Well Uni is over now for me (ceremony pending) and life out of the city is a lot quieter.

I've decided to keep busy with a few events coming up this year, two rails specific and one on more general web design topics:

Rails Camp UK:

FOWD Tour - Leeds:

Take a look, there may be something you fancy.

I'm currently in the process of setting up a Rails 2.3 stack from scratch, and a few things have changed since the last couple of projects I worked on were tooled up.

One thing which has certainly changed for better is binding rspec, ZenTest and Growl together, previously I posted on some work-arounds for missing messages, adding images, and various other bits ad-hoc. This functionality is now all produced by installing the autotest-growl gem which may also be found on github. Take a look at the readme.rdoc

Of interest to me in particular were changes to ~/.autotest

Mine was quite something previously,

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Symlink this to ~/.autotest
require 'autotest/redgreen'
require 'autotest/fsevent'

AUTOTEST_IMAGE_PATH = File.dirname(File.symlink?(__FILE__) ? File.readlink(__FILE__) : File.expand_path(__FILE__))

module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, stick=""
    system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img.inspect} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title.inspect} #{stick}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |autotest|
    filtered = autotest.results.grep(/\d+\s.*examples?/)
    output = filtered.empty? ? "" : filtered.last.slice(/(\d+)\s.*examples?,\s(\d+)\s.*failures?(?:,\s(\d+)\s.*pending)?/)
    if output =~ /[1-9]\sfailures?/
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "#{AUTOTEST_IMAGE_PATH}/fail.jpg"
    elsif output =~ /pending/
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "#{AUTOTEST_IMAGE_PATH}/pending.jpg"
    else
      growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "#{AUTOTEST_IMAGE_PATH}/ok.jpg"
    end
  end
end

Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |autotest|
  %w{.git .svn .hg .DS_Store ._* vendor}.each {|exception| autotest.add_exception(exception) }
  false

now replaced with

require 'autotest/growl'
require 'autotest/fsevent' #osx specific file changed event notification
Autotest::Growl::show_modified_files = true #which changes prompted the autospec run
Autotest::Growl::remote_notification = true #networked growl, to work-around disappearing notifications
Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at|
  %w{.git .svn .hg .DS_Store ._* log}.each {|exception|at.add_exception(exception)}
end

The FSEvent gem is well worth a look if you develop on OSX 10.5 (Leopard), it switches autotest from polling your hard drive (i.e. thrashing) to working with the OS's event notification system. Design patterns strike again!

With these updates I gave an old project a spin to see what would happen, and voila, the specs ran as they should, coloured and all.

A particular error I was receiving before doing this update was

script/autospec 
(Not running features.  To run features in autotest, set AUTOFEATURE=true.)
(Not running features.  To run features in autotest, set AUTOFEATURE=true.)
loading autotest/rails_rspec
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- autotest/redgreen (MissingSourceFile)
    from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
  …
    from /usr/bin/autotest:19:in `load'
    from /usr/bin/autotest:19
Unable to find autotest.  Please install ZenTest or fix your PATH

The culprit being redgreen, which can be uninstalled when using the new ZenTest.

Well, I may like to dabble in the occasional Separated at Birth series, but Totally Looks Like has some particularly incredible juxtapositions:

Totally Looks Like nails the uncanny resemblance between Quentin Tarantino & Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley

Alas, poor Quentin. It’s been hard to take him seriously for a long time now, but this may be the final nail in the coffin.

Could humans at any point in history, given the right information, construct an electronic communication network? To test this hypothesis, Substitute Materials will attempt to build a functional electric battery and telegraph switch from materials found in the wilderness, using no modern tools except information from the internet. The telegraph will be a first step towards an ahistorical internet.

What the author doesn’t say is that he’s doing this in the wilderness while wearing a business suit.

And that he couldn’t find any flint to make a good ax—he had to order it from the Internet.

I foresee much time spent reading this site.

We’ve recently completed (and had printed) a couple of new A4-sized posters for the University of Sheffield, one advertising a series of lectures by the renowned philosopher Stephen Stich & the other promoting an MPhil degree in Political Theory.

Before we continue, you may wonder: why A4? Isn’t that small for a poster? It is, but not in the context of a university department bulletin board with lots of competing notices. If your poster is too large, it may not even be placed on the board; and even if it is, a larger poster will soon be covered up by other notices. So an A4-sized poster is about as large as you can safely make it.

Judging from this use-case, you might also conclude that creating a striking effect for your poster would be crucial: one that makes your notice stand out from the dozens of other notices. And you’d be right.

Stich Lecture Series

This was a rush job: I had 24 hours to go through the process of commission, design approval & printing. What’s worse, I was suffering through the worst flu I’ve ever experienced. What’s worst is that I was handed a huge wodge of text & only two source images. Luckily one image was large enough that it was feasible to expand it further to print quality.

With such a timeframe & under those conditions, you are subject to severe constraints. Constraints are sometimes wonderful & this was one of those times: it helps guide you quickly down the path towards a decent design.

Some of the constraints were posed by the photo. It was black & white and couldn’t be expanded further without risking pixellation. Also, the picture wasn’t fully optimal because a critical element—the top of Steve’s head— was cut off. So immediately we know that the poster should be black & white (to match the picture), it shouldn’t rely too much upon the picture to give it visual interest (because it was small) & that we were going to have to distract the eye from the missing top of Steve’s head.

When you’ve got a lot of text and your photo is small & suboptimal and you’re limited to black & white, then you’ve got to rely upon typography & stark contrast to attract the viewer’s attention. Black text on white is too common: reversing this will catch the eye. Using chunky typography, I covered the top of Steve’s head with his surname & used the look on his face to draw the viewer’s eye towards the explanation for lecture series.

The result is pretty good, I think, and certainly eye-catching, but it’s a little conventional. Had I more time, I would have made that chunky typography a lot chunkier: it would have taken up about half of the poster. But time was a real constraint here.

MPhil Poster

The second poster here is for the promotion of a degree offered jointly by the departments of philosophy & politics. We were to employ a really striking image that’s somehow relevant to the subject. My initial to represent the result of a broken political process: images ranging from protests, revolution, police in riot gear, bombed-out cities, etc. I also immediately thought of Orwell’s memorable line from 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever”.

Any of these images would certainly contribute to a striking poster, but the approach was ultimately rejected as inherently faulty. I might have put out an unintentionally negative message: “Join us & together we’ll destroy the world”. So a re-think was definitely in order!

I came across an intriguing image of anti-Communist graffito on iStockphoto, one that still cleaved to my original idea of portraying a broken political process, but the action portrayed here was more positive. Here, the notion is of casting aside what didn’t work as the initial part of the transition to something that did. And of course, what do you need to make that transition successful? Why, lots of people with MPhils in political theory, obviously!

To keep to the conceit that the poster was itself political graffito, I opted to place the title in a hand-drawn stencil typeface. And finally, the actual content of the poster was placed on a semi-transparent bed.

By the way, if you’re a graphic designer in the Sheffield area & need digital printing done quickly, consider ASAP Digital, who printed both posters. Their quality is excellent & their turnaround time is fantastic.

There are moments when I’m really happy not to live in the US any longer. This is one of them, because I simply know that if I lived & worked there, I’d have to make an eagle-based logo for a consulting company. Because, as I’m sure you’ve twigged, they’re keen-eyed consultants who know what’s what.

And not because they’re nearly extinct.

Using innovative typography on websites is close to my heart. But its development has been sluggish at best, due in part to the virtually non-existent actions of font foundries. Their inaction is in part understandable: the licensing issues aren’t easy & naturally enough foundries don’t want to give up being paid for what they do, because if a font is on a website, chances are that you can rip it off. Even if you use something like Cufon, which is a pretty cool-looking, Javascript-based encoded siFR alternative, you’re likely to be able to re-engineer the font.

It’s tempting to view font foundries—like Adobe—as big, faceless monolithic corporations who have their own profits in mind, not the use of their fonts in innovative ways. But the truth is that they’re usually quite small & by ripping them off you’re hurting “the little guy”. So how do you resolve this issue? Well, in an interesting interview between Jeffrey Zeldman & the Font Bureau’s David Berlow, Berlow suggests creating a new table for fonts which defines permissions for online usage. On the face of it, this sounds like a decent idea, but the problem is it’s an idea that’s come far, far too late: that particular horse has bolted. Foundries should have closed that gate back in, oh, 1990.

Which is where Dive Into Mark’s foundry screed comes in. Unlike many screeds, it’s really worth reading because he makes very cogent, stark points. For one, Berman’s permissions table suggestion would break every font-consuming application on every platform on every computer on Earth. Mark also points to the future:

Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody. I see you’ve decided that it won’t be you. Well, have fun shuffling your little bits of metal around. The rest of us will be over here, using the only fonts we’re allowed to use: Everything But Yours.

Mark’s point is really important: by defining some licensing in the most boneheaded manner possible (really simple example: not allowing some fonts be embeded in PDFs), type foundries have shot themselves in the foot. Unless they change—and fast—they’re going to be left behind.

Here we see some really close (and obvious) parallels with the machinations of the music industry, the movie industry & even the newspaper industry. All of these “content owners” (and isn’t that a generic expression) are so paranoid about “giving away” their work that they’re earning the enmity of anyone who comes into contact with them. And like the music, movie & newspaper industries, I suspect that type foundries are going to see their business models change dramatically—and they’ll not have had the initiative to have a hand in that change.

Like books? Like photography? Like art? Let’s mix all three of them. Thomas Allen’s book art photography is a wonderful series where Tom takes different pulpy book covers & with some judicious slicing makes a fantastic new work out of it.

Thomas Allen’s “Fury” (2006)

Truly fantastic stuff.

Last week, the greatest client in the world & I travelled to London to the Internet World exhibition. Ian asked me about whether it was worth it. Let me try to paint a picture for you:

Imagine a world where you’re selling digital services. Purely digital services—no hands-on gadgets or anything. Now imagine that to sell digital services, which of necessity work over the Internet, you’ve decided that, instead of [just] pitching on the Internet, you’ll go to an exhibition hall. Ignore the fact that this seems pointless. How do you get people to come to your stall?

• No nonsense: Big flat computer screen & a few sweaty nerds with the stink of doom clinging to them;
• Silly gimmicks: Ice cream, smoothies, chocolate, all for the high, high cost of enduring a sales pitch;
• Proximity to Sensuality: Scantily-clad women! Talking to you! Example: dancing girls were dancing, unenthusiastically shouting “Wooo!” whilst in midriff shirts reading “The firewall is dead. Long live the firewall”

Now imagine an exhibition where there are talks given in different theatres. There are six overarching subjects—each with incoherently-assembled themes like “Web 2.0, Social Networking, Usability, Design & Build Theatre ”—and you only design five icons for them:

Couldn’t you spring for a sixth icon? You have no idea how many problems this caused.

The presenters of these seminars were given 25 minutes to talk (like “How we redesigned Virgin for SEO”), but they all—to a man—decided not to give away any of their secrets. Fair enough, but reflect that these people genuinely thought this was somehow going to magically turn into a selling opportunity, simply by stating claims backed with little substantiation, just assertions.

Now imagine a group of people telling you that the greatest way to sell services is online, but decide to do it in a grey hall, having paid thousands to rent their stalls & assemble their marketing junk, as people (including yours truly) shuffle listlessly about.

Finally, the easy part: imagine that, after having walked around for hours & listened to God knows how many awful (truly, truly awful) marketing sessions, you have used your 3" x 1.5" notebook to fill up only 2 pages’ worth of interesting information, because that’s all it was really worth.

So, yeah, it was teh suck.

Unfortunately I’m currently nursing a particularly nasty flu right now, but I couldn’t let the day pass without comment. As of today, Argument from Design is ten years old. Let the confetti fly! And before I say anything else, I want to say a big thank-you to all our clients over the years: we literally couldn’t have done it without you.

Headlong

I didn’t know what I was getting into: that was part of the fun. I was an “accidental entrepreneur”.

After getting my second master’a degree, I worked for a very large organisation—a university. Large organisations can provide a lot of security, but—for me, at any rate—I find them frustrating for their inability to move quickly. Anything I wanted to do had to go through a number of committees, the decision-making process took a year & in the end the answer would be “no”. Plus, I was the lone arty guy in a department full of techies. I often felt like the odd-man-out.

So I decided to leave. Figuring that a small organisation would be more nimble than a large one, I started working for a local graphic design firm. But while small may equal nimble, small doesn’t necessary equal good & it doesn’t necessarily equal a good fit. Whereas in my last job I was the arty guy in a sea of techies, I was now the tech guy in a…well, pond… of arty types. That wasn’t a great feeling (I’m always misunderstood!), but what was awful was the eventual realisation that the owners didn’t have a clue how to sell websites to their clientèle— and that moreover, I couldn’t go out to help sell the new service. I found myself doing more & more print work in Quark XPress & (shudder) FrameMaker. And I learned a lot about how not to run a business. Whilst a small company can be more nimble, it can quickly manoeuvre itself into the ground.

I spent a month or so moonlighting, building up some work & laying the ground so I could start immediately: building a website & portfolio of my own immediately available upon hanging out my shingle. I planned to leave the design firm in June, but the company, not having sold any websites in a year (in 1999, mind you—the height of the dot-com bubble!) let me go.

So that was it. I was off—off on my own. I was frightened & oh my God did I make mistakes. But they were my mistakes. That was truly liberating.

The Value of the Ever-Changing Landscape

Web development is a fantastic business—if you like constantly learning new things. That’s one of its greatest attractions to me, along with the potentially close association of art & technology. And we’re only now entering into a golden age, with a combination of powerful tools for layout (like CSS), interactivity (like Javascript libraries) & back-end development (thanks to clean, clever frameworks like Ruby on Rails). But of course it won’t stop there. All these things will be refined & engender new tools.

There’s something humbling—and exhilarating—about a field that changes so much year upon year. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well, I do love logo design, but this one is unfortunate on so many levels. From the Shipment of Fail:

1973 Logo: The Catholic Church’s Archdiocese Youth Commission

How times have changed! Any priest holding this logo today would face some an angry throng of pitchfork-bearing laity.

Last week, there was an interesting article in the New Yorker that was definitely a worthwhile read in troubling times. To summarise it, the more you keep up your investment in advertising and research & development, the more likely you will reap massive rewards. Study after study cited in the article mentions how companies that increased their investment during recessions saw precipitous growth, while competitors who scaled back their costs would remain at the bottom of the pile.

A prime example is Kellogg & its main competitor, Post. During the Great Depression, Post scaled back its investment, whilst Kellogg doubled its advertising. Kellogg has dominated the breakfast cereal market to this day. Whilst one might read this example as an outlier—and the length of Kellogg’s dominance supports this—there’s a lot of evidence to support the general claim. Companies who increased investment during the 1981–82 recession grew shockingly fast during the next several years; companies that reduced spending grew sluggishly in the same period. And during the 1990–91 recession, twice as many companies leapt from the bottom of their industries to the top as did during calmer economic times; and those at the bottom of their industries had reduced spending.

Increasing your investment doesn’t come without risks, however: you can gamble & lose—big. It’s not completely irrational to scale back your costs in a thoroughly uncertain atmosphere. But if you do dare to increase your investment, you may well transform your company.

So, uhm, why not give us a call & we’ll see what we can do for your website? :)

I am fucking sick of blog spam.

Are HDR images the new velvet paintings?

The DNS Problem

If you own an Apple Airport device or Timecapsule you may have come across the issue of it (unlike similar products from DLink and other specialists) not having an inbuilt DNS service hooked up to the DHCP requests (i.e. being able to resolve local computer names to lan ips the same way you might resolve a website to an ip address, by DNS).

This annoyed me greatly yesterday. Today Ray reminded me of Bonjour, Zeroconf, whatever you want to call it. This tech reminds me of the old windows networking protocol. It may be completely different, but it's amusing to see an abhorred concept coming back again.

Problems have solutions you know

Things worked one way out of the box (8.10), I was able to use ssh hostname.local from Ubuntu to my Mac right off. This is nice as with a default and a public key exchange this is a seamless remote login process.

The other way was not working, but not far out of reach. On my install avahi-demon was already present with the zeroconf plugin, both configured and running, it just didn't have anything to shout about.

This forum thread is recent and works, which is more than can be said for the Ubuntu documentation page for this particular subject.

A template ssh broadcast file is provided with the avahi install. Template so far as you can just copy-paste it into position and ssh will start being broadcast on the network.

sudo cp /usr/share/doc/avahi-daemon/examples/ssh.service /etc/avahi/services

sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

Service Browsing Apps

iStumbler comes with a Bonjour plugin, so you can use it to monitor what's available on your network visually.

For Gnome there is an application "Service Discovery Applet" available via Synaptic (which you can then add by right clicking the menu bar/panel, add, browse down to zeroconf discovery).