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Saturday, 31 August 2002 |
as well as other software from Apple.
10:18:04 PM 
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Here is an article about English artist Roger Dean, who designed the album covers for 1970s hippie band Yes. The article rather cutely is laid out using Mac OS X windows and a Photoshop 7 toolbar.
9:43:47 PM
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This article is a good reminder that even though the free applications that come with Mac OS X—iPhoto and iDVD—are targeted at the non-professional market, they are perfectly useful to professionals as well.
9:31:47 PM
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I have been reading up on Final Cut Pro and Apple’s other moviemaking software tools, in anticipation of being able to make movies with a 17-inch iMac when it finally arrives.
Professional movie editors like Sharon Rutter use high-end PowerMacs, needless to say, but you can still do a helluva lot even with a humble iMac. especially if it has a decent monitor and a SuperDrive like the top-end iMac.
9:24:36 PM
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… here is an article at the Apple website about the Chief Graphic Designer for the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and how he uses Font Reserve in his daily work.
9:04:16 PM
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I was amazed when I read this in Hillman Curtis’ new book MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer:
“Sometimes I brew up a double espresso, from extra strong beans that I get from the Soma Café whenever I am in San Francisco. I shoot it back and go to Apple.com/quicktime and watch movie trailers. Sad, right? Here’s the really sad part… sometimes I get choked up watching them. I can’t help it. It’s that combination of music and motion, color and text.”
Curtis concludes that “… as a New Media designer I am looking at everything.” [My emphasis.] I do that too, constantly.
Looking at everything is something that surprisingly few New Media or other designers or art directors actually do, in fact. I discovered that when working in advertising in London and Sydney. One of my jobs was to locate and supply the stuff of inspiration that would mutate into great ideas in the minds of the golden ones, the blessed ones who go under the designation of the Creatives. Otherwise they would not find it themselves, unless they were particularly self-motivated.
Hillman Curtis lives and works in New York City, and there is inspiration to be found in every square inch of that place. It oozes out of every crack in the pavement. You drown in inspiration in cities like New York, London, Paris and to a much lesser extent Sydney. In Perth such stuff is so rarefied that you track it relentlessly, hunt it down like a predator, and treasure it beyond pearls when you do find it.
The Internet is our salvation in a place like this, where you cannot just drop into the nearest gallery or museum for a quick dose of the visual or the cerebral. Every so often I spend a few days at Apple’s QuickTime movie trailers web pages, sucking down trailers of anything that catches my fancy. I have QuickTime’s preferences set so that I get the biggest versions, and it takes an hour or so for each trailer to download like this. But it is so worth it, when I come across a great little 2-and-a-half minute piece of movie-making.
I cannot play back these movies satisfactorily on this manky old upgraded Mac clone—all its variously upgraded parts mismatch too badly for playback that is anything but lousy at best, but I will be getting a new 17-inch iMac soon enough, when one finally turns up in this place. And then I can have an orgy of inspiration on its letterbox-format widescreen.
Until then I am having a few days of grabbing more trailers to burn onto CD as my ongoing inspiration archive.
3:28:31 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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