laura j. rinaldi

Fun with PDFs or wow, they've improved Acorbat 8

I am used to getting files that I really can't used in the form they are in. This is the life of a freelancer. Often the source files can't be found, or the creative artist is out of town, or some reason that all the client can give me is a pdf. I have learned, over the years, to extract every last drop from every PDF that I have had to work with.

The good news, is that each edition of Acrobat has gotten better. One can now export to html (although the results could not be put up on a page, at least you can have the pieces. But, you can also just grab text, and reflow it (which you could do before, but it wasn't always smooth. And you can click on a graphic, and export it by copying, and pasting into Photoshop. You could always do that by opening in Illustrator, but with so many ways to get things out of PDFs, perhaps I don't need the source files anymore.

And, I have been not asking for them either. If I can, I don't want to use word, or have to wait for a version to be created in Photoshop, if I can get it from the PDF, instead of Word.

I love that a product that used to be just for showing what something looked like, can do so much more. Printers, in fact, ask for Acrobat files instead of the sources files, because they are so much easier to work with.

Wikipedia has a lot on Acrobat. a lot of which i had forgotten, such as that there were others out there trying to be what Acrobat become. After that, a whole industry grew out of ad-ons to Acrobat.

Me, I'm just glad they keep improving it.

I can think of lots of things I would rather do than work on spec

I got a call for a potential client the other day. It was an agency that wanted to know if I would like to work with them to bring in clients. I would look at Websites, and tell them what I think they should change on them, how they should be redesigned, and then they would present this to their potential clients. Oh, it would only take about an hour of my time, and just think of all the work it would bring in.

I was a little taken back. "I see, so you asking me to work on spec?" I said.

"Well, it would bring you work. You would get them to use our services, and we would use you."

"And how would I be compensated?" I asked. 'You get a salary to work on these spec creatives that you aren't charging your client. How would you compensate me?"

She said she would get back to me, and never did.

I related this story to a colleague and said, "Well, if I wasn't busy...maybe..." but she cut me off. "Spec creative? Work for free? There are lots of things I would rather do than work on spec. Even around my house, cleaning my office."

And she is right. There is enough work out there that clients will pay me for, that it doesn't make sense to work for free.  I don't mind giving advice to my own clients, that is different. It is the value added I offer, but somehow, giving advice to non-clients, that I may never get, that aren't even mine, for free?

Yes, I guess there is lots more I could be doing, such as all the work that pays the bills.

A different css file for every browser?

By now, we all know that every browser sees every site slightly differently, just as they see the colors and sometimes even the graphics differently. And, I know from experience and talking to other deisgners, that often if something has to look just so, they do it as a graphic. Words are words, and they will flow and look different, and we have all coem to accept that.

Or so I thought, until I inherited a php site. I usually love working with php sites. Seeing how the designers and programmers have made things work. It is amazing. There are so many cool tricks out there, and I am always learning new things, or new ways to do things.

However, with the recent web site, the client set up a sniffer to detect which browser was looking at the site, and thus could tell the browser which style sheet to use. Now, this is not to say that some browsers, such as IE 4, didn't give grief to css users. Eric Myers writes about it extensively. And Digital Design Blog has links to all that it has gathered on the subject. What is interesting is that most designers just accept that things will not look exactly the way they want, and move on. In fact, in A List Apart, they suggest just building a really good CSS.

My quandary, however, is that the client is currently OK with the site, but wants changes that are caused by weird things in the CSS. Normally, I wouldn't let the client know that there was anything really wrong with their site, and just fix it, but this I had to tell them. I told them I didn't want to break the site to fix it, which I don't. I may have to, however.

Yahool Mail Plus finally updates for Safari

I didn't notice at first. I prefer to view my yahoo mail in Safari as opposed to FireFox, on my Mac, becaue Safari tends to load faster these days. However, I always hate having to switch over to classic Yahoo every time I log in. So, I was surprised to find that it wasn't asking me to make the switch the other day, and it was actually viewable in Safari. How long has this been going on? I only noticed the other week, although in the yahoo blog, apparently it was coming in Feb., but of the top three stories in Google, I don't see one that says the exact date it happened. I know it wasn't working in Feb, or I would have noticed it then.

Be that as it may, I am happy that it has happened. Actually, the only reason I check Yahoo mail at all is to check my junk mail folder. I have everything else sent to my pop account. But, on occasion, yahoo grabs client mail, and won't let go, so I have to slog through junk mail to find what someone has written me. It is far easier to do in the newest Yahoo mail, so that's why it is great that it is being supported in Safari.

Now, if only TypePad would upgrade for Safari, and I would be happy.

WordPress, so many choices for design

Now that my daughter has a blog and several of my clients are asking me to set up their wordrpess blogs, I am amazed to find how many designs there are out there. I guess I find this odd, because coming from the world of website design, as opposed to blog design, I find it odd to use a template. I am used to creating from scratch, instead of taking a foundation and upgrading and mucking about with it.

On the other hand, it is interesting to see what people have come up with. Some are amazingly creative, and I have found a few that I want to take and make my own, so to speak, but it is still odd to work that way, look for a design that is close to what I want and modify it.

I suppose the answer is to design my own, but with so many good designs out there, i find that I would be doing the work that others have done before me, which comes out as a bit of a waste of time.

So, back to the WordPress themes I will go, looking for that perfect blog template to show off my clients house building. Once I have it just as I want it, I'll put up a link. For now, let's just say it hasn't found its right shell.

Fire is not going to be updated, and now Yahoo will make it obsolete

Ever since I was told about the IM client, Fire, for the Mac, I have been using it. Not all my clients and friends are on Yahoo. Some are on MSN, some are on AIM, and although I even have some on Google and Skype, this was good enough, as it was a catchall for most of them.

And I knew Fire wasn't going to updated. They stopped supporting in last year.I have tried to use Adium, the heir apparent, but don't like it as much, so I figured I would just stick it out, and stay with what I had.

But Yahoo has other ideas. I am now getting alerts that Yahoo IM, version 5.6 will no longer be supported, as of April 2.  What a pain.

So, now I guess, since Yahoo is where most of my contacts are, I'll be forced to move over to Adium. There really isn't anything wrong with Adium, other than, for some reason, it doesn't log into my AIM account. I just hate the idea of having to have three or for IM windows open, because one client does almost all.

At least I don't have to have several phones... wait, I do.

The difference between WordPress.org and .com

I had a client decide to do a new blog, recently, and she chose to put it up on WordPress.com. WorldPress.com has a free blog service. It is quite good actually. It allows you to do stats, it allows you to import your own header. It is actually quite robust for a free blog service, and that is what I used to set up my daughter's site, which I mentioned the other day.

But, I was spoiled, when I went in to format this new site, because the time before, I had been able to actually design, or modify the look and feel more, and I couldn't. We both realized, at about the same time, that the last time she had used WordPress.org through HostMySite.

And once we realized that, I was able to make all the modifications I had been able to before. WordPress's free service is fine, but wow, there is so much more with the org version. There is a vast amount of templates to choose from, and once you have installed a template, you can make modifications to the css, and to the header, and all sorts of things.

In the past, I have pointed people to typepad, because, well typepad offers all the cool features too, but WordPress has many more people working on the templates, and you can fiddle around so much. Good thing that they are made by the same company, or I would feel conflicted about suggesting one over the other.

Problems with Yahoo Mail

I have never had problems with Yahoo mail. I have been using it as a business address for years now, simply because it is reliable, and doesn't fail. I love how quick it is. I love that it is both POP and web based. I love that it can move large files.

But last week, I was not in love with it. I would send out messages, and my clients would not receive them for hours, sometimes days later. They would call, to make sure I had gotten the message, and done the job. I would send and send, and nothing would happen. I had to, gasp, resort to using my old email address that has been so stolen that I get bounced mail from Russia. I hate to use it, but I had to.

After what I guess was only a week, I finally heard from Yahoo. Of course, they made it sound like a feature. As though they were doing me a favor updating the servers. But, I wish they had noticed it sooner, and fixed it sooner.

Recently, we saw an unexpected increase in traffic through the
servers dedicated to sending Yahoo! Mail Plus POP/SMTP messages. As a
result, some users have experienced varying delays in the delivery of
Yahoo! Mail messages sent via external email clients. We understand
that this has been frustrating, and sincerely apologize for the
inconvenience.

Then then made me go off and change my POP settings.

Of course, only people who were sending from their email client were affected, like me. It would have been nice if the3y had sent a letter when it first happened, just a letter to let us know to use the web based version. That would have been fine.

It's amazing how much I rely on email these days, but then we all do. It used to be more phone calls, but now it is mostly email. I am amazed to actually talk to people some days.  Good thing I either have my clients phone numbers or IM accounts, or I would never have been able to get ahold of them, to know what was going on, and fix it.

Before InDesign, or how I used to design newsletters and such

I feel like one of those old guys that yells for the kids to get off his lawn. I have been in the graphic design business for over 20 years, and watching that video of Illustrator, from 1987, brought back other memories. One of those memories was how I used to design newsletter, before PageMaker came out.

PageMaker was the first program most people remember being used for design layout, but before I got ahold of that program, back in 1986, I was designing in MacDraw. Not the best way to do it, but it worked. I was doing newsletters for the local offices of Goodwill Industries, down in L.A. I was fresh out of college, being paid very little, using my own computer, even though I was a full-time employee. I was going to Mac user meetings, and that was how I found out about PageMaker, and started using it.  With that knowledge, as well as the knowledge of Illustrator, as I said last week, I was able to get my first job with an ad agency.

I used PageMaker for quite some time, until about 1989, or so, when I tried Quark Xpress, and was sold on it. It was a bit of a pain to convert all the ads over, but to me, it made so much more sense. PageMaker had gotten larger, and bulkier. The files we were saving were huge. Quark was so much lighter. It didn't save all the files, including graphics, in the program, so it was easier to move around, which was important, in the pre-internet world, where we had Ethernet, and zip drives.

I, and the rest of the people I worked with, continued to use Quark until OS X came out, on the Mac. At that point, it became a little trickier, and that is when I switched to InDesign. I have been using it ever since.  Of course, after all those years with Quark, I had to invest in "InDesign for Quark Users" but after teaching myself, I have only used Quark when forced to.

What is interesting, is how so many designer work in lock-step with each other, each using, for the most part, similar programs, even though there are usually at least two choices. I wonder why this is? Is it sort of like primaries, or beta vs. vhs?

Who knows?

My daughter is starting her own blog

Have I said how much I love WordPress? Although I like typepad as well, because of course, I do use it, sometimes I feel WordPress is just better form. And finally, after about six months of my daughter saying she wanted her own blog, I thought, heck, why not set her up on a free WordPress site, so I did.

She had had a blog in mind, shut up and dance, for quite some time. She had drawn it out, on paper, and knew what she wanted, but just hadn't figured out how to put it all together. She knew she wanted to link to other blogs she liked, as well as feature some of her comics. She especially liked some of the people blogging out there, showing off their cartoons, such as Julia Wertz's Fart Party.

So, will she keep it up? Good question. There was a time, when I first started this blog, that I wrote in it every day, then stopped for almost a year. I only started back again, because I realized that if I was going to design blogs for others, and promote them, I had to actually keep mine up to date. And I have, more or less, ever since.

My daughter thinks she will, because she wants to get her art out there, so we shall see.

In the meantime, I welcome her  to the world of blogging.