From brilliance to complete annihilation.
Category: General
Superhero visual alphabet
Australia-based illustrator and designer Simon Koay’s “Superbet.” Check out the details in the larger individual letters. Very cool!
It’s a designer’s job to ask good questions
This is some fantastic advice for designers of all disciplines, but particularly web designers. Ask good questions. The right questions. This is the foundation of a good creative brief.
My personal favorite is to simply ask “what is the goal?” The article even illustrates it almost exactly how I typically phrase it.
Janice Gervais at A List Apart covers that question and more, and ends the article with a bit of design truth: “Your work reflects your level of understanding.”
PANTONE Fashion Color Report Spring 2017
A Mixture of Vitality, Relaxation and the Great Outdoors
From colors that are bright and vivid to those that convey a sense of earthiness, our top 10 colors for spring 2017 are reminiscent of the hues that surround us in nature.
Take a look at Pantone’s Spring 2017 Fashion Color Report.
Black Friday Deal (through Dec. 9): Eltima’s top 10 apps for $50
Eltima has put their top ten apps for Mac on sale for $50. That’s nearly $470 off $520 worth of apps. Grab Eltima’s Black Friday deal before December 9!
I’m a huge fan of CloudMounter and Uplet. Those two apps alone would cost $50, so the rest are icing on the cake, as far as I’m concerned.
The Science of color: Why is Facebook blue
Companies use color to trigger an emotion from us. Here’s a great little article about why designers choose the colors they do.
The best way to add the ports you need to the new MacBook Pro
OWC is accepting pre-orders for their Thunderbolt 3 Dock, due to ship in February, starting at $280 (depends on the length of the Thunderbolt cable you want included). The Dock is obviously in response to Apple’s latest MacBook Pro announcement I wrote about yesterday.
In yesterday’s rant, I mentioned some would have to spend upwards of $200 for dongles to gain the ports they found necessary. The OWC Dock is a bit more than that, but also gives you significantly more options than straight dongles from Apple.
As you can see in the image above, the OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock includes plenty of ports. 5 USB 3 ports, Firewire 800, Ethernet, Display Port, audio-in and SD Card slot are included, along with two Thunderbolt ports capable of driving 4K displays. And the device is powered, so it can charge your iPhone.
OWC’s Thunderbolt 3 Dock comes in Space Gray or Silver, and cable length varies between .5 meter 40Gb/s transfer speed and 2 meter 20Gb/s.
When it comes to the Mac, Apple is making it reeeeeaaally hard to be a fanboy
Apple recently released new MacBook Pro models with great hype. As someone who is in the market for a new Mac in the next year, I watched the keynote with a pretty good amount of excitement and anticipation.
At the conclusion of Apple’s keynote presentation, I found myself staring at the screen with a dazed and confused look on my face.
For years I’ve had a MacBook Pro for taking work on the road. I do light design and image retouching on it, as well as email, web browsing and writing. At the home office I use a top of the line iMac with 32GB of RAM, Core i7 processor and upgraded video card for the heavy lifting in Photoshop, InDesign, etc.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my impending upgrade the last year or so, and decided that I could probably live with just one fully upgraded MBPro and buy an Apple Thunderbolt Display to use when I’m at home. This would save a lot of hassle with file syncing and twice the time spent upgrading and maintaining two computers.
But then Apple Event happened last week and I feel like I’m stuck in a place I don’t want to be. I absolutely love the macOS, but I’m left wondering how Apple and the rest of the world ended up so far apart on their definition of a Pro user.
The new MacBook Pro with its Touch Bar looks cool at first glance, and I can totally see how the average consumer might find it too cool to pass up. The problem for me (and by me, I mean most pros) is that anything found in the Touch Bar can be found in the menus—and probably has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. If it does, I probably know it and use it regularly. So I look at that fancy colorful Touch Bar, shrug my shoulder and… pfffft!
But that’s just one feature, right? Then I look under the hood and find more pfffft! than I think I can chew. A limit of 16GB of RAM. How do they call a Mac a “Pro” computer when you limit it to 16GB of RAM? The reason, according to Apple’s Phil Shiller, is that they wanted to keep the power-consumption down to preserve batterly life.
It’s a PRO computer. Most pro users sit at a desk most of the day, with the MBPro plugged in. Don’t even get me started on the comparatively low-end video card Apple chose to include. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that it’s not a pro-level video card. Period.
The ports… that’s a big issue. Look, I get that technology moves forward. I never complained when Apple chose to switch to Lightning ports on the iPhone. But that’s mostly because I don’t have to plug anything into my iPhone other than the charger. My Mac is another thing completely. Not only do I plug my USB-A iPhone into it, but my USB-A microphone, USB-A DSLR camera cable, USB-A Bluetooth headphones (for charging) and multiple USB-A storage drives. With the new MBPro, some users will spend up to $200 on dongles to connect existing devices to the new MBPro. That’s just crazy.
Apple no longer makes stand-alone displays, opting instead to work with LG to produce a fully compatible 5K display that has an iSight camera, plenty of ports and gorgeous image quality. The price is better than Apple’s former offering, too. So there’s really no problem there, other than the problem of perception.
But the big white elephant in the room is that rumor sites claim that Apple will be updating the MacBook Pro next year with faster processors, RAM upgradeable to 32GB, better video cards, battery-efficient OLED screens and more. Of course, some of those rumors don’t match up with reality. So who knows what to believe.
I’m not sure what to make of the current MacBook Pro, or the rumors that Apple is already working on the device pro users wanted. I get that Intel is to blame for the low-power processors and the effect it has on Apple to provide more RAM and video cards, but then why even release the laptop upgrade? Why not just wait a few more months and release the better device when it’s ready?
It makes me wonder what the next iMac or Mac Pro will be, or even IF they will be. What I know for sure is that my plan to go with a single Mac, the MacBook Pro, are on hold until next year… and even then I may have to alter those plans depending on what Apple does.
I used to be a pure Apple fanboy, but that description is no longer valid—at least not in the year 2016.
Interview with the Apple logo designer
While working in their garage in 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak asked Rob Janoff, who had studied design, to create a logo for their first Apple products. When Janoff went to Jobs with final sketches, everything went very smoothly, and the bitten apple has been the symbol of the brand ever since.
The bite of the apple was a “fix.” Genius.
Quick thoughts on Apple’s September special event yesterday
Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last several months and just woke up a few minutes ago, you’ve no doubt read all about everything Apple offered up at the September event yesterday. If you haven’t, I’m not going to re-hash it all here—maybe you can watch a 5-minute catch-up video.
The following are just a few of my thoughts on the major touch points of the presentation: (more…)