O'Reilly Digital Media Blog - Design

Nice "Appliance," Boys! Xbox 360 statistical twitter...

2008-11-13T17:15:01Z

@EmanuelPM sent his 360 away in it's coffin. The ups guy knew the box was a 360 by the shape since they get 10-12 bad ones a day, he said. ]]> If you're looking for a way to efficiently spread despair even to children, you can join the Microsoft dev team in their sad death march, in which they feel so pressured by the market to make things complex and feature-laden that they can't possibly test their products effectively.

Maine Media Workshops Rock

2008-10-18T12:05:22Z

Just back from teaching for my 4th time at the Maine Media Workshops. What blast! My students learned: painting with light, low light photography, shooting with reflectors and diffusers, Photoshop... and the big hit HDR. We used Photomatix Pro to craft our indoor and outdoor pictures - my HDR image of the Pemaquib is attached. More of my HDR images on the HDR page of my site. One tip on HDR: don't shoot more images than you need. During the workshop, I had the pleasure of meeting Steve Weinrebe. He's da man. Check out his wonderful Photoshop work... and his new book. Hope to see you on a workshop in Maine someday. Bring your tripod for fantastic HDR images!

Anchoring Comments for Editors Working in InDesign

2008-08-19T03:58:45Z

Over at Deke.com, I've written about how we use anchored notes to communicate between the team members who work on our bestselling One-on-One series books. As much as I like having graphically oriented authors work directly with the layout, it certainly brings up issues when it comes to editing passes. Although we've tried InCopy successfully, on books by Stephen Johnson and Eddie Tapp, it takes a special planetary alignment for InCopy to work right for our linear (as opposed to simultaneously collaborative) workflow. In truth, we've gone old school for some projects for the back-end, having them copyedited on paper so that the changes can be put into InDesign. Although the Notes palette, new to CS3, allows for the creation of notes in a non-layout-disturbing way, it's still clunkly. The method I outline in this article shows how we use InDesign's anchored object feature to create notes that are specifically styled to indicate each editor and specifically placed to be read by the author. Let me know what you think.

The Making of the dekePod video: 101 tips

2008-06-24T17:29:26Z

Yes, dekePod is back with a vengeance with "101 Photoshop Tips in Five Minutes." After you watch the "second pilot", as with any encounter with creative genius (or monstrosity, as the case may be), you might find yourself wanting to know more about how this masterpiece was spawned. So I've written up a "Making Of" article over at deke.com to demonstrate the lengths we will go to to prove that artists love geeky things too. Sign up for a free account to read the whole piece (and access to a bunch of other cool tutorials and stuff), and get your behind-the-scenes view of Photoshop video training history in the making.

Coming Soon: The Return of DekePod

2008-05-05T05:26:34Z

Why is this man jumping off the wall? The return of DekePod. I shot this on the set of Deke's soon-to-be-released next installment of DekePod, a podcast from our own Deke McClelland that made its first irreverent appearance a while back to great acclaim. The latest round will feature plenty of in-your-face, World-According-to-Deke information on all things digital imaging. Stay tuned this summer. Get dekePod here.

Using Bridge to View iDisk Contents

2008-03-13T04:10:25Z

I often have to find a particular image or document on a remote drive. especially ftp types, and I was wishing the other day that my otherwise wonderful ftp client (Transmit) would just give me thumbnails so I could visually find the picture I wanted without having to download the whole folder to look for it. Today, I realized that I could (sort of) make that happen in Bridge. If I'd already had my iDisk available in the Finder, then Bridge could access the contents thereof and give me previews. So, I could point Bridge at the folder of samples from say Harold Davis's new book, and find the one with poppies on it without having to download the whole book.

I could actually get thumbnails of the PDFs that were in my iDisk Public folder.

So I tried it with a mounted ftp drive, and well, let's just say it probably would have been better to download the whole folder and look for the image I wanted. Some previews were created in Bridge...eventually. But I really didn't understand what mysterious factor was making that happen for some of them and not others. And then, the beachball started spinning and Bridge needed to be restarted. Apparently, Windows (Vista) users have a similar experience. But a real answer can't be far off. Perhaps an intrepid O'Reilly Digital Media Community member might have a thought? (And, by the way, let me just say that we got a preview copy of Harold's book in the office this week and it's beautiful. It should be in stock in April, and we'll have a limited quantity at Photoshop World if you stop by the booth.)

The Drop Cap from L

2008-02-13T01:41:07Z

After three years of tweaking, I finally dropped off the files for my new book, The Moon Princess, at the printer today. One of the last design challenges was creating a drop cap for the opening word, Long. The white space at the L's right edge broke the flow. Googling around for ideas, I found this vintage screencast by O’Reilly author Deke McClelland. He demonstrates several ways of bulking up an L in InDesign. First, there's the standard three-line drop cap: Then, he drop-title-capitalizes the whole first word: Finally, he settles on drop-capping every letter in the word: None of those approaches looked right on my text, because the first paragraph was only two lines long. My solution was to "lift-cap" the L by doubling its size and making it bold. That put the horizontal part of the character on the same baseline as the rest of the word, leading the eye into the phrase. To enhance the connection, I emboldened the rest of the phrase as well: I could have experimented with a different font for the L; I also considered putting it in a black box and reversing the color. But in the end, I thought this approach looked cleanest. How have you dealt with the drop cap from L?

Deke Helps Discover New InDesign Secrets

2008-01-15T07:34:13Z

One of my favorite podcasts got even sassier this week when our own Deke McClelland dropped in on the fabulous InDesign Secrets with David Blatner and Anne-Marie Conception. During the podcast, Deke plays "Stump the Hosts" by bringing up all the little annoying problems we encountered during the creation of his new InDesign One on One book. Listen with amazement while Anne-Marie, in real time, comes up with an awesome workaround solution to the inability to apply a keyboard shortcut for the character style [None, as Deke and David sit idly by discussing the arcane and possibly useless technique of duplicating the effect of Unsharp Mask using only Gaussian Blur. Deke must have made an impression. David and Anne-Marie each posted follow up commentary on questions he brought up this week. David warns about the weird effect of the double-application object style. And Anne-Marie expands on her elegantly cool solution for how to assign a keyboard shortcut for [None]. Bottom line, a don't miss this raucous episode of one of the consistently terrific podcasts you should be listening to anyway.

Viewing Subfolder Contents in Adobe Bridge

2008-01-04T22:30:01Z

Here's a feature some of my savviest Creative Suite friends didn't know about (so I know it's cool): you can view the entire contents of a folder, including thumbnails of all the subfolder items, all at once in the Bridge window. Adobe calls this the Flat View, and the only real trick is finding the tiny, obscure "Flatten View" button quietly stashed in the Filter panel. Make sure said panel is showing (Window > Filter Panel) and look for the button right underneath the "Filter" tab. For some inexplicable reason, it's represented by a folder with a red circle/slash symbol. (Maybe it's supposed to mean "No Subfolders?")

The Flatten View icon is is hidden in the Filter panel.

Once you find the thing, simply click the icon, and voila, you are presented with thumbnails of all your subfolder items in one handy window. If you're looking for one particular file in a hierarchically organized collection, you don't have to click down into individual subfolders (and back) searching for it. This has been particularly handy for managing the image files for books I'm editing. Take Derrick's soon-to-be-released The Digital Photography Companion, for instance. During the editorial process, I keep the image files in manageable-sized folders, organized by chapter so they can be easily shipped out to the tech editor, copyeditor, etc. But when the Design department wants an image from the interior to use for a catalog or brochure, I can use the Flatten View feature to scan the whole collection looking for that awesome shot of San Francisco without having to remember it's in Chapter 3.

Applying the Flatten View command to my "Art" folder, gives me an "Art + subfolders" window with thumbnails of all the images from every chapter of the book in one view.

You can apply the features of the Filters panel to the whole set, too. So once you have all the files in the window, you can still filter by file type, keyword, and other handy categories. (In my case, I might ask for keyword, "San Francisco" to get every shot of SF in the entire book.) When you're done, click the mystery icon again and Bridge puts you back in your hierarchically organized parent folder with subfolders intact.

The Much Ballyhooed All-Adobe Workflow

2007-12-13T20:37:34Z

For most of the 1990s, the design market was shared by three programs: page-layout software QuarkXPress, image editor Adobe Photoshop, and drawing application Macromedia FreeHand. (Some shops preferred Illustrator, but FreeHand tended to be the more popular choice of page designers.) This benefited users by inspiring fierce competition between the suitors, with each doing its dead-level best to remain on top in its respective market. But because the rivals rarely saw eye-to-eye, it also ensured a certain amount of cross-application friction. There was no such thing as consistent color. And throughout most of the decade, none of the programs supported the others’ native file formats. As a result, Photoshop and FreeHand had to export to standardized formats that didn’t take advantage of their most recent innovations, and XPress was left bottom-feeding from aging import technology and downright antique graphics-handling functions, many of which had been designed to suit grayscale graphics.

Today’s more progressive design market is increasingly dominated by InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, all from a single vendor, Adobe Systems. Time will tell how Adobe handles its monopoly-esque position. Does it innovate to keep us buying its products? Or does it take us for granted, cut resources from its graphics and design development, and pursue markets that have nothing to do with us (and everything to do with our middle managers)?

It’s hard to predict, but for the present, things honestly couldn’t be better. InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator respect each others’ color profiles, so assuming consistent color settings, a shape that looks red in Illustrator appears in same shade of red in Photoshop and InDesign. The three programs share common tools and palettes, making it easy to flit from one program to another. And best of all, they recognize and fully support the PSD and AI formats, which are capable of saving every layer, transparency setting, and dynamic effect that Photoshop and Illustrator can dish out. This extraordinary level of support presents us with three practical advantages:

Advantage #1: You no longer need to create two copies of your artwork, one in the native file format that preserves layers and a second in a cross-application standard that can be read by the layout program. Just save one file that supports all features of the program—PSD in the case of Photoshop and AI for Illustrator—and import that file into InDesign.

Advantage #2: InDesign supports all layers and translucent objects inside PSD and AI files. This means you no longer need to trace the opaque boundaries of an imported image with a clipping path, the way you did when importing images into QuarkXPress. Consider the image files pictured here (you can click to enlarge). On the left is a knife that casts a shadow, as it appears in Photoshop. Knife and shadow exist on separate layers; the background is transparent. When I place the layered PSD file into InDesign, the transparency remains intact). On the right, the result is a photo-realistic composite with a tapering shadow, something clipping paths cannot come close to matching.

Advantage #3: You can share complex artwork between Illustrator and InDesign via the clipboard. For example, just copy a group of paths in Illustrator, switch to InDesign, and paste. If you have the right options turned on, as shown here, you can even edit the paths in InDesign.

To increase compatibility between Adobe’s products, it is essential that you save your artwork properly from the originating application. Some advice:

When saving a document from Illustrator CS3 in the Illustrator format, be sure to include the .ai extension at the end of the filename. When asked how to save the file, turn on all available check boxes, as pictured above right. The first, Create PDF Compatible File, makes the file readable by InDesign. The next, Embed ICC Profiles, permits InDesign to display the colors just as they appeared in Illustrator. And the last, Use Compression, makes the file its absolute smallest without throwing away any important data.
When creating an opaque Photoshop image—which you can recognize by the lack of a checkerboard pattern—I recommend that you flatten the document by choosing Layer’Flatten Image before importing it into InDesign. This reduces the size of the file on disk. I also recommend that you save the image to the TIFF format. With LZW compression turned on, TIFF usually results in smaller files than PSD, and with no loss in quality.
If you want to convey transparency to InDesign, as I did when importing my knife image, delete the Background layer in Photoshop and reduce the file to as few layers as possible. Then use the Save As command to save the image under a different name (so as not to harm the original). Use either the PSD or TIFF format.

So to those of you who’ve permitted the Creative Suite to swaddle you in the warm embrace of an all-Adobe workflow, rest easy. InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator work like cogs in a great, harmonious wheel.

For more information on getting consistent color across the Creative Suite, InDesign’s transparency and effects, and importing Photoshop and Illustrator files into InDesign, check out my newest book, Adobe InDesign CS3 One-on One. For more on leveraging layers and transparency in Photoshop, there’s a best-selling Photoshop version as well, aptly named Adobe Photoshop CS3 One on One.

Why Artists Are Different

2007-06-04T22:02:44Z

A sculptor I know likes to say, "Art is a hammer knocking at your eyeballs." Architect Robert Venturi described one of his approaches as "contradiction juxtaposed."

Amy X Neuburg, here live at EXIT Theatre, juxtaposes fiery operatic vocals with electronic audio loops. (Photo by Rob Thomas)

Much successful art, it seems to me, takes concepts—or symbols of concepts—and squishes them together so our brains are provoked into making new connections. The art, or hammer-like impact, derives from the way those symbols are juxtaposed, the artist's skill in adjusting contrasts—dark vs. light, repetition vs. surprise, fast vs. slow, sharp vs. blurry, realistic vs. distorted. . . .

There's a whole chapter in my book called "Distortion is Art," inspired by sound designer Gary Rydstrom's advice to his staff while working on the tornado movie Twister. I was particularly intrigued by the tension between the computer's power to generate perfect copies with the artist's instinct to distort and juxtapose.

I was thinking about that after reading an artist's reaction to my latest podcast, "Seize the Rhythm," which was about hearing the rhythms all around us and blending them into songs. The sigh of tires on the pavement, the stuttering voice of a nervous caller on an answering machine...there are so many patterns out there to explore.

But what this artist said made me realize that a big part of art is the original vision:

]]> Interesting subject for a podcast. . . . It's something I take so for granted that I sometimes forget that other people may not actually hear things rhythmically. Of course, this is the basis for most of my songs: the way the language itself suggests a tune.

Or, as producer Don Was told me in the book,

One night, I was working with Bob Dylan, and I wanted to ask the billion-dollar question: "What do you go through when you write a song like 'Gates of Eden?' How do you prepare for that? How do you do that? And why can't I do it?" And essentially what he said was, "You can believe me or not, but I didn't write that song. I remember moving the pencil over the paper, but I didn't write it. It came from without. It came from...sources beyond."

Keith Richards will tell you the same thing. In fact, during a session, instead of saying, "I've got an idea," he'll say, "Hold it! Hold it! Incoming." And he never deviates from that. He knows that it's not his. So if the best artists are simply conduits for lightning from the creative ether, does it really matter if you're rolling a computer or a Wollensak?

When you attach importance to the methodology, you're just distracting yourself. To carry forward Keith's metaphor about something incoming, I'd be more concerned with building a really great antenna.

Listen up. Look around. Touch, taste, and breathe your world. The more those impressions collide in your mind, the more art should flow.

The Gospel According to Terry McBride (Nettwerk)

2007-05-01T18:07:36Z

The man of the hour in my book at the moment (and actually for a number of years now) is my friend and colleague Terry McBride, Founder & CEO of Nettwerk-- an artist-centric, forward thinking artist management firm that also houses a label and a publishing arm for its artists. Terry is an artist advocate; we are cut from the same cloth. He has run Nettwerk now for over 20 years, and he's far and away the most artist-friendly guy in the industry. Some of the top artists who have chosen to be on his label over the years include: Coldplay, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, Dido & Avril Lavigne (among many others) -- most of whom remain staunchly loyal to him. The reason is that Terry is charting a new course for artists in the digital age. I first met Terry about 12 years ago when I was driving music efforts at Apple -- and he came to me about sponsoring this new concert series called Lilith Fair that he and Sarah were launching; to my chagrin, Apple passed on the opportunity and of course Lilith was a huge success in the three (or so) years that it took place. He was ahead even then. With regard to Avril, he's launched a Manga series of animated cartoon stories that speak directly to the core of her audience (these will live online and in book form). Terry also believes strongly in honoring the cultures where an artist has big audiences. For example, under Terry's direction, Avril has also recorded several of her songs in multiiple languages geared towards her fans in the countries where she's strongest. Avril's #1 in the charts this week -- so he must be doing something right. He's also taken on the industry -- in particular the RIAA (lobbying group for the major record labels in DC). The RIAA have been suing fans who are caught downloading songs illegally, including underage kids. When one of Avril's fans was sued accordingly, Terry took a stand agains the RIAA & took on the kids' legal bills. Terry is also a leading advocate for 'collapsed copyrights' where artists retain control over their recorded masters, their publishing & domain names -- thereby allowing them full control (and the majority of their revenues) with a wide range of licensing opportunities. This makes the job of a major film studio music supervisor much easier, for example -- in the case of their desire to use a Barenaked Ladies track -- when they can just go directly to the artist and get the deal done (one-stop-shopping). And of course the artist pockets the majority of the proceeds in turn. There are many other such examples of where Terry is paving the way for artists to retain control over their assets and revenue streams. and connect in a much more meaningful, long-lasting way with their core audiences. I couldn't be more in synch with his philosophies, and artists & the industry at large are also starting to sit up and take notice; Terry's been the subject of countless articles and interviews in the past year & has been actively sought out as a Keynote speaker at a myriad of industry conferences. If you want to know where things are headed for artists in digital music moving forward, listen to what the man says.

Even the Robots Are Bored at the Tech Museum

2006-01-30T07:06:24Z

Related link: http://www.thetech.org

Today’s San Jose Mercury News (“the newspaper of Silicon Valley”) has a front-cover story about one of the deep ironies in this world-famous technopolis: The $113 million Tech Museum of Innovation is tanking. Attendance dropped by half within three years of the museum’s opening in 1999 and has remained flat. Revenue is also down by 50%, causing an operating deficit last year despite 20 layoffs. (Staff size has fallen from 200 to about 120 in the last few years, the paper says.)

There’s some hope that the new CEO, who arrives in April, will be able to turn things around, but based on what I’ve seen, the Tech will need to make some drastic changes. Having lived in Silicon Valley for more than a decade, I’ve made several trips to the Tech, including one with my father—a renowned chemistry educator—and two with my young sons. None of them wants to go back.

How could a science museum in the heart of Silicon Valley fail so badly? Its mission statement sounds ideal:

To engage people of all ages and backgrounds in exploring and experiencing technologies affecting their lives, and to inspire the young to become innovators in the technologies of the future.

But the problem, as I see it, is that the exhibits just aren’t designed for exploring and experiencing. There’s too little hands-on equipment and far too many bland computer simulations. It’s just weird to pay good money for a chance to run some cruddy 8-bit graphic demos on ancient PCs. (Though my recollection is that the admission prices used to be about double what they are now.) Instead of learning by doing, you’re forced to watch science through glass.

Two exhibits in particular highlighted the benefits and challenge of making science interactive. On my last visit, my 2-year-old son and I sat down to watch a robotics demo. The star of the show, a late-generation Sony Aibo, could have been a crowd-pleaser. But the poor robodog actually fell asleep! Prod and cajole as his trainer might, ol’ Aibo refused to participate, just lying on the floor, sulking.

Interestingly, the successful exhibit also showcased robotics. It had an irresistible name like “Meet the Peanut Butter Robot.” When we climbed to the museum’s third floor, we discovered that the PB Robot was actually a high school student in a chef’s hat. He was standing behind a table with a jar of peanut butter, a bag of bread, and a knife. To program him to make a sandwich for you, you had to write instructions on a piece of paper.

The joy of the exhibit was that the Peanut Butter Robot interpreted everything literally, forcing you to develop precise programming code if you wanted to eat. For example, writing, “Put the peanut butter on the bread” might provoke the robot to lift the jar and balance it on the loaf. There’s a more detailed description of the demonstration here (580KB PDF), but perhaps PB Robot was one of the workers who got cut, because I never saw him again.

Every time I visit the NAMM musical instrument show, I see more add-on hardware designed to make music software tactile. Clearly technology is more inspiring when it facilitates interaction. For the sake of future innovators, let’s hope the Tech Museum and other educational institutions start to realize that as well.

What got you turned on to technology?

World Usability Day

2005-11-03T04:32:56Z

Related link: http://worldusabilityday.org/

Thursday, Nov 3 is the first World Usability Day, so designated by the Usability Professionals Association. A gimmick? Maybe, but let's face it, making technology serve humans instead of vice versa is a cause that needs all the help it can get.

I still hear way too many technologists (this means you, smarty pants) saying that the whole problem is that customers are stupid.

From a story on the Usability Day site, written by a usability expert who was defeated by his Hummer's $3,000 navigation system (the system is known as "Nat"):

I called the dealership to complain and they explained that I needed to go through a training seminar in order to learn how to use this navigation system... At the time of this writing, I have had this truck now for over a year and still have not used this very-important-to-me-at-time-of-purchase feature. I just sent our office administrator out to my truck to see if she could make sense out of the nav system...

After spending 30 minutes in the truck, driving around town, she came back in with a frustrated look. "They made you pay three grand not to listen to music?" she asked. That's right. Since Nat requires a DVD to be inserted into the CD drive, you can't listen to CDs while driving.

Here's one that's a little more inspiring:

Dutch manufacturers realized that a fly painted on the porcelain of a urinal nearly always became a "target" for men using the facility. And the fly is positioned in precisely the right place for minimal spillage or splashback.

Clever those Dutch!

Shooting video for the iPod & other small screens: the value of a close-up

2005-10-18T14:27:50Z

The recent release of an iPod that plays video creates a new world of opportunities for the independent producer — to get an idea of the scale, think how podcasting has changed the distribution of audio programs in the past year alone. DVDs and online streaming have long enabled people to make and distribute professional quality video with commonly available prosumer equipment: podcasting your video now enables you to reach an even broader audience. The translation from creating images for a TV or computer display to working in the medium of an iPod’s 2.5 inch LCD screen, however, may take some getting used to. The place to start is by considering the size of the images in your frame. Just as the shift from theatrical viewing to home viewing (via DVD, VHS, and cable TV) changed the way cinematographers frame their work, the opportunities created by the very small screens of the iPod and other portable devices demand a different type of screen composition. Wide shots, such as landscapes, look great in a theater, but don’t always hold up as well on a TV screen. Close-ups, especially of people’s faces, look great even on smaller TVs, which is why you may notice newer films feature more close-up shots and fewer dramatic widescreen vistas. As I wrote in my soon to be published O’Reilly book DV Filmmaking: From Start to Finish if the focus of your shot fills your frame it will retain its impact, even at a smaller size. Case in point, the sandwich shown below:

This image is shown at 320 x 240 pixels, which is a frame size the iPod accommodates — see the iPod tech specs page. A frame of DV is 720 pixels wide, more than twice the size of the image here. Even at this size, the sandwich still retains its visual power (positive or negative depending on your feelings about pastrami and/or the consumption of beef) due to the extreme close-up framing. This image of a sandwich from the world famous Katz's deli appears in chapter 3, Composing a Shot to Fit Your Output Medium, which covers shot types and screen size in detail. I photographed the sandwich from so many angles (to make sure I got exactly the right composition) that the waiter came over and asked me if I wanted him to take a picture of me and the sandwich together. If you have a wider framing, and feel the focus of your shot gets lost when you reduce the frame size you can always crop your video. Many video editing and compression programs offer a crop feature that lets you decide which parts of a shot you’d like to retain and which you’d like to leave on the cutting room floor. Cropping your video may do a disservice to your original composition, for example I like the plastic squeeze-bottles of mustard and the assortment of pickles that appear in the background of the image above — if I cropped the shot differently they might not appear in my revised image. At the same time, cropping is a great way to highlight a specific detail and draw attention to a particular element in your shot. I considered cropping the original image of the sandwich from full size down to 320 x 240 so only a detail of the pastrami remained in a super tight extreme close-up, but decided not to because I didn’t want to turn off all the vegetarian members of my potential audience.
Once you’ve got your video composed to fit your target screen size, the next step is encoding it to an iPod compatible format. I’ll save that for another posting. Stay tuned, and bon appetit.