Recently in Interactive Category
Beyond simply developing tools that enable people to harness their creativity to communicate across print and digital media, Adobe has a long track record of championing the value of creativity itself. So it's no surprise that this week the firm released a study that supports this. Based on interviews with 1,000 full-time salaried workers aged 25 and older having at least a four-year college degree, Creativity and Education: Why it Matters, provided as a PDF, makes for some interesting reading.
Decades ago, Adobe was a champion of the use of professional-quality digital fonts, not only by creating its own library but by playing a key role in the development of font formats and fully supporting OpenType within its Creative Suite applications. That initiative had been put on the back burner in recent years, so it was good to see that with its purchase of the Typekit web fonts service last year it was back in the game. Typekit has been a significant part of Creative Cloud subscriptions since Adobe launched its membership-based service in May. This week the Typekit offering received a major upgrade as part of Adobe's rollout of its Edge Tools and Services. The clip above is an extract covering just the typographic announcements.
If you make your living doing anything remotely related to the Internet, then you too have been approached by a family member or friend requesting help on a technical issue. So it was that I was recently enlisted to speed up a WordPress-based site that was performing slowly. Not just slowly but glacially (if that metaphor still applies in an era of global warming). It was so slow that the home page would regularly take ten or fifteen seconds to load. Or it wouldn't load at all and you'd eventually wind up with a less than welcoming 500 error. An unsustainable state of affairs.
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 issues of our time but some of the most trivial. I speak here of the very minor footnote to Internet history which is the misguided Occupy Flash site and the shadowy figures behind it that prefer to not come forward.
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 most expensive from a business that focuses on the low end. Have lunch in a top restaurant, for example, and order just a single dish, washed down by mineral water. You'll eat well in a memorable environment and pay little more than for a more copious offering in a forgettable establishment. If your focus is on the quality of the experience, not the quantity, this approach can't fail.
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 the building. So instead my attention typically turns to my admittedly narrow sphere of interests: playing the Renaissance lute, practicing pendulum dowsing and learning about food. I find food fascinating in all its forms, from the raw ingredients themselves and the history of how they were used in different times and places, on to their ultimate expression in restaurants. Especially the restaurants of France, given that's where I now live.
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 was the lead researcher for the social web at Google, tasked with advising design and product teams on creating successful social experiences, you'd probably figure they were close to the epicenter.
You probably never noticed it but one of the language options when installing major software applications is Canadian English. Huh? Sure, there's American English and British English. But Canadian? What does that consist of, beyond referring to a case of 24 beers as a "two-four"? As always, Wikipedia can tell you way more about this topic than you want to know, but the gist of it is that we Canuks employ an English that blends American and British usage, while adding some usages that are uniquely ours.
Goodbye Verdana. Take a hike, Arial. After suffering through a decade and a half of purgatory, website designers are now finally free to take advantage of the typographic riches of those creating print publications. Bring on the dancing girls! Let the festivities commence! Or has a new nightmare only begun?
Earlier this summer I began a look at the alternatives available to those of us who have domains on our hands but neither the desire nor the resources to build them out to full-blown sites. Beyond simply using the domain parking provided by your registrar, what are the possibilities?
