At the 49th we are naturally curious people who get genuine enjoyment from learning new techniques, software solutions and by striving to stay in touch with modern trends and standards. We pride ourselves on being a very adaptable design service provider and this philosophy has enabled us to benefit from working on richly varied set of projects in numerous fields, for which I am very grateful.
We were recently contacted by illustrator and designer extraordinaire @TrulyAceDesign from www.trulyace.com who I respect a massive amount to helpfully point out that when she tried to subscribe to our RSS feed, Google reader didn't like it at all. I must admit that I had totally forgotten there even was an RSS feed, let alone that someone might want to bother subscribing to it and it swiftly became apparent that despite always trying to be ahead of the game, I have to hold my hands up to the fact that my enthusiasm toward understanding and implementing RSS had left our own site a little behind the pack. For one reason or another (K2 I'm looking at you and your wonderful ability to be fantastically irritating on Mondays) it took me ages to get the feed working properly. Now that it is working I'd really appreciate it if as many of you reading this as possible would click the orange Lego brick on the right of the page and subscribe to make my endeavours worth the angst.
The thing is, I just have this little nagging feeling that there will be a lot of people (like me until recently) to whom at best RSS holds little appeal and at worst have no idea what it is or how to use it. I thought it might be useful to construct an easily palatable guide to RSS and why it's in actual fact really useful and not just a pretty little glassy button that started appearing a few years ago that potentially you have never clicked on due to technophobia.
I read an article recently which contained some advice from retro design superstar David Carson (how very 90's of me) that said something along the lines of when sending over or presenting concept artwork for client review don't include the design you weren't sure of because that's the one that will be chosen. I think we can all relate to this and as you consign that beautiful, cutting edge concept you were 100% sure was going to be used to the studio dustbin, safe in the knowledge that you probably won't be winning that award now after all, you can't help but let off a little desperate sigh and wonder where you can swap your client for someone with limitless budget and a total empathy with your creative vision.
You are a highly trained, highly skilled, highly experienced powerhouse of creativity, what do these chumps know anyway - I've seen things these people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
This post is for my own benefit as much as anything else. I worked in pre-press for quite a while and at one point I knew all of the various sizes of paper off by heart as it was my job to not only order in the paper stock, but at times to also guillotine it up. Whenever I get a request to set up an A1 poster though I just cannot seem to keep the figures in my head and end up consulting Wikipedia. I am never too convinced at the accuracy of Wikipedia though, so in this case I have looked it up from an actual book (retro) and created a definitive list for UK folks anyway, of paper sizes.
Whilst it's not a pre-requisite for designers to like apples (although I hear tell of them keeping the doctor away) it is pretty much a given that they all love Apple. Their stuff looks nicer, runs for longer and is just much more desirable in general despite costing loadsANDloadsANDloads. I love my magic mouse in particular and I can't imagine ever wanting to use anything else to manipulate my pointer (sorry Michelle) - it's perfection.
I loved being a design student. From the lack of money, unwashed clothes, terrible accommodation and ability to smoke like a chimney and drink like a fish whilst simultaneously exploring new heights of creativity and interest - it was fab. Whilst you carry on learning new techniques and skills throughout your career - the opportunity to do this whilst watching Quincy, Diagnosis Murder, 2 generic cooking shows, 1 generic DIY shows and squeezing in at least 2 hours of solid Fifa '98 'Road to World Cup' evaporates as quickly as your final loan cheque. You graduate and then with a brutal inevitability you need a job - and what better place to start than, er, actually where do you start?
We all used to use Quark Xpress to do our design and artworking, and we thought it was the best thing in the world - so fast, so easy to use, so standard. Those days have gone. Remember those jobs where you had to use a drop shadow which immediately meant an annoying voyage into Illustrator, probably a clipping path or two, loads of extra files that somebody else would lose or rename. Ugh. What about bringing in your PSDs or properly distilling those pesky PDFs (probably after realising that your exported PDFs were unusable if you were unlucky enough to use Quark 6). The annoyances stacked up over the years and so did the price and eventually the monolithic presence of the self-proclaimed industry standard became diminished in the stead of the young buck - InDesign. I first used InDesign when it was called InDesign 2.0 and I wasn't that blown away (probably stubbornly saying something like 'well, why do I need this when I have Quark already?") but with the introduction of The Creative Suite and it's common sense based usability with it's second-to-none range of features, there really was no looking back. I have used it in every studio I have worked in since 2003 and 49th Floor use it to this day and I imagine always will unless Quark makes a surprising return to form (I still have the Quark shortcuts memorised in the design-claw part of my brain) or if some creative techno-types release an all singing, all dancing open source version.
This is a simple guide to saving images or logos to be used as avatars at the correct size for various popular social networks. Remember though, if you're not used to photo manipulation or design products like Photoshop or Illustrator a great and fast resizing resource is available at: http://mypictr.com which is free and a piece of cake to use. Click Read More to read more.
