InDesign a little better for you for composing most longer documents. I could think of a few more issues, but I could dig for more in any software.

Xara Xtreme has become over the years a must-have tool. Adobe users have become converts plenty of times, after being hypnotized by its beauty.  Even though I really love most of Adobe’s collection, Xara does certain tasks better and faster. You’ll use it for full graphic and page creation, enjoy it’s speed for mockups and maybe as a thinking tool before you’d open anything else. I love working with objects, breaking them apart, modifying shapes. The projects I’ve been able to do solely in Xara such as illustrations and diagrams, I’ve nearly always completed more efficiently than I could with other tools, and with a lot of enjoyment.

www.xara.com

June 11, 2009 at 4:23 am | 3D, design, graphics, publishing, tools, webdev | No comment

Nice Primer Video on Digital Photography

A new favorite website of mine, Academic Earth is attempting to compile and make more efficient, the university open courseware sites video content. I was obviously interested in what kind of classes might be available in design and related computing. There is a category of computer science, but not design. Fortunately due to overlap, a few classes in my field are there to enjoy even though they don’t exactly hit the mark.

I think you’ll like this workshop on Digital Photography given by David J. Malan at Harvard University. It’s quite detailed, but not out of range of the novice.  I appreciated some of the examples and analogies given. It’s nice to be clear on technical equipment and it’s limitations. Particularly, since cameras are products nearly all of us buy, we all benefit from knowing a little more before we buy.

Workshop – Digital Photos by David Malan via AcademicEarth.org

Dear Universities offering open courseware. Please add design, typography and more. It’s fun, and valuable and useful for so many people. I suppose it would involve a lot of screen capturing which might not be as easy as video production, however, that doesn’t mean it’s not viable or not worth the resources to try.

February 1, 2009 at 5:12 am | computers, gadgets, graphics, photography | No comment

My Free software tools list

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally created my ultimate free software tools list.  Before it was a pathetic page, always a ghost of what it could be.  Now, since I’ve recently upgraded my computer setup, I’ve had a lot of time to refine a perfect setup.

Check out my Free Software Tools page. 

March 12, 2008 at 9:27 pm | computers, design, graphics | No comment

Lunch with Blender 3D user and teacher Tony Mullen (in Japan)

While coming back from our two-week train trip around Japan, Juri and I stopped in Shimokitazawa before heading back to Juri’s parents house. The reason we stopped? Before we left the states, I sent out a cold email to author and instructor Tony Mullen. He wrote an instructional book on my favorite free 3D software Blender. Like a lot of free and open source software, Blender has a large and strong community of users. The strength is based on bettering your skills and sharing knowledge. From this, I just knew that if my email reached Tony, and if he was free, he would likely agree to meet up for lunch. I knew this because I would do the same thing had the roles been reversed.

Tony met us at the south exit of the train station at Shimokitazawa, a very hip little area of Tokyo. Despite the unfamiliarity, I had plenty of things to talk to him about. We walked down the road to a nice cafe and had lunch. I wasn’t really hungry as much as I was excited to talk. We talked about Blender and the community, about our experience with open source software. We talked about our own jobs and about Japan. I was surprised to hear that Tony teaches Blender as the main program in an Introduction to Computers class. This is the same kind of class where one might typically cover MS Word, Excel and email. His college is Tsuda University, a womens college in Japan. So his students, and those who form his after school blender club are all female! I’ve never actually seen a girl do any 3D graphics in my life, let alone college freshman girls in their first intro computer class modeling and animating characters.

While in Japan, I also read an article that Tony is starting another book on Blender, about particles and physics. Sound complicated? It’s basically how to animate things like falling stars or a character’s head of hair. Also handling how objects can crash together or blow apart. 3D is fairly complicated and any book on Blender is a welcome addition since it doesn’t have the nearly the books and products you can find for 3D Max, Maya, or Lightwave.

It felt great to speak and hear english for a couple hours for a change. Tony is a very intelligent guy and quite hilarious. You can tell he’s got the international street smarts. His sharp wit and humor exist on a higher level certainly because of his experience and learning. It was a pleasure to hang out that afternoon. Even Juri got a little shopping done in the district as well. I had hoped to ask Tony if he had any tips for me when I teach my six hour blender summer class in July. I didn’t really get to that point though. No problem, I have his book to look through and he signed my copy of it too. He said mine was the first one he signed.

Thanks Tony! Hope we keep in touch and meet up again!

In an unrelated note, I thought I would share with my readers what my $7.50 Green Tea shake from the cafe looked like. Don’t let the pic fool you. The glass was only about 4 1/2 inches tall. This food size / price issue is the hardest thing for me to get used to in Japan. But I will say the taste made up for it big time. Those are white chocolate chunks sprinkled on top of the ice cream with a small amount of sweet red beans.

June 15, 2007 at 2:52 am | 3D, Japan, computers, design, friends, graphics | 1 comment

The importance of optics

Optics is a field I read on occasionally, mostly through more mainstream articles. I find it fascinating and the technology gains from new discoveries have a large payoff in terms societal and world benefits. I follow particularly the advancements in cameras, but any one invention can lead to many other uses in areas such as health and physical sciences. If you could imagine how long lenses have been around, and how hard it might be to make a lens yourself, then you can probably appreciate the sophistication of the field in the same way I do. It’s an active field with a lot of potential. Mostly because we have a long way to go before we get to the level of reproducing the qualities of the human eye, and eyes of other animals.

I wanted to round up a few of the articles that have caught my eye over the past two years or so. Certain inventions stay dormant for a long time, others come out as soon as commercially possible.

Light field photography eliminates blurry photos.

Stanford University research yielded in 2005 the creation of lightfield photography. Using a microlens array, mimicking features of the human eye, an image captured could be refocused after it was captured using special software. I don’t know what kind of file format would be required to hold the data of an image like this, or whether it would be any larger than a JPEG, PNG, or RAW file, but I’m really interested. Unfortunately no new comments or links have appeared on the project website for quite some time, but that rarely means anything. It will emerge somewhere somehow whether it’s in a smaller specialized product or the reason for another advancement in optics.

Kodak’s new low light filter technology

My little point-and-shoot camera impresses me with its size and video features. I recently discovered how well it took macro focus photos. But my camera, and many like it which are purchsed by millions of people every year suffer in low light. Their compact size means the lenses are small glass. This means less light overall gets into the lens than a large lens can bring in. The result is grainy exposure, object motion blurs, and underexposure. We want our cameras to do as well as our eyes in low light. Using the little flash can also destroy the photo, and though many probably don’t think about it much since they use it so often, but a camera flash is very distracting. Especially the rapid fire redeye reduction flash! What if you never needed camera flashes to get an acceptable or great image.

This is coming soon thanks to Kodak. Read the article and you’ll see how Kodak is working to implement this filter technology into the next generation digitcal cameras and phones. This could mean a lot of huge advancements that we don’t even think about. SLRs might be able to be created smaller because the large lens and glass won’t be needed. A camera without a flash doesn’t requires less electronics and computing and could be made smaller, or more room made for a better sensor or larger longer lasting batteries.

Liquid Lenses

The liquid lens is a few years old. They are now able to control the lenses zoom capability electrically, not requiring moving mechanical parts. That was one of the original benefits that I read about it a couple years ago. Read up about the liquid lens at New Scientist. From the liquid lens, a significant improvement was realized in the way computer chips are made. Also another type of liquid lens decreases the cost for making large telescopes. Turns out, spinning a liquid especially a shiny one like mercury creates the ideal concave shape needed for observatory telescopics. More telescopes means more researchers able to discover and advance more things.

The Red Camera (digital video)

Seven years ago, I was really happy with my Sony Digital 8 camera. I thought I was getting good picture video quality. Turns out the image quality is actually pretty bad. In fact, I was using it for a project this past winter and the quality was unacceptable to integrate into the rest of the project. Luckily I was able to fall back on a digital photo instead of the footage. Looking at a lot of cameras out now, there really aren’t much that are impressing me. Despite seeing more HD cameras, none are really raising the bar of imaging, anticipating the next 10 years. Until I saw The Red Camera, from the makers of Oakley glasses, I didn’t think I’d find a camera that would be good for a startup freelance video production company.

The benefits of the red camera go beyond optics, but I’ll take a little freedom here to recommend it anyway. Oakley created a sub-group to work on the camera and a revolutionary image sensor. Video frames over 4000 pixels wide can be captured. This is more than double the size of full HD. This is more than any available TV can display. This is video that’s going to look great on a theater screen. This is video that rivals the 70mm IMAX film. This camera is a big deal and costs far less than a film movie camera.

Interested in optics yet? Comment here if you have any big ones I’ve missed.

June 14, 2007 at 12:19 pm | gadgets, graphics, photography | No comment

Designer / Author Ellen Lupton’s visit to Kansas City Art Institute

The crowd had gathered in what they called an auditorium, but really was just a medium size room with a small stage, barely enough to fit the projector screen inside of it, and some light cans. I don’t mean to belittle the campus, but it was more like half a basketball court than auditorium. It even had the parquay floor. I guess I was hoping to not have rows obstructing my view of the speaker. Oh well, you make due. It was a free talk.

I had never been to the Kansas City Art institute and I was excited to listen to Ellen Lupton. She has created some books that I consider favorites of mine. In the area of design, Ellen is popular. Her book ‘Thinking with Type’ I had bought some time last year. I loved it then, and I love it every time I pick it up for a little inspiration.

As the room filled up, I heard a few rows in front of me someone say “Was this thing mandatory?” presumably referring to a surprisingly big turnout. “Yesssss!” a couple people droned out close by. That made me chuckle. It was the reminder that no matter how expensive a school is, it’s always dull to have to study and do bookish things. Those moments come back to me that I wish could do college over. I note how lucky they are to get to go to an art institute and do what they love. I note how lucky they are to be in a great school in a cool city. I’d like to tell them that the working world they are anxious to get to isn’t nearly as fun as this lifestyle. But I’ll let them find that out for themselves.

I wasn’t sure if there was a topic for the talk. I was worried it might be the kind of self-promoting lecture, where the speaker keeps referencing their book for purchase on the back wall. Actually it was quite a mellow tone. Ellen presented her talk starting with crimes against typography. Many attention grabbing slides and comments. She talked about impressions of her book. She said that some people tell her her book was funny. She than said, it wasn’t funny and that typography is never funny. That was really the only part of the talk that I didn’t agree with. Actually I think most of her work that I’ve read was quite fun. Not funny necessarily, but light and of quality. A mix that keeps me motivated to pick it up all the time. Humor and fun examples makes a book and typography a good study. Laughing about mistakes can be a good thing. Typography is about choice and it IS fun and even funny.  If you think about it, it’s kind of funny that that humans respond psychologically to typography.  Strange too! What is with us?  It can be a lot of fun because we can use this to advance our information to new levels.  We can control the exact same words to create different outcomes.

I gathered from Ellen’s talk a few things.

1. Society needs designers that care about typography. Examples of $50,000 building signage that doesn’t use proper punctuation is one of the main reasons. Aesthetically it improves our lives to use good typography. Refinement is always good. I have never been to picky about typography myself. I do care about it, but I overlook a lot of things that typographers would probably see as punishable transgressions. Keep getting better and direct some focus on typography because doing it right matters.

2. Opening the culture up to design, bringing it to the mainstream like through the D.I.Y book is not giving away our secrets. It promotes more creativity and is going to show some people how much trained designers are actually needed. It will increase the need for designers. It will improve design overall.

3. The government should no longer have any say over the creation a food pyramid. They have become absolutely useless in this regard. Design can be evil.

Ellen used some very good photographs in her slides, many she must have taken herself. I could see her personality in them. I can tell she enjoys documenting family projects and honors them by telling the stories in sequences of pictures. I appreciate that personality type. You like to share interesting things. You like to look under the surface and make humor out of small cultural and family nuances.

Ellen is a curator of a museum, a design teacher and a designer and writer. She’s one who I thought for sure could answer the question I’ve had burning in me for a while. I’ve found from reading about design that some designers are really on another level than me with their communication. They have a refined skill of talking about their design in terms that give their choices a real flavor. They really convince you that their design decisions are boiled down, the best decisions possible, using a poetic authoritative vocabulary that I simply don’t posess in my usage banks. My question posed during Ellen’s QA was, “How can I improve my ability to talk about my designs, to explain why I made a certain choice, to describe designs in ways that an skilled architect might be able to explain how part of their building feels.”

She responded, “Become a teacher.” That made sense. Because you can’t teach without being able to give reasons why one choice beats another. She also said, never BS when you talk about your work. If a certain part of the design came from your gut, or from out of nowhere, it’s ok to say that. You’ll eventually know where things come from.

I thought it was a good answer. But not a great one. I was looking for more. The next day on the ride home from work, I did a little exercise and came up with my own answer. I’ll write that in an upcoming entry.

Ellen signed my book and we got to chat for a moment. She’s a sweet lady. If she ever reads this, Thanks Ellen for the learning experience.

Links to Ellen Lupton’s works:

Design Your Life
Design Writing Research
Free Font Manifesto
Thinking With Type (Book at Powells.com)
D.I.Y Design it Yourself (Book at Powells.com)

April 14, 2007 at 8:56 pm | design, graphics | 1 comment

The few, the proud, the Nintendo Wii owners

I got silly, I’ll admit. I sat out front of the Target Store on the opening day of the Nintendo Wii sales. I got my Wii the first day it came out. I fell victim to all the internet buzz. I haven’t owned a game system since I was about nine years old. (Atari 2600) I’ve fancied a few PC games, so don’t think I have felt I was too mature for games. But owning a game console was something I just didn’t think I would do this time in my life.

So what’s up with the Wii? For me, I liked the idea of internet surfing in the living room and being able to get my old favorite games on it. I though the motion sensitive controller was the perfect direction where game technology should be headed.

When I bought the Wii that morning, I behaved unlike how I usually do. I spared no expense. I got all the accessories and games I wanted to get. I didn’t fret over the money whatsoever. This was my game system, a fresh new source of fun, a way to live in the future and the past at the same time. Why hold back? Sometimes you just buy the movie popcorn so you can enjoy it. You know what I mean?

Since then I’ve gotten more games and even introduced myself to a few great Nintendo Game Cube played. The Wii plays those Gamecube games. I didn’t realize how good the quality of graphics the Game Cube games have. In fact, I didn’t realize some of the titles that were available for it. Resident Evil 4 and a recent Tomb Raider title to name a couple.

The Wii has a motion control system with the infrared controller and sensor bar. Wii tennis works for example by you actually swinging the controller like a racket. And though I’m more of a gory scary game fan, Wii sports is the perfect party game. At least until the novelty runs out for most people.

I’ve been working on a big freelance project lately, so no nintendo time, but I’ve got a stack of games just waiting to be played once I’m finished. It’s great to be a kid, to get all the games I wanted for a long time and never had the money for. And I can appreciate it more too I think because I know the kind of programming and graphic effort that goes into these games.

By the way, Zelda was mindblowing. I never played that style game before, it was always boring to me. But the Wii Zelda is adventure through and through.

March 1, 2007 at 4:57 am | gadgets, games, graphics, nostalgia | No comment

3D graphics will explode in 2007

Home users and soccer moms can create 3D graphics. And the use and creation of 3D is going to grow exponentially in 2007 all because of Google and the Blender Foundation. People are intimidated by 3D. I know because I’m intimidated by it and I’ve been doing it for quite some time. I won’t admit to any level of mastery here because I’ll get myself in trouble for sure. Let me tell you why and how things are changing.

Nearly a year ago, Google bought Last Software and acquired SketchUp. But Google is a search engine. Why do they care? Google wants to index and provide the world’s information. That includes geography and mapping. Mapping is a big deal, because people who want to learn equally want to know how to get from point A to point B. Google Maps and satellite imagery led to Google Earth (more later) which led to the desire to map cities in 3D. That being the huge undertaking that it is, Google needs help. They need help from everybody if they want to map and create a virtual earth including all of it’s man made structures.

Sketchup is an award winning architectural modeling application. Whatever awards they have, they deserve because this program is slick. It’s a seriously fun way to model buildings, objects or anything else. Once Google bought Sketchup, they did the second best thing I could think of; release a free version for everyone to start creating models and importing them into Google Earth.

Version 6 of Sketchup was just released earlier this month. Until this month any buildings you could create were basically boring white boxes representing cities. Now you can embed the textures and add them to Google Earth. You can add them and they become apart of the entire system as everyone else sees it.

Take a look at downtown St. Lous. The plain boxes aren’t too impressive, but are somewhat helpful to understanding the scope of the downtown area. Notice that we have the beginning of higher quality models creeping into the system. See the well-textured model of the new Busch Stadium? Guess who created that? Google did. And surely they did that to give us all an example of what can be accomplished here with the new version of SketchUp and Google Earth. Anyone who wants to add to this city or any other is welcome to do so. Eventually, you will be able virtually explore the city in exactly the way it’s laid out. People are beginning to jump on this project. They like the idea of contributing and the ease at which they can make their own world.

Now let’s look at the program to create these cities. SketchUp is smart. Drag the mouse using the rectangle tool and it knows you want to draw a rectangle on the ground plane. Grab the patented push/pull tool and extend your rectangle into a cube. More rectangles, more extrusions. This model would take you about 3 minutes to build starting from zero training.

Newly added to Google SketchUp 6 is the ability to create text objects for things like signs on structures. If you look at the large toolset on the left of the screenshot, you might see a few strange or intimidating icons. No worries though because SketchUp comes with great tutorial walkthrus built in to the program where you practice creating and fixing models. And video tutorials on the Google SketchUp site will pump you right up to start trying more challenging things. Who wouldn’t want to model their dream home or even just model the house or apartment they live in now. You can think smaller and model the lamp you saw at the home store, or do like my good friend Tracey, who modeled a tradeshow booth for his company to see how everything would be laid out. Being able to create 3D examples of your product ideas, your brainstorms on landscaping is not only inviting, but you start seeing it as necessary. I look back and think, what if I had this in high school?

Every high school, and even elementary schools can be teaching 3D without worries of cost. Teachers, want to demo the next project for shop class or geometry? I have the perfect tool for you.

Moving on to Blender

Blender is another free 3D graphics package. I have been using Blender for a couple years now, doing various professional projects. Nothing too fancy, but not too shabby either. I’ve grown quite a bit with the program now that I understand better settings for lighting and modeling shortcuts. I would say Blender is a lot more flexible than SketchUp, but I won’t say one is better than the other. Certainly Blender could be considered harder to learn. The fact is I like having both programs around to solve problems and create visualizations.

Now it might be crazy to think that a program with a high level of difficulty is going to cause an explosion in 3D graphics development among the mainstream. But I’m seeing the explosion right now. Last year the Blender Foundation created the Orange Project in which they compiled a small team of Blender animators around the world and put them together in a studio for some months to create a completely open source animated movie. The short was created with free open source software (FOSS) and the files used to make the movie, e.g. models footage and instructional materials were given away and anyone can remake the movie, reuse the models in any way they choose.

Imagine the same happening in Hollywood. After Spiderman 3 is released, wouldn’t it be great if on the DVD, they gave you all the source materials, all the 3D buildings, the special effect raw footage, the full outtakes and said, “Hey, go forth and create a learn from this.” That won’t happen with Spiderman, but it DID happen with the Orange Project and their movie Elephants Dream. Anyone can use the movies models, redistribute the content, share, recreate, mix and mash.

Blender also has a game engine in which you can create 3D games of your own. The game engine is free like the rest of the program. This appeals to a lot of people too. If they are willing to put in the time, they can create the worlds, the effects, the entertainment.

Blender is small in size and multi-platform compatible which means that anyone inspired to do 3D for games, movies, or images has access to some real power. Plus the communities instructional materials have grown steadily over the past few years too. The online Blender wiki manual is constantly being refined. When I started learning 3D, Youtube didn’t exist. Now Youtube has hundreds of screencasts of people modeling or animating with blender, teaching effects and best practices. You can follow along and pick up how it’s done. Learning 3D is constantly becoming more accessible as more people do it, they teach others. It’s growing just like that.
Going places you can’t actually go

Just yesterday, I stumbed across a link I found absolutely amazing. Someone has taken the open parts of the Game Engine for Half Life and created an architectural walk-thru of the Kauffman House, created by Frank Lloyd Wright. This is the kind of inspiration and possibilities that will make 3D completely blow up. Forget about just the fun of 3D, and think of how it is enabling people to travel and visit places that they can’t actually go. Virtual campus tours on college websites are anything but exciting. They are basically boring photos of campus. What if a group of engineering or art students at a campus created for their thesis project, a game walk-thru of the outside of campus. Something that could be downloaded in 30MB and played on a computer. I could visit the campus in a very real way.

People are finding that 3D enhances the communication of ideas. It fills a gap that a hand drawing or a piece of clip art simply won’t. I encourage you to give these programs a look. Be the first kid on your block to model your block on Google Earth. Watch the Youtube videos of people generating particle effects with Blender. Use SketchUp to model that bookshelf you have been wanting to build. Create some killer example photos for yours or your kid’s next science project. I promise you are going to get hooked on the 3rd dimension.

January 23, 2007 at 2:22 am | design, graphics | No comment

A little sad tonight

A book is never the labor of just one person. In my case our Adobe Creative Suite 2 book was written by several extremely talented people with a wide range of experiences. I appreciate their contributions immensely. The book officially released in September 2005. Sadly though, one of my co-authors named Carla Rose passed away in December 2005 just after being apart of the project. She was 62 and had thirty books under her belt. Her website was graphicalcat.com and her passion was photography, scrapbooks, writing and family. I am honored that such a great person would inject their energies into the project. It saddens me I didn’t know about all of this sooner than now.

May 28, 2006 at 3:20 am | books, friends, graphics, writing | No comment

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