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 Sunday, 17 February 2002
Further On Type.
The next worthwhile thing for the new typophile to do is check out Adobe’s new range of OpenType fonts.
The current Mac and Windows computer operating systems support OpenType, and InDesign certainly does so admirably. For further information about its virtues, here is another article on the Adobe.com website: A Font For All Seasons.
10:27:32 PM 
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A Word From The Master.
If you’re beginning to get interested in good typography, and good type as such, you cannot do better than buy yourself a copy of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style.
You will most likely have to buy it from Amazon.com, as I have never seen a copy of it in Australia. I have two copies, just in case one gets damaged. I love it.
Robert Bringhurst:
The Elements of Typographic Style.
No less a typography divinity than Hermann Zapf said of this book that “I wish to see this book become the Typographers’ Bible.” Zapf also says of The Elements of Typographic Style the following:
“All desktop typographers should study this book. It is not just one more publication on typography, like so many others on the market. It is, instead, a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field. Written by an expert, Robert Bringhurst’s book is particularly welcome in an age where typographic design is sometimes misconstrued as form of private self-expression for designers. As Bringhurst puts it: ‘Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised and dissected before it is consumed.’”
10:15:33 PM
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Days Of Future Past.
What I am really excited about in the latest generation of Adobe’s publishing products is their typesetting engines. InDesign 2 has the most amazing typesetting capability of them all, but the rest follow close behind.
Remember when you had to set your type in Illustrator, then import the outlines into Photoshop for further work? Now doing it all in Photoshop is enough. But it’s InDesign that’s really begun to restore to writers and designers and even typographers the possibility of decent typesetting once again.
It used to be that if you were carefree and reckless with the budget, and were desperate for a good bit of type design, that you would call up some expert in the esoteric arts of hot metal setting. He’d take weeks and spend a fortune getting it just so, off in some dank basement workshop in the East End.
Now, put InDesign 2 in the same hands that moulded molten lead. Or in your own. Save a small fortune and do it all much, much better. No more excuses that the software is too crude for quality type design and all the usual and unforgivable mistakes.
A quick play with some nice type,
just for the pleasure of it.
9:16:59 PM
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Where Is Photoshop 7?
One of the reasons most often cited by designers for not switching to Mac OS X from Mac OS 9 is that two prime items of software have not yet made the switch themselves—Quark XPress and Photoshop.
InDesign 2 is so much better than XPress 3, 4 or 5 that you may as well swap over immediately if you can. There is the price factor, too. For the cost of one XPress licence you’ll get a whole suite of Adobe publishing tools. One objection down.
As for Photoshop, well, according to Friday’s demo Photoshop 6 is quite happy running in Mac OS X’s Classic layer especially when you call it from LiveMotion 2 or GoLive 6 to edit an image embedded as an object in one of their pages. The transition was seamless. Of course, having a recent and fast Mac is a big help! My current machine is far too old and slow.
The word on the much-awaited version 7 of Photoshop was, essentially, don’t ask. If you really feel the need to make some graphics in Mac OS X, try out Illustrator 10. It’s pretty good, and now allows you to make more photorealistic imagery than ever before.
8:41:25 PM
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LiveMotion Soon To Go Live.
LiveMotion 2 was pretty impressive from what I saw of it. Again, version 1 was immature although interesting. It started out as an animated version of the short-lived ImageStyler web graphics tool and retains some of the same interface elements.
But LiveMotion shows that Adobe has also learnt much from their years of owning and building After Effects, their professional video motion graphics software. After Effects is so good and so ubiquitous in filmmaking that those who would use Apple’s Final Cut Pro as their video editor of choice, instead of Adobe’s Premiere, often have a copy of After Effects on the same machine, for titles and effects.
After Effects now includes Flash export amongst its options, and that’s one of the things that piqued my curiousity about it. LiveMotion 2 has the same kind of timeline as After Effects, based on time and duration instead of keyframes and frames as Flash 5 is. It also has the sophisticated scripting environment that LiveMotion 1 so obviously lacked.
Previously there was no way you’d consider using LiveMotion alone—you’d have to use it in conjunction with Flash. Now, LiveMotion 2 might well be enough in itself. Many of the tasks that Flash 5 makes a misery are made easy and fast in LiveMotion 2.
8:09:57 PM
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New And Better Publishing.
The software demos Friday were impressive, and I’m looking forward
to trying the new versions of Adobe’s print and web publishing tools out shortly.
Everyone has their favourite software tools, and there is usually more than one brand of each product type available. That’s a good thing—competition helps firms make better products. But the best design firms and advertising agencies that I’ve worked with have always kept an eye on the competitive products, and switched whenever appropriate.
Quark’s page layout tool XPress has long been the software of choice for print production, even though Pagemaker was the product that launched the DTP revolution in the mid-80s when it was owned by now-defunct Aldus. InDesign 2 goes far beyond XPress and is a real page design tool, as opposed to being a page layout product.
InDesign 2 is what everyone had hoped version 1 would be—the Quark killer. Little wonder so many magazine publishers and advertising agencies have made the leap to InDesign now. I think it’s only a matter of time before a multitude of designers, art directors and publishers follow them.
7:28:28 PM
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Easy With That Apostrophe, Eugene.
There is a self-replicating plague on the loose in the English-speaking world. I call it inappropriate apostrophization.
By that I mean the incorrect use of the apostrophe before the letter S. It has two legitimate uses—ownership and contraction. Ownership is when you are referring to something that someone or something has possession of. For example, this is Bob’s bat.
Or apostrophe-S is used when you are making a contraction of two adjacent words. For instance, that’s interesting. But you never use an apostrophe-S for plurals.
You’ll find inappropriate apostrophization all over the place, especially in greengrocers. Here’s one I see at the local fruit and vege shop all the time: Potatoe’s. Down the main road all the record stores do this: CD’s and DVD’s.
On Friday’s seminar no attached S was safe without being burdened by an apostrophe being placed inappropriately between it and the rest of the word. It’s an axiom that no designer knows how to spell, and as the presenters were former graphic artists then I guess that was the reason.
Here’s a simple way to test whether an apostrophe is necessary or not. Does the word with the S own the thing denoted by the word after it? Then an apostrophe is appropriate. Is the S at the end all that is left of another word, like is? Then use an apostrophe. In all other cases an apostrophe is probably inappropriate.
6:59:36 PM
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One Good Reason.
I’ve been having problems with headaches, intermittently, for some days. The source is these elderly CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors I am using. The main one is a 21-inch Mitsubishi, and the secondary monitor, for palettes and extra windows, is a 15-incher.
I have the refresh rates set as high as each monitor’s video card will allow—100 Hertz. That’s a pretty good rate compared to what CRTs used to refresh at in the old days, when you would easily notice the flicker. But it’s not anywhere near good enough these days when you might need to use your machine for long stretches each day, at any time of night or day.
Apple is once again leading the industry in declaring CRTs obsolete and making available flickerless liquid crystal (LCD) displays at close to reasonable prices, but I will be damned thankful when there are no CRTs left in the world and LCDs, or better, are the norm.
10:31:30 AM
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Catching Up Today.
For various reasons I did not post to this weblog yesterday or the day before, but I am going to catch up with a vengeance now. There are so many things worth noting today, I think. So here goes.
On Friday I attended an Adobe software road show. The presenters, whether Mac-user or Windows diehard, kept referring to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser as Internet Exploder.
I just had a reminder of why. Exploder just froze for no good reason yet again. It always does that, whether I am using it in Windows, Mac OS X or Mac OS 9.
Unfortunately, far too many web programmers create pages full of code that does not adhere to the industry standards, especially in the JavaScript language. I use Opera as my default web browser right now, and find I have to jump into Exploder to view such badly programmed pages. Then of course Exploder explodes.
9:32:19 AM
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