Laura J. Rinaldi

This doesn’t so much have to do with graphic design but with what people feel they can open a shop with. I live in a small town. People who have money to shop tend to only be here on the weekend, as they work over the hill in Silicon Valley. Those who live on this side of the hill don’t tend to have a large amount of discretionary income. The businesses that survive tend to understand this, so the liquor stores and small markets stay open, for the most part. Those that are trying to sell other things, unfortunately, tend to fold within a year. We have had a skateboard/surf shop, and any number of little boutiques come and go.  Lately people have been opening up either antique clothing or consignment or just plain clothes stores. I’m sure there must be a market for this, but not here. I believe we now have three clothing shops all in a row.

There was one shop that hung on for over a year, that sold mostly young women’s clothing (read teenage girls), that folded over the winter holidays. Today I see that it is being taken over by a soap shop. A soap shop.

While I agree that soap is quite cool to buy, and I have seen vendors selling it at both the farmer’s market as well as outside of their house, (along with home made pies), I don’t think they should open a shop to just soap.

But, of course, no one asks my opinion. Perhaps this shop will survive. Or, it will go the way of the clothing store, the bead store, the other stores that were there before it.

I have heard arguments, of late, that people don’t want to get a netbook, or don’t want to do cloud computing, because that would mean they would have to be linked to the internet, and they didn’t want to have to be, all the time.

How nice, that there are people out there that think they can get their work done without having to be connected, but I can’t. It used to be that having a laptop, when the power went out, was enough, but it isn’t anymore. I need the lap top, but I also need some kind of internet connection, or I can’t get any of my work done. I certainly can’t work on websites, and even my print files still have to be emailed to the client for approval.

Oh, yes, before the internet was big, I did without it. I used the fax, and I made phone calls, and couriers, and fedex, but people won’t put up with that.

And I am well aware of it too. I am always ready to pack up and go to a wifi spot when the power fails. I even went out in a snow storm (well, a storm for these parts) once the roads were open, so that I could get a clients documents to them.

So, don’t let having to have an internet connection stop you from getting a netbook, come up with a better answer than that.

I attended a WordPress meet-up on Tuesday, and while I will probably write about that, at some point, one of the things that came up was how long it took to do the work. The presenter was showing a Wordpress site that he had built over the weekend. After we had picked our collective jaws off the floor we wanted to know how long various bits had taken him. One thing he said, which I thought was striking, was that some of the solutions to problems he had come up with when he went out for his bike ride, or while was in the shower.

Ah yes, the power of not trying and failing over and over again, and taking a break. It is well documented that sometimes we think best when we are away from the problem.

I bring this up, because I was faced with a problem yesterday which I fooled and fooled with, and couldn’t solve. While I lay in bed this morning, my mind came up with a solution, so that by the time I got to the computer and fixed the CSS, that had been giving me fits, it was only a matter of minutes before it was fixed, instead of hours, as I had looked at last night, when I had given up on working on it.

So, my advice of the day, step away from the computer.

Just a quick note. I’ve working on two sites that are heavily CSS, which is good. I need to learn it more. But, I have one client where I must churn out html emails. It is rather like learning to drive a car, and then having to hope on a scooter. Still makes you move, but in different ways. And where as one is not supposed to use tables in CSS, one has to use them in emails that are going out to places like outlook. You can’t even use a style sheet, if you are doing it the proper way.

I guess I’m just saying it makes my brain hurt sometimes.

OK, this might seem like an odd thing to do, find stock photography of people holding iPhones, but it is actually harder than it looks. I guess because the iPhone hasn’t been out all that long, but when I tried to do search on istock, recently, I couldn’t do it by searching for iPhone. I had to search for “mobile Device” and “touch screen” and even then, it came back with those touch screens that still used a stylus. I was surprised. In fact, as far as I could tell, there is only one photographer on iStock that is shooting models holding iPhones, and it is all the same model. Oh well.

So, there might be growth market out there for this, or not. Right now, of course, I need this for one of my clients. Who knows what the next big thing will be, that I will need stock shots of.

I had this same problem, recently, when asked to find a photo of the newest Wacom tablet, which I happened to have, so I just took a picture of it, and loaded it into my document. I may have to do that with the iPhone as well, but I’m hoping I won’t have to.

The is probably not something a lot of people have to do, but thought I should write about it, since I have had to do it twice over the past month, and was frustrated in the process, so here goes.

You can’t.

There, that is the answer. You can’t directly convert InDesign into Word. It doesn’t work that way. However, fear not, you can easily convert it into a PDF, and from a PDF, you can export it into Word. PDFs, if done right, are great for this. Of course, you know you can open PDFs in Illustrator, and you can sort of convert them into HTML (although not very good, at least you can grab the graphics and the text out, so that part is good.

The problem with converting into word, is that things aren’t always set up to do much more with the word. I discovered this the last time I converted this way. I had to spend about another hour moving things around so that the word file was a) something that looked close to what the client’s InDesign file looked like and b) was something they could work with if they wanted to make changes, which was actually the whole reason that this procedure was requested.

OK, I sometimes get my news from Facebook, I admit it, but sometimes it is very helpful, as in this case where I am a fan of Wordpress and they linked to their blog where they wrote about the worm that is infecting old Wordpress sites. This got me updating all my sites, as well as my client’s sites, but what about that site I wrote about recently that is hosted on an AT&T server? Nothing I can do about that. *sigh*.

I know that people create worms and such because they can, and it is good that this open source form of blogging is keeping on top of it, but it is a pity that they are attacking them at all.

I have been experimenting with FireWorks, and Illustrator and PhotoShop to get the iPhone app graphics to look right. As I wrote the other day, I really love what I can do with smart objects.  The thing I really love, which I didn’t mention the other day, was that I have been drawing in Illustrator at the size that the 57×57 icon will be, so that when I paste it into the page of photoshop it is already the right size.

This way, I can see, ahead of time, how the black outlines will be, and all that. I was doing this all in photoshop before, and drawing it at 512, the shrinking it, and being very upset when it didn’t look right, but once having shrunk it, I couldn’t make it larger again. And, of course, with Smart Objects, I can.

It appears, from what I have gleamed, that others are doing it in Illustrator as well, but what I haven’t found out, is how they are porting it into a png file. I had tried just exporting from Illustrator, but that doesn’t work right. When I tried drawing in Fireworks, and shrinking, I found that the outlines were changing too much, and I couldn’t make it larger again once I had made the 57×57.

That is the annoying thing about the icon. It has to look good at 57×57 and at 512×512. There doesn’t seem to be a logic about it, and because this whole Apple iPhone thing is so new, there is nothing in place that are best practices. It is a bit like the early days of desk-top publishing. People were designing things that if you picked it up, it would be all over the place, and hard to adjust. This is another good thing about doing the file with smart objects. If someone else wanted to pick up my work, they could, and would be able to even edit the smart object. Total circle.

I will be very happy when this project is done, and I can point out the app. For now, it is just between me, and the developer. *Sigh*.

I’ve written several times on this, as I do each image, and I have come to the conclusion that my first instinct is probably correct, that it is easiest to draw in illustrator. I have followed blogs all over, saying that Fireworks is best, but I find it kind of hard to work in, for objects, where as Illustrator is what I have always drawn in. Heck, I’ve been drawing with it since it was Illustrator 88.

When I mentioned this to the person I am working on apps with, he asked why? Why draw with that? He could not see the use of it, since he has been drawing with Fireworks and find it to be just the thing to work with, and perhaps, in time, I will to, but here is the thing I like the most. When I copy and paste into Photoshop, I can do so as a smart objects. The cool thing about smart objects is that they can be resized smaller and larger. So I can paste into the 57×57 form, get the icon looking exactly the way I want it (I’ve been doing this by copying in layers, rather than grabbing the whole image from illustrator). Once I have it the way I want it, all I have to do is resize, and because it is done in smart objects, the images resizes too and is clear and crisp.

Now I just have to get my developer to approve the design, and I am all set.

OK, this in entirely unscientific, so take all this with tons of grains of salt, but since I don’t watch much TV (first because I couldn’t get stations where I live, and then later because I fell out of the habit), I do not reach for the remote when I wonder what the heck is going on. I do listen to the radio, but it is the BBC, and so it has to be a major story for it to show up there (although they have reported on things in California, such as earthquakes and stupid things Arnold has said.)

The way I have been getting info of late, is through social media, of all places. It used to be the local lists I was on, but I don’t check those quite as often as I used to, but I do check facebook several times a day, and the other day, I got my news from there. I know people who are local, and one reported on the Brookdale fire, that happened this past week.

Heck, I could smell the smoke, only living about 5 miles from Brookdale, but then I could smell the smoke from the Lockheed fire as well, so it was hard to say where it was coming from. Once alerted, I was able to look at google news to find out a little more, but that was about it, just a little more.

I suppose that means we have come full circle, that we learn things by word of mouth?

P.S. After having written this, my iTouch went off, with an Associated Press breaking news story, about a local murder. So I guess there are even more ways I get information.