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

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.

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.)

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.

I’ve written this very long post about why I built it, most of which will only be interesting to me. (Hey, it’s my blog.) If you have an interest in how my brain works, go for it. But if you’re just going to play with the app and then skip to making comments, please note:

1. I have the utmost respect for the people and the methods behind Grid Calculator. I just think your software is ridiculously overpriced.
2. If you’re a programmer, please don’t belittle my admitted novice programming ability. Instead, know that I’m always eager to learn and can certainly benefit from your knowledge.

Version History

v0.5, 5/10/10

You can now choose between a document grid that is proportional to the page or a square grid. It’s not an exact square grid, but it’s closest to a square grid to fit in the page evenly.

v0.4, 6/22/09

Pressing return or enter would clear the fields; added a “return FALSE;” to prevent that from happening

v0.3, 5/19/09

Fixed the math that calculates the Row space. Again. It should be right this time.

v0.2, 5/5/09

Fixed the math that calculates the Row height

v0.1, 5/1/09

Initial Launch

Some Background

While I might tweet a lot about the technical minutiae of web design (much to the chagrin of many friends on Facebook), the truth is, my share of the mortgage is primarily paid by art directing, designing, and typesetting large documents in short timelines. For the benefit of my non-designer friends: we’re not talking Word files, either; custom InDesign documents with tons of linked images, dozens of styles, a few master pages, and my obsessive attention to balancing out particularly strident rag-right paragraphs. And usually the turnaround is about five days, including juggling content coming from four different sources and simultaneously programming a matching “microsite” (a nonsense term I despise).

Therefore, I could not do my job without first creating a solid grid. Grids are the foundation of good design. Even the most avant garde of designs often have an underlying grid.

I thoroughly believe that my design education was sorely lacking in the fundamental study of grids, and I’ve spent the last year or so of my work secretly diving into a self-initiated boot camp. Sure, my bosses thought they got a great document, but they had no idea I was experimenting with proportions and creating baseline grid for maintaining vertical rhythm.

Grid Calculator

It was with some excitement that I saw the headline “Grid Calculator by Designers Bookshop.” Would this time-saving tool simplify my life? Around lunchtime, I nuked a Healthy Choice Mediterranean Pasta and watched the demo video of this (I hoped) revolutionary product. Sadly, it doesn’t do much of anything.

It has some definite pros. It does a lot of floating-point math for you. Also, the idea of basing your grid on the height of a lowercase “f” instead of the cap-height, which I had been doing, proved interesting.

But that’s where anything time-saving features end. There are no provisions for monkeying with the proportion of your text area, nor—perhaps most distressing—does it actually do any work within InDesign or Quark. You’re still left copying and pasting numbers back and forth between the calculator and your design app to create the grid. Oh, and incidentally, with the exchange rate as of this writing, this application costs $57.02. Let’s face it: Grid Calculator is nothing more than a simple spreadsheet.

That’s when the bug flew in my ass. After reading The Cult of Done Manifesto and watching Ze Frank rant about brain crack, I’ve committed myself to acting on as many reasonable impulses as possible. I set about to prove that Grid Calculator could be produced in an hour using a simple spreadsheet application.

Prototype One: The Spreadsheet

First order of business—did someone beat me to it? Perhaps not; Google produced nothing for me. The first comment from the blog at which I read about this product suggests that a free spreadsheet alternative is forthcoming, but I think the commenter was simply making the suggestion. So I fired up Numbers (not nearly as powerful as Excel but a hell of a lot prettier) and got started.

My spreadsheet skills are pretty good, I won’t lie, and I got pretty far within an hour. In fact, I had in front of me pretty much an exact feature-for-feature duplicate. It looked different, and it didn’t have every feature (more on that below), but I could follow along with the demo video and achieve the exact same results. I had achieved my goal. (Also of note: I didn’t save the file, otherwise I’d share it with you. That was stupid, wasn’t it?)

I would have stopped there, but I wanted to add another feature. Grid Calculator, a European product, seemingly only works in millimeters. I successfully added conversion ratios to allow the spreadsheet to work in inches, millimeters or pica. That’s when I ran into a snag. Pica measurements are typically written as “22p3,” or 22 picas and 3 points. I’m sure Numbers or Excel is capable of creating a formula to parse the “22″ out of that, multiply it by 12 (1 pica = 12 points), then add the “3″ to make 267.

A Simple Web App is Born

And that’s when the next bug flew in my ass—maybe I don’t know how to parse “27p3″ in Numbers or Excel, but I know exactly how to do it in JavaScript. And wouldn’t a link be easier to share and distribute? And wouldn’t it be easier to extend something written as a web application? I had already reverse engineered the math, so how hard could it be?

And so, with the formulas and a lightweight open source CSS library in hand, I committed my second hour to his project. Thus: Gridelicious.

I assure you that you can follow along with Designers Bookshop’s video demo and get the exact same results—just fill in the red boxes. Also, unlike Grid Calculator, you can work in inches, picas (including 0p0 notation), millimeters, and points.

Caveats

It doesn’t have every feature of Grid Calculator: I left out the quick conversion, though I can easily drop that in. I also left out the proportion feature and the top margin features because I’m not exactly sure what they do; they aren’t demonstrated in the video, and there is no downloadable demo of the application that I can toy with. (I’ll be happy to add those features if someone can explain to me what they do.) Also, Grid Calculator lets you save grid settings, but if you made a grid you like, wouldn’t you just save the InDesign file?

Also, if anyone views the source on this, you’ll see my shortcomings as a programmer. I’m sure if John Resig took one look at my .js file, he would feel shame for what has become of his creation.

In fairness…

According to the Grid Calculator webpage, a Pro edition of the software is on its way which will not only do the calculations but also build the grid for you. That, to me, is worth $57 or more, especially if it was built as an InDesign plug-in so I can watch how adjustments to the settings affect the layout. An application like that, indeed, would save me a lot of time, and I would gladly buy it

Also worth noting: the math used by Grid Calculator is based on a method developed by a designer named Marcus Gärde. His book looks to be very informative and classy. I would certainly like to get my hands on a copy. It’s also worth noting that I found this page detailing the math after building my app, but I’m glad it worked out that way. By reverse engineering Grid Calculator, I actually have more appreciation for it and the methods behind it.

However, there is really no sense in spending $57 on an application that does so little. I spent more time writing this blog post than I did building the app. ‘Nuff said.

I look forward to your feedback, and I will post changes at this here post.

(Incidentally, you have Mrs. Guthrie to thank for the name “Gridelicious.” It was one of dozens of names we threw out this afternoon as I drove her to the airport.)

This Friday, yours truly will participate in a qualifying match on the incredibly popular design competition Layer Tennis. Contestants have 15 minutes to exchange artwork, be it Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, collage, pencil drawings, whatevs, in 10 volleys. I imagine it will be the shortest three hours of my adult life.

No, it’s not the main event. The main event goes to well-established members of the designerati. In fact, one of the main event contestants this week is Tom Muller, whose work has been an inspiration to me for a while now. Just to know that my work—my dashed-off, half-assed, holy-crap-I-have-to-get-this-uploaded-in-45-seconds work—will share a domain name with his is humbling.

Once I know the actual link for the competition, I will update this post. UPDATE: If this default HTML index is to be believed, I’m pretty sure my match will be found at here. UPDATE UPDATE: Yes, that is the correct link. It will be live Wednesday afternoon. During the match, like most contestants, I will be twittering my ass off. I also hope to have some manner of webcam going so you can watch my frantic pixel pushing—more on that soon.

Also, the best way to follow the match is via Twitter. If you follow @layertennis, you’ll know immediately when volleys are posted.

Finally, I will need your help. Twitter users can comment on the match by including #lyt in their tweets, and they’ll appear on the Layer Tennis discussion page. The crowd is your opportunity to start a virtual wave for me, and I’ll be watching the discussion while I wait for the next volley. Tweet your cheers and help me make it through the competition; just don’t forget to put #lyt in your tweet.

I’d like right now to thank my boss now for allowing me to use precious PTO time at the office so I can take advantage of fiber-optic internet and a 30″ monitor. To my co-workers: thank you for staying out of my way.

I’ll see you on the internet on Friday.

Now, about learning Python in three days so I can use Nodebox…

First, I addressed this in the comments, but I want to be clear: those that do spec work are not evil, they are just doing themselves and their fellow designers a disservice. Those that try to convince you spec work is not bad for you or our industry are evil. They are lying to you and trying to convince you that the work you do is without value unless someone likes it.

Secondly, one of the evildoers linked to this post. My argument is made, but I want to disagree with him on one point. 99designs.com is in no way similar to iStockPhoto. iStockPhoto is a way to create products. There is no creative brief, just a place to sell your wares. iStockPhoto is a flea market for royalty-free media. 99designs.com, on the other hand, is unadulterated spec work, with clients presenting vague creative briefs and expecting specific, targeted work without the benefit of research and understanding.

Also, to Jeremiah: “evil” is a very strong word, but you are someone who is systematically trying to destroy and devalue an industry that still has a lot to offer even in this global economy. It’s the best word I could come up with.

ONE MORE UPDATE: I also recommend Andrew Hyde’s post comparing spec work to a ponzi scheme, which Jeremiah Owyang also linked to. It’s incredibly well written. Users of Adobe Creative Suite should should be required to read this post before they install the software.

___

At this year’s South By Southwest interactive festival, there is a provocative panel discussion called, “Is Spec Work Evil? The Online Creative Community Speaks.” I expect it will be a hour of monstrous bullshit, and I hope the design community will converge on it en masse.

Let me start by answering their question: yes, spec work is evil. You’re not going to ask three plumbers to come fix your a leaky drain and then pay the one who does the best job. It’s unfair, it’s unethical. And yet, designers are asked everyday to behave in exactly the same way. If you ask a designer to create a logo for you, you owe that designer money, plain and simple. Groups like AIGA and campaigns like NO!SPEC are trying to educate the public.

Crowdspring and 99designs don’t realize they are actually doing a disservice. What makes a good designer stand out is research and strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 corporation or a start-up restaurant around the corner—you pay a good designer for the discovery phase, which is essential to identifying business needs and developing solutions that will help you grow your business. If you slap a 50-word creative brief online, you may not get strategic work that is focused on your customers (but you’ll surely get what you paid for).

Thus, when I read that this panel was going to occur at the very influential SXSW, I thought, awesome! Someone is trying to make a difference, convincing not only companies but other designers that spec work cheapens our profession.

Then I looked at the panelists:

Mike Samson

The co-founder of the aforementioned Crowdspring, the leading website for trying to legitimizing spec work

Jeff Howe

The author of Crowdsourcing, which is a different concept—ad hoc online groups coming together to solve a particular problem. Crowdsourcing is not necessarily bad; it can be powerful when everyone who participates derives value, be it in the form of a micropayment like Mechanical Turk or helping a cause like finding aliens. Howe writes like he is more of an observer of the phenomenon, but I get the impression that he’s a fan.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff

Chief Creative Officer of Threadless. Don’t get me wrong—I love Threadless. I have a $25 gift card I’m looking forward to spending. In the case of Threadless, it’s not about solving business needs, it’s about promoting your art and possibly making money on it. Not exactly spec work, but it does live in a gray area. Nevertheless, in the context of the other panelists, Threadless sits as an enterprise that attained great success by asking site visitors to design artwork for free. And that example will certainly be lauded by…

Jeremiah Owyang

The one name I had to Google. Guess what? He’s pro-spec-work. One of his arguments is that it happens all the time, so let’s just get used to it. Well, corporate greed is unstoppable and happens all the time, so we should just get used to that, right? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?

Then there’s David Carson. What he’s doing on this panel, I certainly don’t know. I truly admire David Carson for his place in design history. Maybe he’s the one who will argue against the other four panelists. Or maybe Carson, who originally proclaimed the “end of print,” thinks all this crowdsourcing is a great idea. Either way, David Carson’s work hasn’t been relevant for over a decade. It’s like asking John Hughes to speak about the future of directing movies.

Essentially, what we have in this panel is a attempt at convincing designers that this unethical practice is the future of our profession and that we should stop whining. Whining is one thing; defending our ethics is another.

I won’t be at SXSW, but I know many of you out on the interwebs will. Please: show up at this panel and give these guys the what-for. We’re professionals, and we perform an important service. Long tail, schmlong tail: that’s what Craigslist is for. We need fewer people telling beginning designers it’s okay to give your work away for free and more explaining that the work we do has value and, when done properly, will bring value to our clients.

The Mrs. made a beautiful tin for family and close friends with homemade white-chocolate peppermint bark. Drool… She also included some little bags of dried fruit and just about every flavor of Hershey’s Kiss imaginable. (Have you tried the Hot Cocoa flavor of Hershey’s Kiss? They’re killer.) I’ll post a picture of it later this week so you can see for yourself why I value and respect my wife’s talent every day.

While Mrs. Guthrie worked on our gifts, I worked on our card.

Guthrie Holiday Card 2008

The idea started a few years ago when I was asked to design a wedding invitation for my friends Eric and Angie. Both are actors and just plain fun folks, so I didn’t feel too limited when brainstorming. Even I, though, had an idea that was certainly too crazy: pose them as boxers and make a vintage silkscreened boxing poster. The copy even wrote itself — “A match so big they’ll need TWO RINGS,” for example. Clearly, it’s an idea that wouldn’t work for most weddings, but I never forgot it.

Earlier this year, though, it occurred to me the same would work for a holiday card for us, seeing as how I was raised in a Christian household, and my wife is Jewish. The challenge was writing copy that actually downplayed any violent overtones. Boxing promotion is about raising the stakes, classifying the title match as an act of war.

Despite a desire to print our card on my beloved Gocco, we opted to simulate the distressed texture and pulpy print quality in Photoshop. I actually think that was a better choice, as I was able to get more detail in the type. Unsolicited recommendation: Staples-brand double-sided photo quality matte paper.

What wasn’t a better choice, though, was using Photoshop to put in the boxing gloves. Using some cheap stock photography as a guide, the Mrs. and I posed in similar stances to the source images, and I brought in the gloves. However, I had to add lots of shadow and depth and move some bodily appendages around. Honestly, I should have just headed over to Sports Authority and bought some gloves; would have saved me hours of tense Photoshop work, praying that any imperfections in my clone stamping would be hidden by the halftone pattern.

So far, my favorite reaction has been, “So, when is this?” Sorry, it’s not a real event. Just our way of saying Happy Holidays, no matter which holiday you celebrate.

While the Mrs. and I did go off in separate directions to work on our self-appointed projects, we certainly do check in with each other constantly. A lot of people ask if it’s difficult being in the same field as Lesley, but it has been quite the contrary. Since we worked on our wedding invitation together, we’ve learned how to give each other constructive feedback and to support each other’s decisions. Plus, I trust her talent. She always scoffs when I say she’s a better designer than I am, but she really is. I know just about anything she creates, I will love. Thanks for keeping me inspired, honey.

On behalf of Lesley and myself, we wish you Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year.

So the nearest book to me, as is usually the case when I’m doing a big layout, is Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. And here’s that fifth sentence, which I love:

They can also be used (as they often are) to shout at readers, putting them on edge and driving them away; or to destroy the historical integrity of a typeface designed before boldface roman was born; or to create unintentional anacronisms, something like adding a steam engine or a fax machine to the stage set for King Lear.

Bringhurst is, of course, referring to the bold italic weight of type that appears in many fonts these days. Bold italic as a Roman variant didn’t appear until the 19th Century. So there.

Update: There’s also this one, which I also posted to Delicious. Therefore, I’m pleased to announce that my band Jovan Sterija Popović‘s new album “Only While I’m Asleep” drops next Tuesday. Here’s the album cover:

So, yeah, I posted about silly Internet memes. Hey, at least I posted something, right?

Like ever other nerdy graphic designer, I experienced major tingles in all my special places when I first learned about Helvetica, your film celebrating the 50th anniversary of the most ubiquitous typeface in history. Mrs. Guthrie and I got roped into the hype, which included purchasing a pair of Veer’s Helvetica mugs. In fact, I sport the “I Love Helvetica” and the “I Hate Helvetica” pins on my bag, and my “Helvetica” t-shirt is still one of my favorites.

However, I’m very different than many of my designer colleagues in my reaction to the film. Many designers, including this one, got sucked in by oh-my-God-that’s-Massimo-Vignelli moments, but I had hoped that Helvetica would have been more than typography’s answer to US Weekly.

At it’s core, Helvetica amounts to little more than graphic design porn. Not that there isn’t a market for that; I salivate over design annuals all the time hoping one day my skills are as refined as those award winners. Clearly, I’m the audience for your movie. However, typography has become more pervasive in our culture than ever. Fewer and fewer citizens of a modern community can escape set type. Perhaps I wanted too much from your film, but I had hoped that your 90-minute love-letter to a font would include an exploration about how the invisible art of typography influences society and why it matters.

I asked you a question after the opening night screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago, and I wish I had phrased it differently. I started with:

For every person in this audience, there are 50 administrative assistants out there setting their email in Comic Sans.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew this would be a laugh line for the audience, and I’m sure you had heard statements like this before. You had even said that you would not make a sequel called “Times New Roman,” and you interrupted me here to comment that if you made “Comic Sans,” it would be a horror film, which made me chuckle. I continued:

My question to you is: are those sorts of people seeing this film? How are they reacting to it? And do you see your film as being at all evangelical to those people?

That last part of my question was where I screwed up. Instead of challenging your own description of the movie — “It looks at the proliferation of one typeface… as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives” — I asked you about how we can make the rest of society pay attention to the work we do, a silly and arrogant notion on my part. My mistake left you the opportunity to answer, “That’s not the movie I wanted to make,” and left me without the opportunity to follow up and inquire what you learned about “the way type affects our lives.”

You are now shooting Objectified, a documentary about industrial design. I am sure, judging by your previous work, that it will be an exemplary, well-crafted look at beautiful, functional objects and the talented people who design them. Your website suggests that the film will examine “our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.” You are putting the consumer first in your thesis, and I applaud you for that. The consumer, I believe, was overlooked in Helvetica. I hope that consumers of design will learn from Objectified that design is a problem solving process that combines functionality with beauty and elegance, that the user’s experience has more to do with good design than ambiguous aesthetic whims.

In other words, as you said in your answer to my question on the opening night of Helvetica, I hope viewers of Objectified learn more than “Designers are weird.” Yes, we are, but we’re not without purpose.

Thank you. I look forward to some oh-my-God-that’s-Dieter-Rams moments.

Sincerely,
Arlo