Write With: online group document management

WriteWith is a simple, free (for now, anyway) online document editing program, which has incredible potential for journalists, educators and anyone who collaborates.

Here's the description of the creation/intent:
"Most of Writewith got built in the last 6 weeks, but it’s been a few years in coming. One of us cofounders, Martin Goldman, started out wanting to solve a big problem — the student newspaper at SUNY Binghamton, Pipe Dream, would sometimes accidentally publish the wrong versions of articles. At the end of a hard night at the copy desks, editors would lose track of which Word document drafts on their computer desktops were the final drafts."

I tried it, using a brownie recipe from yesterday's NY Times (a spectacular recipe, I might add). It worked like a dream: upload the original draft; edit; output new document in a variety of formats from MS Word doc format to blog entry to pdf (yep! FREE pdf creation!).

Collaboration: the future of the internet!

Online Image Tools

From the March archives of the Self Portrait Challenge comes a list of clever (and free!) online image manipulation tools:

1. queeky - drawing tool
2. offtype - drawing tool
3. artpad - painting tool
4. scribbler - fun tool - can’t save image but can do a screen save
5. flashface - make a face using many variables
6. typedrawing - draw an image with letters
7. websketch - sketch and save and crop and alter your image online
8. mr picasso head - fun make a face tool
9. textorizer - turn your photo into a text image
10. face transformer - upload an image to be morphed
11. polaroid-o-nizer - turn your photos into polaroids
12. typeorganism - turn your photo into type
13. pikipimp - change your photos
14. movie poster flickr tools
15. hockney-izer - flickr tools
16. image mosaic generator
17. cartoon magic
18. magick image
19. wanted poster

There is, of course, the granddaddy of all: fd’s Flickr toys. Lots and lots of options on this page alone. Go make art! Now!

Historic Colors

On his blog, Gerry has posted some 'Colors for Historic Preservation'. They are nice deep rich tones. Unfortunately, this palette was established in the minds of the paint companies and of the public in the first wave of historic preservation in the 1980s. The reality is that historic paint colors for the rich were gaudy. Our founding fathers and mothers seemed to have ascribed to the theory of 'if you've got it; flaunt it.'
Pictures from the same room in Mt Vernon - the tasteful blue was done in 1980; bright green is the most recent restoration, done using more accurate techniques and analysis. For more information on this renovation, see: Architecture Week
You can view the Biltmore House colors online. Nowhere do they actually say that these are the historic colors. In fact the exact wording is: "Inspired by Vanderbilt’s Estate".

In reality, the house was a tad more garish, as demonstrated by this restoration of the "gilded Italian 22 karat gold leaf" walls of Mr Vanderbilt's room.

It is true that the average and poorer families had to make do with earth-toned paints, often suspended in a milk binding medium.

Peep Fest

Celebrations are always good. Today was a new one: Peep Fest - celebrating those little dabs of marshmallow and sugar. Market Street Books was the kind sponsor. They had trays laden with Peeps of many colors, a chocolate fountain for Peep dipping and even Peep salsa. Lots of fun photo ops. On straight sugar, I'm good now for another year.

Color Tools for Use Outside Photoshop

More color tools:
1) ColorCop
Color Cop is a (Windows only) freeware eyedropper and color combination tool that makes grabbing a color your like, along with a few complimentary colors, quick and easy.

Color Cop also offers variable magnification, average sampling of 3x3 or 5x5 squares, and quite a bit more.

2) ColorZilla "is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks - both basic and advanced.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes."

Smashing Color Cards

Smashing Magazine has decided to create color cards for web designers. Their first card is green. The card itself has a range of one hue of (apple) green in a range of saturation. Set into this background are a variety of tastefully complimentary text colors. Reportedly, Smashing will be creating more of these cards. Handy!

More palette options

It's spring. The current issue of Country Living has pronounced that pink and green are the colors for spring (this spring? every spring?). They're easy colors to warm up to when things are a bit too gray outside. Today I've been working on two similar color palettes. The palette above is based on a hooked rug, featured in Country Living (want to see a bad online magazine? Try to find expanded content at Country Living Online) .

The palette below is based on an idea that Amelia put forth: "...in times of greatest upheaval, films became brighter, colors more intense and the lighting more artistic to highlight certain aspects of a character's emotion." The colors below are from a 1931 Jello cookbook. The colors are pretty cheerful!

Color Palette Tutorials

On our class tutorial page, I have posted two videos on creating color palettes. One demonstrates how to use Photoshop to select and identify colors from a photo (above).

The other video demonstrates using Fireworks and uses an antique poster as the image to be analyzed. (below)

When you are creating your color palettes, be sure to select a couple of neutral tones from your photo.

News in a Poster format

While browsing antique poster shops for a color scheme, I came across this wondeful poster by Otto Baumberger. It's from 1928, yet it looks totally contemporary! Poster information: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 1928,35.5" x 50.25", Lithograph

Seguy Palette #1

Using a floral print by Seguy as a starting point, I created a hexadecimal palette by using Photoshop's eyedropper tool to sample the colors. I then created a new color palette image in Photoshop with hexadecimal colors.
Pochoir or silkscreen prints are a little easier than photographs to use in a color analysis. There is no tonal gradation, just large flat color fields.

1930s Color Palette

I adore the print work of French artist, Eugene Seguy. Most of his pieces were done as book illustrations. In looking at his work, I was inspired to do a color check using I Like Your Colors, on a gallery that sells his work, Leonard Fox Rare Books. Below is the returned color palette. This is good, but it is missing the neutralizing tan on the front page, which is actually a photo. In using Dreamweaver to do a color analysis, it turns out that the hexadecimal color is #A59267

I could do this analysis in Fireworks, Photoshop or any other photo manipulation program. I just happened to have Dreamweaver open. The image below was created as a table in Dreamweaver, then I took a screenshot of it and saved that as a jpg. I did try to import the table into Blogger, but Blogger rewrote the table code in bizarre css that wouldn't render background colors.To the right, is the colors palette generated by Like-Your-Colors. I find that the white : color ration has too much white to make an effective color decision in this dark, rich toned scheme.

Color Inspiration

In design, it is a good idea to keep a sketchbook of what is inspiring you at the moment. Sketchbooks are sloppy. They are works-in-progress. I want to start keeping a design sketchbook of colors that inspire me, in preparation for (potentially) reworking my blog color scheme.

First clipping from: Marcy Tilton's website
Sensational Color has an article declaring that red and green are the colors of vibrancy and freshness in India's markets.

Beauty and Obscurity

344 is a design studio and the online home of artist, Stefan Bucher. My daughter got me interested in his films of himself drawing monsters.

His studio page, 344, is fascinating as well - but it has just about the most unclear web site navigation that I have ever encountered in a web design. The good news is that once I figured it out, I was amused, rather than irritated.

Give it a shot - see if you smile or grind teeth.

Quote of the day: Web Attention Spans

Design Meltdown - Webservices Part 2:

Some great quotes on web design and the need for clarity:

"Short attention spans

Web users have incredibly short attention spans. I believe this can be particularly true of web developers in search of tools to solve particular problems. I know that I grow incredibly impatient when I land on a site and can't figure out it's purpose. So designers of such sites need to make it's purpose instantly obvious. Is it to build forms? Times sheets? Polls? Why the heck am I looking at your site."

Another great quote, relevant to this week's studies:
"Branding
Just as with any other product branding is of the utmost importance. One can no doubt go to countless versions of the same applications. Making yourself memorable is a good thing. This is where clever concepts that make your site stick in the brain are great."

BBC's Fifteen Web Principles

Below are my favorite principles from the list,
The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles. The others are good suggestions too, but these resonate with what a good web site should be/do.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people's content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn't mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they're on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won't ever get lost.

14. Link to discussions on the web, don't host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

Media ... for the 21st Century

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

The MacArthur Foundation has just launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative. The focus is on understanding how digital media should/will inform the learning skills (and defining those skills) of the next generation. Here's what they list as the skills.

This could almost work as a checklist for what we, as communicators, should be doing in structuring our current media -

"Schools and afterschool programs must devote more attention to fostering what we call the new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape.

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.

The new skills include:

• Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

• Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery


• Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes


• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content


• Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.


• Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities


• Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal


• Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources


• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities


• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information


• Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms."

Microsoft = High Design?

Judging from a review by New York Times' David Pogue, it would appear that Microsoft has realized that visual delight and design pleasure has a place in software design:

"Over all, Office 2007 is much more pleasant to use than previous versions. It seems to be the work of the New Microsoft, a company far more concerned with elegance, beauty and simplicity than the Old Microsoft. Little things like typography, choice of wording and on-screen feedback get more consideration in Office 2007 (and Windows Vista, which goes on sale to consumers the same day)."

Its about time! After years of being envious of Apple's design aesthetic, there might be hope for those of us who are shackled to the PC world.

Saul Bass: New Again

Saul Bass is considered one of the greats in mid-century graphic design. His work has stood the test of time and is coming back around, inspiring new digital designers. At Creative Pro, editor, Terri Stone has posted an animated gif that emulates the opening film titles for Anatomy of a Murder, a 1959 thriller.

She has also posted a link to an archive of Bass' film title sequences. Click through a few (literally, the images are not animated.) The images for Its a Mad Mad Mad World could be tee shirt designs at Threadless or housewares at Urban Outfitters!
image: Saul Bass; Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

creativepro.com - Are You Ready for the Small Web?

Just when we thought that we had it down with web display, eye tracking and layout - a whole new ballpark. sigh.

creativepro.com - Are You Ready for the Small Web?: "
Is this the best way to read The New York Times on a tiny screen?

The digerati talk about Web 2.0 or the Semantic Web. I say, what about the Small Web? What does it mean to make your network available and fully functional to people with 3.5-inch screens as the window? You think it's tiresome waiting for a Flash animation to load now? See what it feels like while you're standing in line at the airport."

image: creative pro

Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006

It must be time for a road trip to DC! Its the National Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt Museum December 8, 2006–July 29, 2007

"The third Triennial brings together the experimental designs and emerging ideas—including animation, new media, and fashion, robotics, architecture, product, medical, and graphic design—at the center of American culture from 2003 to 2006.

Design Life Now features the work of 87 designers and firms who are leaders, innovators, or emerging figures in the world of design. They are practicing across numerous creative fields, including architecture, products, landscapes, interiors, graphics, film, animation, interactive media, fashion, robotics, and more."

I missed the last triennial in 2004, but I am making up for it by reading the book: Inside Design Now with writing by Ellen Lupton, one of my favorite designers, teachers, commenters and critic (all in one!)

Public Art in a Virtual World

Through an article in the NY Times, I am becoming interested in the possibilities of communicating visually via the role-playing game/community Second Life:

"...the Infinite Mind outdoor visual event is available on the sim. It replicates the photography exhibit, Our Walls Bearing Witness – Darfur: Who Will Survive Today?, that was projected onto the walls of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. during the Thanksgiving week in the U.S.

The virtual exhibit was scheduled to be dismantled on December 12, however, in light of the circumstances, it may remain until the interview can be rescheduled. It also includes a video of the real world exhibit installation. Don’t miss out. Take a few minutes and teleport over. This is yet another example of the powerful communications tools Second Life affords.

Halocaust_005 I often refer to '360-degree' content when urging clients and colleagues to rethink information presentation in 3D spaces. By that, I don’t necessarily mean an object which an avatar can walk around, through or physically interact with. I also mean rethinking more powerful content through multimedia...." Public Affairs in Second Life: Crisis in Darfur with Mia Farrow

Creating art (or curating the art to create a statement, such as this photography exhibit) on an intimate level is nice, but the potential for creating public art, at your desk, via your computer, which can communicate to the multitudes seems incredible! No more waiting for exhibition space at the local coffee shop or trying to persuade a gallery owner of the merits of this exhibit. This will make it possible to have multiple exhibits in a short period of time, assuming that one has the content to mount them.

Snowglobe travels

Childlike does not have to mean shallow or cloyingly sweet. Two New York artists have been experimenting with snowglobes, those glass balls filled with water, glitter and a small scene.

Most snowglobes are a cliche, without much surprise and certainly no contemplation. As I child, I loved to stare in them and imagine journeys. Thanks to a pointer from Kim Carney's blog, I have found a whole series of snowglobes by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz that not only have the mystery of my youth, but go way beyond in possibilities to ponder.

"Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, in their recent work entitled Travelers, reconstruct the journey as transition, adventure or mishap and they monumentalize it by means of a snowglobe, a symbol of souvenir and memory, which since the 19th Century, has aimed to capture the beauty of the snowscape and the silhouette of cities in a winter fantasy.

The snowglobe seems to encapsulate in a fictional mockup that quaint, kitsch tale of the sublime experience as a formulation to popularise the intensity of the romantic journey.

Each of these snowglobes has been constructed and designed to contain a snowy tale that is later on photographed. Inside the sphere, life becomes a transition to nowhere, characters appear lost in a hostile environment and vainly try to find a path which has ceased to exist: they are a metaphor for the modern world, constructed as a continuous landscape of spaces of transit and paths, lines of communication or waiting areas....

The work of Martin and Muñoz certainly connects with these proposals of a constructed reality to the extent to which it acts as a mock-up, but on the other hand distances itself from them by tackling a world of fantasy, inscribed on the imaginary and without contact with the credible, putting to one side any bleeding between reality and fiction. Their winter no-lands are spaces which take in the imaginary occurrence of small individual disasters, extolled as monuments of daily desolation

Schubert’s Winterreise isn’t a journey through a landscape, but an itinerary of feelings and passions which lead to an interior which is both shredded and wished for, a decisive journey which leads to one’s own rescue. In this way, the snowglobes in Travelers construct a journey to the interior of fear. The snowglobe is only apparently innocent: it contains black humor, it’s an impossible tale of modern terrors. Travelers who haul their suitcases through the snow, a couple meet and embrace, blessed out, on the tip of an impossible iceberg, a couple who drag a prefabricated cottage through an inhospitable winter or some drivers detained by a soldier amidst a snowfall...." Winter Journey by Santiago B. Olmo

Domino Pressure

I have found it! An engrossing, tomato squashing game of dominoes! One could argue that it increases the players three dimensional manipulation skill. Then again, it could just be regarded as addictive fun!

The point is to figure out the pattern in which the dominoes will fall. You then have to figure out which is the first one in the line. Tap that first one and watch the tomato squish!

Score is tabulated by pieces left standing at the end of the game. Oh, and its a race against time.

Old coke machine

This is an old, rusting coke machine in the woods behind my house. These woods are littered with refuse from the 1940s-60s. It used to disturb me because I thought of it as destroying nature. Now, I see it as a part of living in this area. This is not the North Cascades wilderness. It is a rural area which has been manipulated by man for better or for worse. The rust and slow decay of the cast off appliances are a reminder of the temporal nature of man within nature.

Man versus nature

First test posting

This is a test

• courier.
• arial
• Georgia
• Lucida Grande
• Times
• Trebuchet
• Verdana
• Webdings

Course homepage

• This is a test posting with image.