March 2008 Archives
We humans are a strange breed. Throughout our history we've managed to bring forth engineering projects on a staggering scale, such as The Great Wall of China. Graceful structures spanning continents and millenia testify to the ancient beliefs and aesthetic refinement of cultures that could have much to teach us. The backdrop for these marvels of human ingenuity is the natural wonder of the Earth itself, at one time a source of spiritual and material sustenance. But rather than cherishing all this, we have systematically destroyed the best of what we have inherited from those who came before, either through neglect, greed or intolerance. And what little remains, is going fast.
Blazing Sushi? That seems like a contradition in terms, given that one of the main ingredients of this popular dish is, in fact, raw. But in the world of design, clients with strange names are not unknown. Nor are design briefs that insist on including long strings of relatively dull text that must be somehow elegantly worked into a small area. These, and other perils, await the brave designer hardy enough to take on AbleStock.com Design Brief 8, currently running on Graphics.com.
The latest version of Microsoft's browser for Windows XP and Vista is available for download. Oh, the horror.
Abraham Maslow famously said that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Closer to home, it would seem that for Adobe Systems, every web site is starting to look like an application. We're further and further away from the company's early 80s origins, based on the brilliant PostScript page description language developed by founders Warnock and Geske. But who can blame Adobe? There's an undeniable attraction to playing in the big leagues of application development, along with Microsoft and Google.
