That was my response to a message I received through Facebook this morning. It read:

“is this woodys son? im 28 yrs old i live in england, u might never get to read this but i listen to woody everyday man, he is the one person that did his thing without a second thought! and inspires me everyday when i look at his ‘59 bound for glory record hanging on my wall, that picture of him on the front cover looking faded with age and woodys face with a look total determination! i need to get some of your music, ive heard a couple of your songs and you carry it in the blood! i do hiphop and i made a dedication to woody im gona have to send it to you oneday if this is the arlo guthrie?? peace and blessings….”thats about the biggest thing that man has ever done!!”

This bloke’s musical interests, as copied and pasted directly from his Facebook profile, are:

Underground Rap Man, Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, John Lennon, Julian Lennon, “GEORGE HARRISON”, Arlo Guthrie, Arlo and Woody Guthrie, Woody and Arlo Guthrie, And Arlo Guthrie, The Best of Arlo Guthrie, Coming Into Los Angeles by Arlo Guthrie, Coming Into Los Angeles by Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant Massacre – Arlo Guthrie, Last To Leave by Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant Massacre by Arlo Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie/ Amazing Grace, Arlo Guthrie

So this guy is clearly a huge fan of Arlo Guthrie.

Here’s a recent photo of THE Arlo Guthrie:

And here’s my current profile photo on Facebook, which is public:

I mean, the resemblance is frightening. I can see why he got so confused.

Dear Oliver:

By the time you are able to read this, you may actually be sick of hearing me say that the day you were born was the happiest day of my life. On March 21, 2010, your mother’s water broke at 6 am, and at 7:31 pm that night, you turned our marriage into a family. You may look completely different now, but at the time, you looked exactly like me when I was born, which is to say you look exactly like your Grandaddy Dave, my father.

Your mother is the strongest woman you will ever know, and don’t you forget it! I always knew that your mother is amazing and capable of doing damn near anything; I had no idea what that really meant until you were born. The work to push you out, the sleepless nights keeping you fed—you really are lucky that she is your mom.

And I’d like to think that you’re lucky to have me as a dad. I was scared silly that you were coming into my life. In these past six weeks, you’ve shown me that, yeah, I was right to be scared. Looking back on your 39 weeks of gestation, I realize that not being scared would have made me less able to change your diapers, to rock you to sleep and to hold you — to love you. You’ll understand one day.

Your mother and I love you more than ourselves. That’s not to say we won’t make mistakes. We will both make poor choices, and in some cases, our reflexes will get the best of us. That doesn’t mean we don’t love you. On the contrary; it simply means we’re humans. Humans that love you unconditionally.

I’m not going to use this blog post — will you even know what a “blog post” is? — to try and impart some wisdom about life. When you have questions, we will answer them. When you make decisions about the world, we’ll support you. We want to create a world for you where you feel safe to make your own wisdom. We’ll teach you to treat others with respect, and that’s all we can ask of ourselves now.

But I will use this opportunity to tell you about the first gift I bought you. Once we found out that you would be a boy, I bought you a domain name. OliverGuthrie.com is yours and no one can take it away from you. (Unless you forget to pay for it after your 18th birthday — but will you even know what a “domain name” is in 18 years?) Until then, I hope you won’t mind that your mother and I are borrowing your domain name to post photos of you. You’re a good looking kid; we don’t want to be selfish with those good looks.

I know you’re only six weeks old, but you’ve done more to change my life than anything else has. I’ve told anyone willing to listen that life seems easier now, an odd thing to say with an infant in the house in need of constant attention, certainly. Yet, every decision I make from now on will affect your life, not just my own. Having that kind of responsibility makes me feel humble. Everything is about you now, and to me, that just seems easier than the alternative.

I love you, and your mother loves you. And if this internet-thing is still around in 15 years, I apologize that this blog post will embarass you in high school.

Good luck and Godspeed,
Dad

Since making my grid calculator a year ago, I’ve foregone using inches entirely and have left my InDesign rulers set to points. As was put to me by someone on Twitter (whose tweet I can’t seem to find found it), using points versus inches is the difference between using a scalpel and using an axe.

As a consequence of using points, I found myself looking at kerning and leading in far more minute detail. Perhaps it’s because the units of measure are now the same with my rulers or because I’m obsessing now with maintaining vertical rhythm on my baseline grid more than ever. Next thing I knew, I was constantly typing numbers into palettes to make precise changes to my type instead of just using keyboard shortcuts. Cumulatively a huge waste of time and an annoyance that took me out of that proverbial zone.

Thus, I made a change to my InDesign settings that have save me tons of time and gained me a lot more precision in my work. If you’re a designer that obsesses about your typography*, you should consider making these changes, too.

In preferences—InDesign→Preferences for Mac users; I don’t know (or care) where it is on Windows—select “Units and Increments.” If you haven’t changed anything, it looks like this:

I now have that palette set to this:

For example, if you want your body copy to be a smidgeon larger, you’ll hit Command-> to increase its size. By default, that text jumps 2 points. With these settings, it only nudges up ¼ point. The difference is dramatic:

Another example. Let’s say you have a widow. If you highlight your copy and hit Command-Option-←, your tracking becomes -20/1000 of an em, and your paragraph will look squished. However, -5/1000 could eliminate that widow with hardly any perceptible change:

By changing your increments, you can quickly make precise adjustments, the kind that give your piece that finish and refinement that good designers demand. Thus: a scalpel, not an axe.

To make this your default behavior, make the change while you have no documents open; otherwise, the change will only apply to your open document.

* And if you are a graphic designer that does not obsess about typography, consider a different profession.

Yet another Creative Suite update. Yet another $600 Adobe will try to extort out of us. After reviewing the new features for the applications I actually use and sitting through the online launch event, here are some reactions. This is entirely based on my experience and opinions. I'm not a video editor (though I do need After Effects every once in a while for small projects) so I won't be touching on any of that. I'm sticking with the package I own: Design Premium. If you agree or disagree, well, that's what the comments are for. Have at it.

InDesign CS5

I'll start with the application I use the most, given that 90% of my job is spent doing page layout.

Flash Development

The biggest new feature of CS5 is the integration of Flash creation across every application. At first, my eyes rolled. Quark has had this feature for awhile, and it seemed stupid for them, too. However, after further consideration, I actually have a need for this feature.

You see, I have this oddity: I develop a lot of website designs in InDesign by setting my rulers to points (1pt = 1px), setting my RGB color to sRGB, and using an Applescript I wrote that exports an InDesign file to a layered Photoshop file in an incredibly silly and roundabout way. I know, it's crazy, but InDesign is my Fireworks. With the addition of Flash development, I can turn my InDesign files immediately into prototypes. I'm surprised to find myself looking forward to this feature.

However, why can't InDesign create actual web graphics? Much of designing for the web is an exercise in typography. What is Adobe's typography tool? InDesign. With more web designers using grids for their designs, it seems that a logical extension for InDesign would be to build in some tools for web design into InDesign, such as image slicing and Save for Web, exporting my style sheet as a CSS file or at the very least including a native way to create a layered Photoshop file from InDesign. Adobe is touting enhanced ePub exporting, and an ePub file is simply an XHTML document, so why not HTML, too? If Adobe wants to put the tools for web design into the hands of print designers, InDesign is a perfect place to do it. (It would also give Adobe a chance to up-sell to Dreamweaver to turn those files into dynamic sites.)

Update: As one of the commenters pointed out, InDesign has an “Export to Dreamweaver” tool, which does turn your style sheet into CSS. If you’ve tried to use it, you’ll know that the tool does not let you design a website; it’s meant more for taking a story you’ve set in InDesign, like a magazine article, and move it to Dreamweaver for a web designer to prep for online. It does not let you actually design a website. What I’m suggesting is the robustness of the Flash exporting capability but for HTML.

One question, though: If I can export an InDesign document to Flash Professional, why can't I export it to Flash Catalyst? Catalyst is in every version of Creative Suite, and yet one of their biggest content creation applications can't leverage it? Very odd.

Also…

• Multiple page sizes in one document is awesome and sorely needed.
• Making the layers palette more like Illustrator's is brilliant.
• Making multiple columns a paragraph style is something I've wanted since I stopped using PageMaker.
• Will tracking text changes sync with the track changes in Microsoft Word documents?
• Can I preview how an ePub file will look on devices akin to how Save for Web and Devices works in Photoshop and Illustrator?
• I'm jealous of QuarkXPress 8's Grid Styles feature; I'm surprised InDesign does not have a similar feature. (At least my grid calculator still has some life in it.)

Photoshop CS5

To laymen, Photoshop is graphic design. When someone who isn't a designer thinks of a graphic design tool, it's usually Photoshop. Thus, Adobe's marketing department continues to demand more features be shoehorned into Photoshop to drive sales.

In this release's case, it's the 3D tools.

Attempting to turn Photoshop into a 3D application akin to 3D Studio Max or Cinema 4D seems just stupid to me. I've tried to use CS4's 3D tools, and they really stink. Hopefully, they are improved in CS5, but I don't think that matters. Developing 3D assets is a very particular skill that requires a considerable toolbox and a specific workflow. Adobe could create their own 3D application, something simpler to use—something between Google SketchUp and Cinema 4D would be hot—and offering the power of placing native 3D files into all Adobe apps. Instead, we get the already overwhelming Photoshop interface with 3D tools essentially slapped on.

The awkwardly named Repoussé feature (Was "Extrude" already trademarked or something?) seems akin to WordArt in Microsoft Office, but I'll have to use it to be sure.

And why is that feature only in Photoshop and not Illustrator? I might want those elements as vectors, not pixels.

To be fair, Photoshop CS5 has some truly magical features. Content-aware fill and the new refine edge tool, if they work as advertised, will change my life. I think the Puppet Warp tool should have gotten a different name, as it will clearly have uses beyond just manipulating limbs and appendages. The new brush tools seem far more accessible than those in Corel Painter. I look forward to all of those tools.

Nevertheless, we all agree that Photoshop is just way too gigantic now. It's time to break it up into some smaller, more manageable pieces.

Illustrator CS5

As I said above, Repoussé should also be an Illustrator feature. The 3D tool in Illustrator is neat—I've used it for a lot of artwork, and it's fun to experiment with. However, those objects can't be used like Photoshop 3D layers, i.e., manipulating those 3D attributes in an After Effects project. It's another reason why Adobe should just bite the bullet and move all of these features into their own 3D application.

(It's worth noting, to be clear, that Adobe used to have a dedicated 3D application: Adobe Dimensions. It was discontinued and became the 3D tool in Illustrator.)

For the most part, Illustrator CS5 looks awesome, the one app that I'd be very excited to upgrade. The interactive stroke widths, the artboards panel—a huge improvement to CS4's best new feature, multiple artboards—and the pixel grid will save me tons of time.

Dreamweaver CS5

I still don't know any serious web developers who are writing code in Dreamweaver. When text editors like TextMate or streamlined IDEs like Coda are so easily extensible and malleable, and with so many new web resources coming out so rapidly (How many updates to jQuery and Rails have there been since Dreamweaver CS4 came out?), Dreamweaver still just seems like a relic of the late 90s web boom.

With that said, the new features in Dreamweaver actually make it compelling, especially the integration with CMS applications like WordPress and the BrowserLab feature. If I purchase this upgrade, Dreamweaver CS5 may deserve a second look.

By the way, why isn't the BrowserLab feature built in to Dreamweaver instead acting as a separate application?

Fireworks CS5

The last time I used Fireworks, it was a Macromedia product. About two months ago, after reading the Hicksdesign article about Fireworks, I fired it up for a new web project, just to take it for a spin. I gave up quickly; it's a buggy piece of crap. It also had a steep learning curve for me because it is still so different than all of the other Adobe applications. Many designers swear by it, and I can truly see the appeal. It looks like Fireworks is still Adobe's stepchild, though, given that the only new features advertised are "performance enhancements" and things it should have always had, like Adobe Swatch Exchange support and "pixel-precise rendering." Too bad. There's a huge opportunity for another company to sweep in and take a lot of marketshare.

Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst CS5

I hate Flash. I'm a huge fan of the Click to Flash plug-in for Safari. Sadly, that doesn't mean I don't need Flash. Like Fireworks, I opened Flash Professional for the first time recently in years. So much had changed that I couldn't finish the relatively simple thing I needed to do. Flash Professional has become such a giant bear that a simpler application development tool was definitely needed. For small microsites (I hate that word), interactive presentations and banner ads, Catalyst could be useful. We'll see how easy it is in actual use, but I don't know enough to pass judgement.

The Really Nerdy Stuff

There are two very nerdy improvements that I'm excited about.

• The big news is 64-bit support for Mac users; Windows users already had it. As of this writing, I'm not sure if the entire suite is now 64-bit, but Photoshop is. Enormous performance improvements are in store now that Photoshop can use all of your RAM, not just 3GB of it. Update: According to Photoshop’s Product Manager, support for 64-bit is only in Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro. Another Update: Illustrator CS5 does have increased RAM limits, but not much.
• Also big news is the use of Adobe AIR for CS extensions. I've been working on an InDesign extension, but creating a UI for it has been difficult. It meant using Adobe's kludgy ScriptUI or Flash. Now, because AIR is WebKit based, I can build the UI with just HTML. Odd that Adobe would embrace something more open than Flash, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.

So… is it worth it?

Every 18 months, Adobe wants several hundred dollars from us. It's how they keep bringing new features to us. Sometimes, those new features are ridiculous. Sometimes, they pay off in ways that we never expected. No matter what, we end up having to pay for the upgrade because we get left behind or can't open files we receive from other designers. And given that Adobe has a near monopoly now on some tools, we're left with little choice.

The pricing is definitely high. Final Cut Studio is $999, $299 to upgrade. Apple's entire video suite is cheaper to upgrade than just Photoshop Extended ($349 to upgrade). Because of their stranglehold on the design industry, we're stuck paying it. (Yes, I know, Apple subsidizes the cost of their software by selling the machines required to run their software. Still…)

Where else could we go? QuarkXPress 8 is $799. For $100 less, I can upgrade InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator—the whole lot, not just my page layout application.

Because what pisses us off the most is the lack of choice and competition. Our entire industry runs on Adobe's products now. Quark has been marginalized, decent Photoshop competitors aren't up to snuff, Illustrator competitors hardly exist and Fireworks has no equal. If I could do my job without Adobe's products, I would, but I simply cannot. And for what it's worth, every day I learn something I didn't know in Photoshop or InDesign that delights me.

In this designer's opinion, the $600 I or my employer will spend on the CS5 upgrade is, sadly, worth it. It's like paying a ransom: it hurts like hell, but at least I have my kid back.

Adobe really has become the new Microsoft. Hopefully, someone will put together the tools, the user experience, the price and the marketing acumen to truly challenge them. (I'm looking at you, Corel.)

(Originally posted at http://designover29.tumblr.com/.)

Art Directors Club has their annual ADC Young Guns competition. The rule is, you have to be UNDER 30.

Every year, Print Magazine features 20 new designers under 30.

John Bielenburg’s Project M states that it is for “young graphic designers.” Though the application says all ages can apply, don’t get your hopes up. I saw John Bielenburg speak a few years ago, and he said—complete with a graph—that an artist’s most creative age is the early 20s.

The design community has a fetish for youth. And it needs to stop.

These competitions completely ignore the many people I met when I went back to school who emerged as amazing thirtysomething designers. In 2002, after years of working crappy office jobs to support my compulsive addiction to amateur theater, I realized that my favorite part of any production was to design the poster. I decided it was time to go back to school and become a graphic designer. Sadly, I soon realized that the opportunities for design students—competitions, internships, job leads—were skewed heavily toward brand new designers in their early 20s. When I graduated, I was 31, and it was already too late for me and many of my peers.

Therefore, I’ve started this tumblog to highlight those designers and artists, the brave people who decided that their passion was too important and took the risky move of switching gears. The people who, like a 21-year-old, are yearning to share their fresh, new ideas but also have a family to raise and a mortgage to pay.

I know I sound like a curmudgeon shaking my cane at a group of kids and bellowing, “Git off mah lawn!” That’s not true. I’m excited by young designers with their doe-eyes and new approaches. My argument here is that they aren’t the only ones excited by the prospect of interrupting culture long enough to make someone think or solving a once unsolvable problem. It’s time to reward the new designers over 29, even if it’s just a link on this little website.

I’m collecting links to portfolios now and would like to start featuring them at the end of April. (I have a kid on the way.) Send me your links either via email or Twitter. The designers must have found design (or web development or motion graphics or editing or any other visual communications endeavor) later in life. I’m also interested in the moment: what made you say, “It’s time to become a designer”?

Good wine has to age for a while before it’s perfect, before we can taste the artistry and skill that went into that bottle. Let’s raise a glass to the designers who took the time to age before sharing their ideas with us, too.

The teabaggers scare me. Not because they’re passionate. I applaud that. Not because they think the government isn’t working for them anymore. I agree with that. The teabaggers scare me because most of them are idiots with no real ideas and no fundamental understanding of government and society. (“End all taxes!” “Then how will you pay for the roads?”)

Case in point: Thomas Zaleski.

John Gruber retweeted this:

You can see it was retweeted 14 times as of this post.

So then I tweeted:

My short URL link pointed to Mr. Zaleski’s original tweet. No longer. (We’re getting to that.)

So Mr. Zaleski responded to me:

So I responded to him:

So he responded:

So stupid me decides to actually try and engage him in a civil debate:

I haven’t gotten an answer yet. His individual tweets are now protected, so I can no longer link to them:

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not the only person who hammered this guy. I don’t take credit for scaring him away, but it was fun to be a part of the herd.

So let’s review:

1. I called him out for insulting Roger Ebert, a man who can no longer speak or eat.
2. He says something that doesn’t make a lick of sense and asks me to be civil.
3. I accuse him of being less than civil.
4. He claims he didn’t insult Roger Ebert.
5. I ask him a serious question.
6. He runs away.

All in all, a good day.

At my day job, I often have to track down high resolution versions of a potential client’s logo for a proposal and/or a spec design*. When Brands of the World comes up empty, I resort to searching for a PDF on the potential client’s website using this Google search:

site:clientdomain.com filetype:pdf

Try it.

I do it so much that I decided to make a quick bookmarklet. Drag the link below to your bookmarks. Then, next time you’re on a web site and think, “I wonder if they have any PDFs,” just click the bookmark.

Search Site for PDFs ← Drag to your bookmarks bar

There are plenty of other filetypes Google can search. If you want to find PowerPoint files, for example, change filetype:pdf to filetype:ppt.

*Yeah, I hate spec work, but it pays my mortgage.

The CTA Red Line stop at North and Clybourn is awful. Despite being a within a block of a Crate & Barrel, a Restoration Hardware, and other fancy-pants stores, the stop is a filthy mess. It’s falling apart and in a state of disrepair, much like the nearby notorious Cabrini Green housing project.

It also has a place in my heart. The first time I visited Chicago, I stayed with friends on Belmont and took the Red Line from Belmont to North/Clybourn for my internship interview at Steppenwolf. And when I later moved in with those friends after accepting that internship, I made that exact same trip every day. I don’t get off at North/Clybourn very often any more, but despite it’s decrepit state, it still reminds me of when I first moved here 13 years ago.

Today, I read that Apple is planning to spend $4,000,000 to renovate the stop. This is great news. While my nostalgia for those creaking, oddly narrow escalators will never go away, my detest for the station’s appearance compared to the recent upgraded Brown Line stops will finally be erased.

But I’m not writing because I feel wistful. I’m writing because of one tiny part of Apple’s agreement with the city—Apple may get naming rights:

In the agreement approved at an August 19th Chicago Transit Board meeting, in exchange for the improvements the CTA will lease the bus turnaround [behind the stop] to Apple at no cost for 10 years, with options on four, five-year extensions. The CTA will also give Apple “first rights of refusal” for naming the station [my emphasis] and placing advertising within the station, if the CTA later decides to offer those rights.

I know the CTA needs the money. I know that it’s a good investment for Apple to have a shiny new CTA stop adjacent to a shiny new store. (It’s also generous of them to invest in a public project like this.) But naming rights gives me the willies. If the stop becomes something like “Apple Store/North Avenue”, then it will set a precedent. A new Target store is under construction on Broadway not too far from the Wilson Red Line stop. If Target renovates that stop (not a bad idea, really), should it then become the “Target/Wilson” stop? Will all of our stops soon become sponsored by a corporation?

There’s no indication that this is actually going to happen, but the potential is there. It’s a slippery slope:

“Excuse me, sir, how do I get to Chicago and Franklin?”
“Get on the McDonald’s Line at the AT&T stop and take it around the Sony loop. In about four stops, you’ll get off at Procter & Gamble.”

The only potentially untrue thing in that exchange: no one says “Excuse me, sir” anymore.

I’m willing to accept the good with the bad: corporate sponsorship of public works would inject cash in places we need it, like public transportation. But the effect I believe it would have on our already corporate-saturated culture is painful. Too often we express ourselves solely as our advertisers teach us to express ourselves. Sometimes, I’m not sure if I’m seeing a product placement in a movie; it’s more believable to hear an actor order a Heineken or a Pabst Blue Ribbon* than it is to see him belly up to the bar and ask for a “beer.” Such is our culture already. Corporate names for public works crosses the line, I believe.

I would certainly like to think that renaming the North/Clybourn stop “The Apple Store Stop” or, as TUAW put it, “iStop“, would cause an uproar. I, too, would email all my friends to oppose it.

I’d probably email them from my iPhone.

*Apologies to David Lynch.

Updated 10/28/09, 9:37 AM because I realized I used the expression “slippery slope” twice.

To my friends quickly skimming this on Facebook, don’t be alarmed. Yes, “Les Lye” is an anagram of my wife’s name “Lesley.” Lesley is just fine.

Les Lye was the adult male actor on You Can’t Do That on Television. The character I remember the most was Barth, the diner owner whose hygiene and culinary skills left much to be desired, a great opportunity for a young tween like myself to laugh and yell, “Eeew!” He was a funny, funny man to a lot of kids, including me.

Moment of silence for Les Lye.

I always thought it made perfect sense that Ed McMahon hosted TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes. Like his co-host Dick Clark, Ed McMahon devoted his life to making other people look great, standing out of the way so folks like Johnny Carson could make the audience laugh or handing out giant checks to suckers or giving Britney Spears her big break. I’m sure the bloopers show offered Ed a compelling, anticipated opportunity to look better than the people he was introducing for once.

Okay, I kid. Ed McMahon was a professional and an iconic figure. Though he can no longer keep his feet on the ground, at least we can say he has successfully reached for the stars.

Moment of silence for Ed McMahon.