Chris Dickman

Taking the Mystery and Fear Out of Your Legal Agreements

2012-03-13T10:13:58Z

If you're completely comfortable drafting legal agreements for your design services, then you won't be interested in what Docracy has to offer. But for the rest of us the site offers a welcome solution to a stressful aspect of... The concept is deceptively simple: provide a wide range of lawyer-vetted legal agreements that visitors can download at no charge. That alone is handy enough and those crafted specifically for designers, such as AIGA's Standard Form of Design Services, should be the first place you look. But the site also makes it possible to complete and execute versions of its contracts online. These are technically valid and legally enforceable, it would seem, since the site is ESIGN Act compliant. All without the $150 per hour pricetag. In the above brief clip, Docracy's founders provide an overview of the service at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, which it won.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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The Weird, Wild World of eBook Production: Part 2

2012-02-27T08:58:00Z

Last week I ended Part 1 of this saga of creating an eBook for distribution to online bookstores with the promise that in this installment I'd share with you why mastering this new domain of publishing is somewhat akin... First, let me be clear that all the software you need to create an eBook is freely available. For example, Microsoft Word is what my friend used to create the text for her book. However, any text editor will do, including the open source Open Office. I'm using Photoshop and Xara Designer Pro to create the cover and interior graphics but anything that can save to GIF, JPG or PNG will get the job done, including open source apps like Gimp for bitmap image work or Inkscape for vector creation.

Once you've got all the content created, it's certainly preferable to use a page-layout application like QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign for books that are image-intensive or contain tricky formatting. I'm a Creative Suite user so I'm relying on InDesign 5.5 (earlier versions can get the job done but 5.5 added some welcome ePub functionality, some of which is covered in the clip above). If you're publishing a simple book, you can upload content directly in Word format to resellers like Amazon or aggregators such as BookBaby or Smashwords. On the other hand, the fact that Smashwords calls its Word to ePub conversion software the "meatgrinder" might give you pause. Better is to use one of the many ePub creation, editing, validation and display applications and thereby avoid unpleasant surprises. Literally dozens of these available, many of them free, with a good list on the mobileread.com site.

Since I'm using InDesign to format the book and generate the ePub, I'm using the open source donationware Sigil program to easily tweak the ePub's style sheet, as well the code of some of the pages. This tweaking is an essential part of the ePub workflow, thanks both to — say it ain't so! — limitations of InDesign and weirdnesses of eReaders. Since I am also going to convert the ePub to mobi format, for submission to the Amazon store, this requires a second ePub that will require particular tuning before the conversion. Fun stuff, huh? Then there's the proofing side of things. Before you submit your book to a store, there is a natural impulse to know what it will look like. For this Adobe provides the free Adobe Digital Editions, or ADE as it's usually referred to, which is available as a download for Mac or Windows. I was happily using this to proof the book as I went along until at one point strange inter-paragraph spacing showed up on one page. Then some links stopped working, only to mysteriously later fix themselves. Rather unsettling.

The capper was when I added the cover image to the book and it refused to display. After fruitless experiments and some online sleuthing it turns out that ADE is a bit of a dud as a proofing tool. In fact, a moderator of the InDesign forum on Adobe's site went so far as to say "ADE is the last thing I'd use to check an ePub." I'm still using ADE for proofing, along with Sigil and several other eReaders but the lack of a single trusted proofing app is frustrating. So why haven't I abandoned ADE? Because I discovered to my horror that it's the engine employed by many eReader devices, so it has the dubious distinction of being the Internet Explorer 6 of the eBook world. Frankly, I expected more of Adobe. The best thing you can do is proof on the device that will be displaying the document, so if your target is the iPad, life is simple. For the rest of us, not so much.

At this point in publishing my friend's eBook I'm bumping up against the contradictions, limitations and frustrations of what is all-too-reminiscent of creating web pages circa 1995, when View Source and a few online forums were the principal sources of site creation wisdom. Since I had recently upgraded InDesign to CS5.5, I registered it to claim one of the incentives that Adobe provides, in this case 30 days of access to Lynda.com. This got me off to a good start, thanks to Anne-Marie Concepción's five-hour InDesign CS5.5 to EPUB, Kindle, and iPad series. It provided a solid grounding, although at one point Anne-Marie in speaking of a buggy 5.5 feature suggests we "give Adobe a break" because the feature is new. You'll encounter more than a little of this kind of apologizing on the part of the experts for the ePub-creation shortcomings of InDesign, which I find a little irksome. InDesign is a professional, expensive application and one expects it do the job with no excuses. I'll say more about this in the third installment.

After taking in the video series I followed this up with Elizabeth Castro's mini-book From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle. It's slim but provides some essential information, notably on creating eBooks for the Kindle. I didn't check out her earlier EPUB Straight to the Point, since it's a bit dated now and has a focus on creating books for the iPad. The InDesign forum on Adobe's site proved valuable tips, with knowledgeable users and moderators quickly responding to several of my questions. I mentioned the wiki on the the mobileread.com site earlier but its forum has also been very useful, since it's the hangout of those creating ePubs with just about anything but InDesign. As such it has provided a non-Mac, in-the-trenches perspective that's steered me in the right direction on several occasions.

In the next installment I'll share some tips on creating images for ePubs and take a look at the process of generating a Kindle book for the Amazon store. Of course, feel free to share any tools or resources that I've overlooked in the comments area below.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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The Weird, Wild World of eBook Production: Part 1

2012-02-20T09:25:27Z

When a friend asked me recently if I'd provide a hand turning her first non-fiction book into a self-published eBook, I agreed without giving it much thought. After all, eBooks have been around for some time now. Certainly long... Because as it turns out, creating an eBook for distribution to bookstores such Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com is far from being a no-brainer. There are a surprising number of technical minefields to walk through for whoever is creating the actual eBook file for distribution. And the author is faced with some tricky decisions to make that not only affect the look of the final eBook but how it's distributed. My involvement in this initiative has been on the production end, since I'm employing my admittedly rarely-used copy of InDesign. But as I have learned, you can't create an eBook without keeping how it will be distributed in mind.

Let's start with my friend and her book. It's a pretty standard self-help title, about 60,000 words with just a few simple illustrations. Formatting is equally straightforward, with heads, two levels of subheads and body copy. In terms of distribution, she wanted to get the book into as many online bookstores as possible, so she chose BookBaby.com, an aggregator that can push a book into not only the big-name stores, including Amazon.com and the Apple iBookstore, but more modest ones, such as Kobo and Copia. In theory the process is pretty simple: you send BookBaby your book, and it submits it to all the stores it supports. It handles all the payments, which you can track in a single place, thereby simplifying things immensely. All this for just a $99 fee and $19 per year after that.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, the first thing to know about eBooks is that the EPUB file format, while common, is not ubiquitous. The notable exception is Amazon, for example, which uses the AZW format, a slight variant of the Mobipocket standard. In theory, this is not a problem when you use an aggregator like BookBaby, since you send it the book in Word, InDesign or EPUB format and it handles any of the conversion requirements. I had already planned to create an EPUB, for several reasons. First, Adobe has been heavily promoting InDesign 5.5 as the tool of choice for EPUB creation. My thinking was, the less conversion the better. Since I could proof the InDesign-created EPUB before submitting it to BookBaby by displaying it in any one of a number of readers, this would reduce the possibility of unpleasant surprises caused by BookBaby's conversion.

But with the same logic, did it make sense to trust BookBaby with the EPUB to Kindle conversion required for submission to the Amazon store? I sent several emails to BookBaby about this, requesting clarification on whether it did the conversion using its own proprietary conversion software or whether it used Amazon's KindleGen program? And if the book showed up in a mangled state in the Amazon store, what could my friend do about it? Could she change it or even have it withdrawn from the Amazon store? BookBaby charges a stiff fee to make changes to your books, so this was a significant issue. The lack of responses from BookBaby wasn't encouraging. Which is a point that needs to be made: aggregators such as BookBaby and Smashwords are experiencing phenomenal growth and, surprise, don't seem to have the support people in place to respond to technical questions. So complex publishing projects are probably not the best fit for them at this stage. But this book was simple.

As well as KindleGen, Amazon provides a plugin for creating Kindle books directly from InDesign. This sounded promising, although the current version is beta .96, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence. You'd think Amazon would want to encourage people to use InDesign to create books for its store by getting the plugin out of beta but version 1 seems to be a long way off. And you'd think Adobe would do everything it can to achieve the same goal, by providing a direct export to Kindle format from InDesign. Nope, not happening. It's also not reassuring that InDesign users seem to shun the plugin and Adobe doesn't speak of it. But KindleGen, coupled with the much easier to use Kindle Previewer, remained as a solution. You'll find information about this on the Kindle Publishing Programs area of the Amazon site, with the Kindle Publishing forum providing tales of woe from the trenches.

So the decision was made to use BookBaby for everything but Amazon, with InDesign generating the EPUB file. Now I just had to transform my friend's Word files into a decent-looking InDesign layout. I'd then generate the EPUB for BookBaby and finally convert that to Kindle format for Amazon. Piece of cake, right? Feel to laugh again, my wise friend. Because my education in the vagaries of eBook production was only just beginning. And in Part 2, I'll tell you why.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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A Second Look at the Google Web Fonts Directory

2012-02-08T12:01:56Z

I have to confess that I'm amongst those who viewed with mixed emotions the 2010 launch of what was then called the Google Font Directory. Way back in 2006 I had written optimistically, in The Web — A Typographic...]]> Yes, this initiative could give the nascent move to web fonts mainstream adoption. But browser support for web fonts at that time was marginal (it's still far from perfect). And then there were the open source fonts that Google was making available at launch — most of them sucked. Bigtime.

Despite this, Google's service has increasingly gained acceptance over the years, since the fonts are free and easy to implement. Probably the biggest boost in this regard has come in the form of WordPress templates, which can be counted on to support them. I had pretty much given up on Google as being worthy of serious consideration, given the proliferation of commercial services providing vast selections of top-quality web fonts. But recently coming across its web fonts directory again has given me pause to consider. Admittedly, it's almost impossible to use the words "beauty" and "Google" in the same sentence. You really can't expect Google to give a damn about aesthetics; it has an engineering culture in which speed and efficiency are worshipped. But this can have its benefits in the domain of web fonts.

Serving such fonts from the cloud takes time and can result in distracting font-loading effects for the visitor. If anyone can tune the cloud to deliver fast fonts, I would place my bet that it would be Google. And this would seem to be case, since last week it announced the latest tweak to the service, the implementation of Monotype Imaging's MicroType Express compression format, which is said to yield about a 15% savings in file size over using gzip alone, translating into faster rendering in the browser. Apparently Google has an entire engineering team that is responsible for such things as stripping out the font character hints used by Windows when serving fonts to Mac, iOS and Android clients or managing subsetting, which removes unneeded glyphs from fonts to also reducing file size.

Okay, so it's running a lean, mean web font serving machine. But what about the fonts themselves? The collection hasn't grown much over the years although fonts such as Abril Fatface, Hammersmith One, Vollkorn and Ubuntu can indeed be used for cringe-free work. But it's a recent initiative that really got my attention, in the form of fonts created via the Kickstarter site, well established as a platform for funding creative projects. The way this seems to work, Google receives proposals from type designers for the creation of a new font for the web fonts directory. Once approved, this goes up on Kickstarter, along with some Google seed funding to get things going. If the font reaches its pledge target, Google then tweaks the font for use on websites and places it in its directory.

While this hasn't resulted in an avalanche of new fonts, the ones available so far do fill in some gaps in the collection. Hopefully the success of this model will encourage more type designers to participate. I've included the Kickstarter-funded fonts here, so you can decide for yourself. Above is Exo Sans and below you'll find Euphoria Script, Folk, Fast Brush Script and Montserrat.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

Adobe System's Spring Software Tsunami

2012-01-19T16:14:20Z

When Creative Suite 6 ships, sometime within the next few months, Adobe is hoping you'll purchase a subscription to its Creative Cloud, which is a central component of the release. Let me restate that: Adobe is really, REALLY hoping... Perhaps most importantly, it puts a stake in the heart of Adobe's upgrade dilemma. Until CS5, engineers beavered away for years between releases, at which point Adobe would unleash a marketing blitz to convince its users to upgrade. Many did but more than a few upgraded only every second release. This included yours truly, who maintains Graphics.com on a daily basis with CS4 Design Premium. I started with CS, then went on to CS2 followed by CS4 but passed on 5 and 5.5. Adobe is not crazy about customers like me, since we further fragilize a revenue stream based on long release cycles, as well as being a pesky tech support burden. Adobe's solution was to offer a subscription model in 2011, as well as point releases every year, beginning with 5.5. My sense is that response to both these initiatives was less than overwhelming, thanks to the new features in the 5.5 apps not being that compelling and the subscriptions not adding any value to the classic buy-and-own approach.

But with CS6 and Creative Cloud, laggards like myself will find themselves on the endangered species list. Sure, I'll be able to upgrade my Suite to CS6, via an offer that's available until the end of this year. I applaud Adobe for recently reversing its draconian upgrade policy of last November, which would have provided upgrades only from 5 or 5.5. But I'm not expecting the CS7 Suite to be available as a downloadable or boxed product. Perhaps even 6.5 will be available only by subscription. Because the advantages of the subscription model to Adobe are just too compelling.

Ask any utility company, cell phone service, bank or landlord: you can't beat monthly income. For a software company this is a dream come true with many benefits, such as the elimination of piracy. But without the Creative Cloud, such an approach wouldn't be feasible, since there needs to be a lot of perceived benefit for users to turn their backs on something they own and embrace a rented product that disappears when they stop paying for it. Pricing isn't finalized at this point, with Adobe saying only that memberships will start at $49.99 a month (why not just make it $50?) for a one-year subscription. Will it be worth it? Not for those using just one or two apps but the Creative Cloud offer should prove tempting for heavy Suite users. Just what will membership, as Adobe prefers to call it, get you?

First off, nothing less than the latest versions of all the Creative Suite desktop tools. That's right, all of them, as well as other applications, such as Lightroom, Edge and Muse. Just to be clear, you download, install and run these locally, like you do now, it's just that these are all included in a Creative Cloud membership. Then there's all the Adobe Touch tablet apps, including Photoshop Touch. But wait, as they say, there's more. Services include device and computer syncing of your creative files, cloud storage, Adobe Business Catalyst for creating and hosting sites, the very nifty Adobe Typekit for serving webfonts, and even Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, for creating iPad apps. That's quite a pile.

Of course, questions remain. One of my first thoughts was how many computers a membership was good for — this will be a non-starter if I can't continue to run my applications on both my desktop and laptop. And what will cloud storage cost beyond the free 20 GB, which will be chewed up pretty quickly? But for 50 bucks a month, I have to admit that at this point Adobe has my attention. So when its PR firm recently contacted me with the offer to play with all the Touch apps on a Samsung tablet running Android 3.1, there wasn't much chance I'd decline.

The Touch line currently includes Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, Proto and Photoshop. I spent some time with all of them but my main interest was in Photoshop, given that I've been using the desktop version since version 3. I have to admit that I was prepared to be dismissive, given the horsepower of the Samsung tablet and the idea of using my finger to perform actions I was so used to making with a keyboard and mouse. However, Adobe has clearly given the interface of Photoshop Touch a lot of thought, with the result that it's not only aesthetically pleasing but quite responsive. Little touches make all the difference, such as tool names being only visible when you touch them to save screen space, and an offset pointer option that makes it a little easier to work with some precision, if you don't have a stylus. So yes, I had fun messing about with the Touch's stripped-down implementation of layers, selection tools, filters and effects. Speaking of selections, I was surprised to encounter Scribble Selection, which seems to have been lifted verbatim from the selection technique used by many AKVIS plugins, such as Coloriage.

I was able to make use of the Creative Cloud to exchange files with my desktop, albeit in a limited way. Perhaps because I'm using the CS4 version of the Creative Suite, I hadn't known that the Creative Cloud was in beta at this point and available to anyone with an Adobe ID, which is itself free for the asking. Whether this will remain the case after CS6 ships is hard to say, since the Creative Cloud pages on Adobe's site say that "Customers will have access to a free membership to explore certain features of Creative Cloud." The key words there are "customers," "explore" and "certain features." It would make sense to assume that at least those purchasing any of the Touch apps would have a free base level of Creative Cloud functionality, such as the 20 GB of storage currently provided by the beta.

I was able to upload a PSD file from my desktop to the Creative Cloud and open it in Photoshop Touch. But here's where the limitations kick in, beginning with a 1600x1600 image size limit. Larger images are simply resized down, with a noticeable loss in image quality. It gets worse, since layers in the PSD file are also flattened when opened. It wasn't any more fun going in the other direction, since Touch saves files in PSDX file format, which unfortunately requires Photoshop CS5 or later plus a free plugin to open. The alternative is to save as JPEG. Ugh. Clearly Adobe could have made it possible to open Touch files in earlier versions but it chose not to. A good guess would be that this was because the main role of all the Touch apps is to add value to the upcoming Creative Cloud membership plan, since they are designed to work with the latest versions of the desktop applications. Photoshop Touch itself is still at version 1.0.0, two months after it shipped. No doubt the next version will show up when Creative Clould becomes available.

Which brings me to the question of who will use Photoshop Touch. On Adobe's site the firm says that Photoshop Touch "lets you quickly combine images, apply professional effects, share the results with friends and family through social networking sites." Well, that's all good fun but what about using it as part of a professional workflow? So here's how I see it. Adobe is hoping that Photoshop Touch will be a hit with consumer users, as this text indicates. That could happen, since Photoshop Express, despite all its shortcomings, has been heavily downloaded. But of course that's free and Photoshop Touch is $9.99. If it is a hit, Adobe can also make money from Creative Cloud storage fees and other services. Photoshop Touch sales in the Android Market have declined in the last 30 days, its Facebook page is moribund and the discussion forum on Adobe's site is also pretty quiet, so it's not clear what its fate will be as an isolated purchase, whether for consumers or pros, although availability for iOS will give it a boost.

If you have Photoshop 5 or 5.5 I say what the heck, for 10 bucks why not give its Touch cousin a spin? You might find it handy for visual brainstorming, simple comping or perhaps tweaking web-resolution images. But it will really make more sense — as will all the Touch apps — when it has more functionality and can take advantage of the upcoming Creative Cloud and CS6 applications. To close on a positive note, only Adobe could have released an entire suite of tablet apps for the creative community and it should be applauded for doing so. In fact I'm counting on Adobe to make Creative Cloud so compelling that I won't have to think twice about joining when it becomes available. Adobe, don't let me down!

What do you think: will you be the first in line for a Creative Cloud membership?

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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The Great Adobe Upgrade Dilemma

2011-11-28T09:51:13Z

Like many of you, I use Adobe Creative Suite applications every day, specifically Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Acrobat Pro. These form the core of the tools I work with to maintain Graphics.com. The only significant exception is in the area... I'm on record as being no Adobe basher, and in fact in my last missive I took the unpopular stance of defending the continuing existence of Flash. And yet I'd be remiss to not share my concern with the possible impacts of Adobe's recent shift in upgrade policy. What's all the fuss about? Just this. In the past it was possible to move to new versions of individual applications or Suites from ones that went back several iterations. This made it possible for me, and many others, to move from the initial Creative Suite to 2 and then 4. So I was looking forward to moving to 6 when it was released next year.

But that possibility was rudely shattered with the announcement at the Adobe MAX conference earlier this month that unless you were the lucky owner of 5 or 5.5 you would have to pay full price for moving to 6. Stop and think about that for a moment. With 5.5 due to be replaced in a matter of months, we're now forced to purchase an upgrade we don't want, near the end of its lifespan, so that we can then soon purchase... another upgrade. There's something rather diabolical about that.

I've been waiting for a hailstorm of complaints from Adobe's customers but to date this has yet to manifest itself. The only objection to the new policy I've come across has been an open letter to Adobe from Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, who is no doubt concerned about a scenario in which his members stay parked forever on old versions of Photoshop. Not much need for new tutorials, books or conferences in that case, is there? In fact the entire infrastructure of book authors and trainers will be affected, not to mention websites like Graphics.com that publish more than a few articles and news items devoted to the Suite. What's the point of continuing in that direction with a greatly-reduced number of people moving to 6?

Because that will be the likely outcome of such an upgrade policy. Adobe has decided to refocus on its conception of its customers—either pros at the high end or consumers—with the little fish in the graphics pond left to flounder for themselves. Whether that's a good business decision or not, only time will tell. But it's always sad to see a corporation throw an entire market segment under the bus, especially one that for two decades sustained and breathed life into its products.

But here we are. Up to you, now, how to react. You're certainly free to make your thoughts known to Adobe, whether indivually or in an organized manner. Myself, I'm trying to decide whether to take advantage of Adobe's current offer to upgrade applications or Suites to 5.5, which ends November 29. Or should I hang in there and see if the Creative Cloud-based subscription model is more attractive when Creative Suite 6 ships next year. And you?

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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Stamp Out Fascist Open Standards

2011-11-21T14:36:41Z

It was of course the Marquis de Sade who once observed from his observatory of mankind that was the asylum of Charenton that "Those who define are the masters." In that he not only summed up the most important... Let's start with the intellectual dishonesty of co-opting the Occupy Wall Street movement, one of the most important popular manifestations of our era. I don't really like hamburgers very much. So from the same logic, it would be fine for me to create an Occupy McDonalds site, declaring the importance of returning to a hamburger that was 100% organic beef. You'd say that was self-selving and trivial? If so, you would be right. The creators of Occupy Flash are quite aware of the dishonest nature of their hijacking of the OWS brand, since they declare that: "We understand we are fairly shamelessly co-opting populist terminology. And for that matter, we're not really occupying anything. More like evicting. Or banishing. Regardless, we love the idea of normal people taking on big corporations in the interest of the population at large."

Right. More truthfully, they love the idea of grabbing the fleeting attention of developers for the empty vessel that is their antipathy towards Flash. If they wanted to take on "big corporations" they could just as easily start with Apple, the master of closed systems. But Adobe is a much easier whipping boy.

These folks don't like Flash in a big way. But why? "The Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates." Well, one out of five isn't bad, I guess. It does require a lot of security updates. Like, oh, let me see, Windows and Mac OS? Like any mature Internet-facing technology, in other words. I'll tell you right now I use Windows systems and for me, Flash doesn't crash any more, perhaps less, than anything else. Sorry, that's just how it is. Buggy? What does that mean? Its time has passed? And what will replace it? HTML5? Please, give me a break.

Here's the thing. Flash may well annoy a lot of people. Mac users, in particular, have a real antipathy towards Flash, thanks in part to the late, great Steve Jobs casting a fatwa upon it. This has been exacerbated by Adobe being its typically arrogant self in flogging it relentlessly as the key to the universe while dragging its feet in key areas. But so what? Show me something better that can really set the browser free. These Occupy Flash types would prefer we all march to the dumbed-down open standards song, a browser-based experience that would set the clock back a decade. Sure, open standards simplify the life of developers but where do the users show up in all this? Typically, nowhere. The technical elite call the shots to further their own narrow agenda and users are left to update their Facebook profile and buy junk on Amazon. Hello, isn't the Internet capable of just a bit more than this? And of tolerating technologies that (horrors!) are not the product of standards committees. You know, those groups that have contributed so much to the advancement of humanity.

I think we just might be able to tolerate the existence of a single browser plugin that actually has the potential to greatly enhance our experience of the Web. The responsibility is all Adobe's for not spending the last few years encouraging the development of such compelling Flash content that we wouldn't all rise as one and demand that they continue extending its capabilities. But failing that, to allow a coterie of developers with a selfish agenda to incite us to stick a knife in it—no thanks, you can count me out.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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Creating Facebook Tabs the ShortStack Way

2011-11-09T12:09:16Z

One of the oldest tricks in the book when you're on a tight budget and looking to purchase goods or services is to go for one of the least expensive offerings of a high-end provider, rather than one of... The same holds true in the domain of web services. Whatever your needs there's a myriad of providers, ranging from free to ruinously expensive. How to find the gem amongst all the clunkers? I applied the single-dish-at-a-good-restaurant approach a few months ago when searching for a shop that would let me create and deploy apps for the Graphics.com Facebook page. I had been maintaining the page for a few months and decided it was time to liven it up by adding a monthly sweepstakes that offered prizes of graphics software.

The app had only a few requirements. First, it needed to be available only to those who Liked the page, a classic device to convert visitors to fans, as well as bring existing fans back to enter each month. It also needed to be fully integrated with Facebook, for example by allowing participants to share the monthly sweepstakes and invite their friends. I also needed the app to capture the names and email addresses of those entering. As well, the app creation environment needed to be simple enough that I could quickly create a new sweepstakes each month and publish it without any hassle. And if hassles arose, I wanted to be sure that support was available to quickly resolve any technical issues.

While lots of free Facebook app services are out there, and in some cases might provide all that you need, I passed on these and began checking out commercial services, those that offered plans going up to the enterprise level. After some research I opted for ShortStack, which provides plans ranging from free up to (gulp) $300 per month. The free plan is really very robust, since you have access to quite a bit of functionality that you can deploy on any number of pages with up to 2,000 total Likes. However, I went for the first pay-for level, dubbed Silver Dollar, which provides all I need for the princely sum of $15 per month, as long as the Graphics.com page doesn't exceed 25,000 fans (which won't be anytime soon).

So how did I go about creating and publishing the sweepstakes app with ShortStack? The first step was to generate the text and graphic assets, starting with the long document for the official rules. Then I created several images for the different elements that would be displayed to those landing on the sweepstakes tab for the first time, as well as to those who were already fans. Then it was time to glue these together into an app.

After logging in to ShortStack with my Facebook account, I began by creating an entry form by using the visual back end. Easy stuff, even for someone like myself who ranks form creation on the same level as root canals. Then it was time to begin the tab creation process. A range of templates is available, complete with themes, but I preferred to start from scratch. This is made easy thanks to ShortStack's widget-based, drag and drop environment, as shown below (click to enlarge).

To create the tab I simply dragged over a number of image, text and form widgets, then clicked on them to define what image or text was connected to each, and how they should display and behave. You can click between fan, non-fan and admin views of the tab at any time, which I found invaluable.

Once the "stack" was set up to my liking, I saved it and clicked Publish to display it on the Graphics.com Facebook page, shown below.

Now each month I can simply return to this tab in ShortStack, change the graphics, update the text and republish it. Sweet. Also handy is that entries are saved in a database, making it easy for me to randomly pick a winner. And on the few occasions I've been stumped by something, my queries have been quickly and comprehensively answered. I don't know if you can reasonably expect much more than that for 15 bucks a month. In fact, this has worked so smoothly that I'm now planning to deploy the photo gallery app.

While I'm clearly a ShortStack fan, there are many competing services out there. Have you found a great one I've overlooked?

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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The Once a Decade Type Competition

2011-11-04T09:19:22Z

A few years ago there seemed to be a bit of lull in the introduction of new typefaces. Perhaps not surprising, given the hundreds of thousands already available, ranging rom the classics, through contemporary releases and on into experimental... I subscribe to quite a few newsletters from font designers and vendors, and it's always a treat to poke through the latest releases and picturing what kind of project might be appropriate for some of the more compelling offerings. But this approach only scratches the surface. What's the best way to access the cream of the typographic crop? While design competitions are a great way to get a heads up on top current work, type competitions are much rarer. One of these, Letter.2, recently picked 53 entries from a field of 561 international submissions, based on their design excellence.

The completion was organized by Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), the leading typographic authority, so the choices can be trusted. Given the value of such a competition and the number of submissions, you would think this would be held yearly, but the last one took place... in 2001! So the winners in some cases go back a few years. And while showing examples is handled competently enough, there is no explanation of how the fonts exemplified "design excellence," or even a link to the site of the designers.

Take Chartwell, by Travis Kochel, shown above. You might think this is simply another condensed font, suitable for use in information graphics. Pleasant enough, but nothing to get excited about. If so, you'd be half right. In fact, Chartwell is available in three flavors for creating chart, line and pie graphics. Through ingenious use of OpenType ligatures, you type in a series of numbers and the font generates the graphic. Handy for quickly creating simple graphics directly within InDesign or XPress, for example. It even comes with the required JavaScript for using it as a webfont. Amazing. The characters in the illustration are simply provided in the form of a supporting alphabet. But there was no mention of any of this on the Letter.2 site.

Below are just a few of my favorites, with my links to more information, but it's well worth going through the winners to spot candidates for future design projects.

Aria - Rui Abreu, 2011

Marlene - Nikola Djurek, 2011

Tangier - Richard Lipton, 2010

Veljovic Script - Jovica Veljovic, 2009

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

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Erik Spiekermann by the Numbers

2011-10-31T12:40:09Z

House numbers are one of those things you don't really think about until they're brought to your attention—and then you can't stop thinking about them. This happened to me recently after reading about a new line of numerals designed...]]> Of course, part of the charm of signage in the public space was at one time due to it not having been "professionally-designed." But these days it's hard to argue with his perspective that most house numbers are not only not professionally-designed—in fact, they range from banal to hideous. I can confirm this after an afternoon of walking around my neighborhood closely examining houses, to the occasional surprise of their inhabitants.

Spiekermann has accordingly created four designs: Classic, an adaptation of Bodoni; Contemporary, based on his own Meta Bold; Industrial, a generic negative stencil; and Tech, which avoids the use of diagonal strokes, for some reason. Each number is either laser-cut enameled or painted steel, extruded and anodized aluminum or water-cut, polished stainless steel. Judging from the examples, these will succeed from a legibility perspective and should be a fit for a wide variety of modern structures, although their aggressive design might prove jarring on older structures.

Perhaps that's why the more refined Classic, in green, is my favorite. In fact, I have a weakness for old-fashioned enameled numbers, like the ones still being made by Denmark-based RAMSIGN, an example of which is shown at right. If you have a favorite manufacturer of house numbers, by all means share a link below.

More information about Erik Spiekermann's house numbers is available on the Gestalten site.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com

So French, So Bad

2011-02-22T10:49:01Z

What's with the apparent inability of the French to express the unique appeal of their country in a graphical manner? It's not like they weren't once the world leaders at this. Think of those captivating posters for Parisian cabarets from... This first came to my attention a few years ago when I stumbled across a freshly-minted logo by the French Government Tourist Office and later commented: "Here's where we are in a nut (snail?) shell. Last summer, France joined the ranks of countries having a graphical identity that embodies the delights of a touristic visit. For France, being the world's most popular tourist destination, this represented a non-trivial task, both for those managing the design project, and for the designers themselves. The result, shown below, was to my eyes far from a success, not least because it traded heavily on the mythic French image of Marianne, here in harness (or rather, out of it) to flog the wonders of French tourism."

While this had a certain racy charm, using a topless babe as the embodiment of French travel seemed to me rather dubious in this day and age. And I guess I wasn't the only one, since some months later the sanitized version below showed up. No longer offensive but now simply pointless.

To make matters worse, the government agency responsible for this effort then merged with a similar entity and called itself Atout France. Predictably, the first task of this group was to create a new logo, which you can see in all its drab horror below. I mean... beyond using the red, white and blue colors of the French flag, does this convey anything about its mission to tell people about the delights of France?

But wait, it gets worse. You may have heard that after years of high-level lobbying, the "gastronomic meal of the French" was recently given the nod by UNESCO as being part of the "intangible cultural heritage of humanity." That's right, France's glorious gastronomic tradition has now found its rightful place in the pantheon of cultural greatness, along with Turkey's Kirkpinar oil wrestling festival and some kind of Belgian bread and fire feast. These days you have to take comfort where you find it.

The French have responded to this acknowledgement in a predictable fashion — by setting up a government agency to spread the good word. And of course where there's a new government agency, there's a new logo. In this case, the agency in question has as its mission to tell the world about the wonders of French food. Wow, what a dream brief that could have been. Imagine what a talented designer could have done with that! And so with no further ado, I give you:

Hard to believe, isn't it? Is it just me or is that a piece of clipart? And how convincing is the English tagline? Even the choice of typeface and how it is set is questionable. To say nothing of the relationship between the tiny graphic above and the wide type below. What a train wreck, what an opportunity missed.

Okay, that wasn't a very positive post, I admit. So let's end things on a happier note. And since happiness in France consists at present in dreaming of former glory (believe me, I know, I live here), let's browse through some juicy images from the Golden Days, thanks to ParisPosters.com and Memory-Pub.com.

Drab French government agencies take note — your country deserves better.

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
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Creating Tasty Business Cards: to Printfinity and Beyond!

2011-01-06T12:37:49Z

Last week I shared some of the resources I found useful during my crash course on getting up to speed on using WordPress to create a hobby site devoted to French food. I have since stumbled across the StudioPress... The final site will take good advantage of all the usual social doodads to foster exposure online, but I decided to also go old school and create some cards that I could pass out when the occasion presented itself — that's often easier than going into a long-winded explanation of what a site's all about and then expecting someone to remember the url. What I needed was something that expressed the French foodiness of the site, so I began trolling the collections of the microstock agencies, in the end narrowing down my favorites to a few dozen. But then things got tougher. How to pick a single image to best personify the nature of the site? I began another online search, this time for a printer that would provide some flexibility by allowing me to use more than one image.

After landing on the sites of some rather dubious printers I eventually checked out Moo, a British online printer that seems to be well regarded in the design community. In fact, Moo has the appearance of being geared primarily to creatives and while remaining affordable, provides more than a few nods in their direction. For example, imagine my surprise and delight when I realized that I could use a different photo on the back of every single card (a process Moo calls printfinity). Talk about being a kid in a candy store. I trimmed down my image selection to ten of the best and decided to go for a print run of 200, so I'd wind up with 20 of each card.

The design side of ordering on the Moo site couldn't be handled much better. Layout templates in several formats are provided, so I snagged the Photoshop template to create the text side of the card and saved the final design to the recommended size in JPEG format. The photo side was even easier, with the requirement being to simply provide properly sized 300 dpi images. I then uploaded all the images and walked through the online proofing process to ensure everything looked okay. At the end you can choose either the Classic or Green paper. I went for the latter, which is almost painfully ecologically correct, but even the Classic is made from sustainable forests and is elemental chlorine free (not the same as paper that doesn't use any chlorine compounds for wood pulp bleaching, but still pretty good). Moo quite consistently does the right thing in this regard, an increasingly important point for designers.

And the quality of the cards? I'm certainly pleased with them. They arrived nicely packaged, along with a handy desktop card holder. The stock has a satisfying thickness to it and holds the ink well. Print quality is good, with the text side crisp and consistently positioned, while the image colors and contrast are well saturated (they would have "popped" a bit more on the Classic stock but that wasn't a look I wanted). In fact, Moo does some image optimization to achieve this liveliness, something you can disable during the online ordering process.

The down side? I honestly can't think of any. Moo provides a well-priced, quality service and would seem to be very customer-oriented. Other printed products are available, such as mini-cards, stickers, postcards and greeting cards. You can even upload your own images and receive free printed samples.

In my case, I can't get their postage stamp-sized stickers out of my mind. Imagine hundreds of tiny stickers, each with different images for food, how cool would that be? I know I want them. I just don't know what I'd do with them. But I'm working on it.

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
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Slithering Towards WordPress Mastery

2010-12-29T07:42:14Z

You might think that after a day of updating the Graphics.com site I'd be only too ready to shut down my systems and go walk the dog. Alas, I'm dogless and have yet to convince the cats to leave... I can as happily spend time in a modest husband-and-wife bistrot as one of the gastronomic temples for which France is justifiably so well known. But there is something compelling about the starred restaurant system that Michelin created and has now perpetuated for more than 80 years. Of all the many restaurant rating systems, this original one still has the most juice, with dining in a starred restaurant the promise of a memorable experience. A luxury (at least for me) confined to special events, I wound up spending quite a bit of time searching online for starred restaurants, either in my own area near Lyon or in conjunction with a trip to a different region. Michelin's own site I find impossible, so after a while the inevitable thought crept into my consciousness: why not create my own directory of the 500 or so starred restaurants?

Off I went, working my way through the list of restaurants, searching for them one at a time online and creating a spreadsheet with the results. I then set up a site using the phpMyDirectory directory application and imported the data. This site provided a simple way to quickly locate starred French restaurants in a given region or city, something I maintained for several years. Until recently, when I decided it was time to add some value to the raw restaurant listings by wrapping them in a framework that could provide both myself and (hopefully) visitors with the ability to blog about French food and restaurants, as well as interact with one another.

I've been building and managing community-driven sites for 15 years, and in that time have employed more than a few content management and blogging systems. But for some reason I had never used the insanely popular WordPress which, coupled with BuddyPress, looked like just what I needed. Starting from absolute zero I thus began gobbling up resources to quickly bring me up to speed on WordPress, the most useful of which I list below.

Digging into WordPress
I'm not usually that nuts about long, technical eBooks — I still prefer to be able to flip through a printed copy. But in the case of Digging into WordPress, which is available both in printed and PDF form, I have to admit that the eBook version works nicely. To some extent this is due to the book being very well organized and nicely designed, so it's a pleasure to scroll through. But also because it's studded with truly useful clickable links that would be a pain to type in from a printed version. I was glad I came across this as my first WordPress resource, since the authors place a lot of emphasis on thinking through the nature of a new site, followed by setting up a structure to best reflect this, via such elements as categories, tags, permalink structure and taxonomies. Another strength is the many step-by-step instructions for increasing the security of a WordPress site, many of which would never have occurred to me.

This isn't a book for those who just want to run a default install and add a few plugins. In a rare instance of a book title actually relating to its content, the authors encourage the reader to dig into the somewhat complex innards of WordPress, and it's thus designed for those with at least some understanding of PHP. I'm quite the noob in that category but I now get a sense of what's possible and have added to my list of New Year's resolutions the modest entry "learn PHP" — right after the equally attainable "achieve world peace." Hey, I can dream.

Before moving on to the next resource, let me emphasize that I was quite impressed by this book and recommend it. You can check out an extract on Graphics.com.

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes
I had reached the point where it was time to install WordPress and begin building out my site. But what theme would I use? There are plenty of both free and commercial themes available but I wasn't able to find just the right one. So I tackled this SitePoint title to get a better sense of what would be involved in creating my own template. More developer skills than I could reasonably hope to acquire, as it turned out, but the read was useful for explaining the role of theme frameworks and especially child themes. The idea with these is that you make all the changes you want to the child theme while leaving the parent theme untouched -- important in the world of WordPress where updates to its core can require a theme to also be updated. The extract on Graphics.com focuses on how to sell your WordPress themes.

WordPress 3 Site Blueprints
While most WordPress books provide a range of general information, this title attracted my interest because it focuses on showing exactly how to create nine particular kinds of sites, such as ecommerce, local classifieds, job board and membership-based. It also provides a very handy guide to migrating a static site to WordPress, something that I would imagine would be of use to many readers. However, my interest was the chapter devoted to creating a community portal, since it provided a lot of info about configuring BuddyPress, the plugin I had decided to use to add social networking functionality to my site. The clearly-presented, step-by-step instructions came just at the right time for me, and I was able to successfully install and configure BuddyPress. The downside of this book is that each of the nine sites is based on a plugin for its functionality, which is fine in theory, but the world of WordPress moves quickly. You'll need to make sure these are still the leading plugins in their category before basing a site on them. There is also an extract from this book available on Graphics.com.

WPMU DEV
It was clear I needed a solid commercial template to start with, one that I could then tweak as I went along. It had to work with the BuddyPress plugin (most don't) and I needed to know that the developer would update the template as necessary, as well as provide responses to my inevitable questions. After much wandering about I settled on the Studio theme from WPMU DEV. These folks provide a good range of themes, plugins and support, so I went for a monthly membership, which provided me with access to everything. You can just purchase the themes or the plugins but having access to the entire offering has been a great to help to me during the initial construction phase of the site.

Yoast.com
While there's no shortage of sites providing WordPress tips and techniques, Joost de Valk is something of a superstar in the search engine optimization and WordPress domains. While sometimes overbearing in his posts, Joost knows his stuff and is well worth following. I use two of his most popular plugins, WordPress SEO and Google Analytics, both of which make managing these complex tasks easier.

So where's the link to this French food site, you ask? It's coming along quite nicely, thank you, but it's not ready to fly by itself quite yet. In fact, I'm planning to change the template and move the phpMyDirectory-based restaurant listings to the Directory plugin that WPMU DEV recently released — a tortuous process that will no doubt serve as a cautionary tale for a future post.

In the interim, what WordPress resources have made the most difference to you?

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
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Attention Shoppers: 3D in Aisle 5

2010-12-21T16:46:03Z

One way to broaden your design portfolio is to make a point of constantly trying out new imaging techniques. And while 3D imagery is nothing new (in fact, anaglyphs go back to 1853), its use is rare enough in... As you might guess, StockFood specializes in photos and footage related to food, with a library of more than 400,000 items contributed by 900 international photographers and film makers. In fact, the collection is a little broaden than it may at first sound, since it also includes such categories as Food & People, Well-being & Beauty, Flowers & Decorations, and Lifestyle (Interior Decoration). That's all fine, but why it's worthy of note here is that any image in the collection is now available as an analglyphic stereogram. You simply need to specify this when purchasing the photo and it will be delivered within two working days for an additional cost of $99 above the regular license fee.

Not every photo lends itself to providing an effective stereogram effect, with the best candidates having significant depth and multiple layers. The site apparently provides advice to help buyers find the best image, to ensure that the radish, or whatever, will jump off the page. The only potential glitch is that traditional red-cyan glasses are required for viewers to experience the 3D effect. While this might seem like a show-stopper, StockFood takes an upbeat approach: "Either the glasses have to be provided at the site of any 3D campaign, or they have to be sent to customers or readers on request. Either way, the need for special glasses offers an ideal opportunity for direct communication with target clients. Despite the financial cost, it allows the customer to become more involved in the communication tool. And personal commitment of this sort enhances advertising impact." Customer involvement has a price, so make sure your potential client for 3D has deep pockets.

StockFood provides a short video showing off a few sample images and even has a contest running until the end of this month in which it's giving away 1,000 sets of glasses. Nice, but what I would have really liked to have seen was a gallery of examples of real-world printed work showing this imagery in use — hopefully that will show up as clients begin to take advantage of the creative possibilities of 3D food photos.

What do you think, is this something you can see using for your own work?

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
Follow Graphics.com on Twitter

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The Outside In Approach to Social Networking

2010-07-13T13:04:04Z

Speculation has been heavy of late that Google is poised to introduce a new service that will attempt to stave off Facebook's otherwise inevitable quest for global domination of the social space. So if you came across someone who... That would seem to be the case with Paul Adams, who is currently also putting the finishing touches on Social Circles: How Offline Relationships Influence Online Behavior and What it Means for Design and Marketing, due for publication by Pearson Education in August. Look for an extract from that on Graphics.com.

Adams' Think Outside In blog embodies his ideas about business and design, which he sums up in the following way: "We need a new skill set, a new way of understanding people. A new way of understanding customers. We need to understand how people think, and what motivates them to behave in certain ways. The best way to do this is to design from the outside in. To observe people in their own environment, probing them so that we understand their behaviour. This understanding enables us to design things that are meaningful and valuable to people. So stop designing products and features, and start designing experiences."

Adams' point is that we need to pay more attention to the way people actually are, rather than basing design decisions on what makes sense to us or what we think will make sense to others. Basing a creation on one's own worldview has its place—notably in the arts, with novelists and visual artists traditionally drawing heavily on their own experiences. But this approach has limits, especially in more rigorous domains. We know now, for example, that Freud based much of his psychoanalytic theory on himself and his immediate family, before extrapolating this to apply to all of humanity, from prehistory to the indefinite future. However, it turned out that (luckily for us) Freud and his family were a one-off. Thus, the resulting dead end of Freudian psychoanalysis can be seen as a textbook case of designing from the inside out.

I mention all this here because Adams recently posted a monster slide deck from a talk he recently gave to the Voices That Matter web design conference. I can't imagine how he managed to get through all 216 slides, but the posted talk, complete with footnotes, is packed with enough insights to keep anyone involved in the web to ponder afresh the increasing role of social interaction. And as you might expect from Adams' Outside In focus he has lots to say about what we can learn from the offline social networks in which we engage. There's also intriguing nuggets, such as evidence gleaned from sources as diverse as Neolithic villages, the Roman army, Wikipedia administrators and online gaming communities to indicate that 150 is the maximum number of people with whom we can maintain weak social ties. Who knew?

I won't comment on more details here but simply encourage you to take your time going through the presentation above. Hats off to Adams for sharing his perspective.

Chris Dickman
Founding Editor, Graphics.com
Follow Graphics.com on Twitter

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