Category Archives: Apple

Don’t Forget the Words

Frank Chimero, The Second Trip-Up:

A young designer is beaten over the head with typefaces, grids, and rules—and rightfully so—but typography can act as a smoke screen. There is so much to learn about the letters that it’s easy to forget about the words. Once a designer has the typographic skills in their pocket, anyone with their head on straight realizes ugly words in beautiful typefaces are still pretty dumb. I tripped over this observation while struggling to make good designs and clear illustrations for idiotic articles and muddled ideas. I then fell into something I’m still attempting to understand: words are the most explicit example of clear thinking.

Work at Home: Taking Breaks

As a freelancer I have the freedom to work at a pace that I control with as many rest breaks as I think I need. It’s one of the many great reasons to freelance and it’s not just a matter of convenience but also of health and productivity. my tendency is to work a two-three hour block between breakfast and lunch and then between lunch and dinner. Within those blocks I work 45 minutes with 15 minute breaks. I’m not using any kind of app to remind me to break so this fluctuates a bit and is usually influenced a bit by my surroundings or natural needs to take a bathroom break or to get a drink. It’s just as common for me to work thirty minutes and break for ten minutes when I feel the need.

There are days when I am between projects and on such days my rest/work pattern falls away completely. I’ll take care of miscellaneous tasks such as scanning receipts or clearing out accumulated desk clutter between extra time catching up on social media and RSS feeds. It’s not uncommon for me to have one such day durning the normal “work week”.

In short, it is a natural cycle of focused work balanced with rest and relaxation as needed. The result is a sense of productive well being and and a body of work that I and my clients are happy with.

Work at Home: Using a Standing Desk

This past spring, after years of working at a desk or while laying in a bed with a laptop (most recently a MacBook Air), I decided to begin standing while doing any work at the computer. I’d already transitioned from the laptop which Kaleesha was using to write her first book and had moved over to a Mac Mini at the desk full time. Two things happened shortly after this transition. The first was that the increased time sitting at the desk without the ability to move around to work led to increased back pain. This led to the second which was a bit of renewed research into the benefits of standing to work. I’d previously tried it out but had never pushed myself to make it my primary position to work and with the laptop it was too easy to just sit or lay somewhere.

In March, with increasing pain and a scale that insisted on inching slowly higher I decided to make a few changes. First was to stop sitting while working. I used a bit of extra plywood in the shed to construct a raised display shelf and, a bit lower, an adjustable shelf for my keyboard and trackpad. It took just a couple hours to put together and paint. I built it with the notion that during the transition period I might want to move the display down and sit occasionally but never did. I’ve been standing ever since. Well, I have been known to sleep on occasion and sit at the table for dinner. I also spend a bit of time lounging with the iPad on the bed or couch throughout the day but work time, 3–6 hours a day, is standing.

Six months in and I can report that I am very happy with the decision. During the first few weeks I was often aware of standing and had a little pain in my legs and feet. I could get the work done that I needed to get done but it wasn’t effortless. Today I regularly stand for 1–2 hours at a time with no thought to the fact that I’m standing. Put another way, standing has become the natural way that I work. I usually put in an hour or two between breakfast and lunch and another 1–3 hours between lunch and dinner. Occasionally I’ll need to do an hour or two in the evening. My schedule changes a bit day to day which is quite nice as it allows for some flexibility and variation between standing, sitting and reclining.

Of course it should be noted that standing is only one aspect of a healthier lifestyle. I can’t say that I’d seen any weight loss for most of this period. In fact, due to my diet I’d seen an increase over the past year which continued after I began standing. I’ve since gotten back into walking 2 miles a day and in July I began tracking my diet more closely, both practices have helped me steadily and slowly drop half of the weight I needed to drop. By January I will have achieved my goal weight and will go into the new year with the healthy habit of standing while working.

Excellence is not Perfection

There’s been a good bit of hub-bub lately about how Apple has over-extended itself. Whether it’s complaints about iOS 8 bugs or a bendy iPhone 6 it all seems to be much ado about nothing. No doubt there are bugs but this is nothing new. No company releases a major new upgrade to any operating system without bugs, not even Apple. Go back through the releases of iOS or Mac OS and you’ll see that every release has bugs and most releases have at least one or two big bugs. This is nothing new so why pretend it is? Frankly, given the ever increasing complexity of the Apple hardware ecosystem, my hat’s off to them for keeping it together as well as they have. We expect excellence and I think that’s what we get. Excellence should not be confused with perfection.

The big bugs with iOS 8 that I’ve seen mentioned the most in my Rss and Twitter feeds? HealthKit needed an immediate fix so 8.01 was pushed out sooner than it should have which turned the just released iPhone 6s into iPods. No doubt a big problem which was rectified by 8.02 a day later. Aside from that I’m seeing the usual anecdotal complaints of instability. Another issue, not so much a bug as an issue of different timing for the different upgrades, are iOS 8 users upgrading to iCloud drive who were unaware of how this would effect their ability to access their iCloud documents from Mavericks-based Macs. Apple presents a warning for those choosing this option. Perhaps they could have done more? On my devices I’ve had no instability. My personal experience with iOS 8 has been nothing but excellent.

The critiques I’m seeing on iOS 8 seem to include the notion that Apple is rushing things and should slow down releases but this is a damned if they do, damned if they don’t scenario because it’s often said that they are not releasing enough. Not enough hardware, not enough software. Complaints about a lack of updates for iWork or iPhoto or iTunes being too bloated… the list goes on. I’m the first to admit that I often wish for new features or updates more often but that said I’m also usually very happy with what I have. Again, excellence not perfection. Most incremental updates have proven great. Major app rewrites such as iMovie several years ago or iWork last year have come with a bit of pain, no doubt. Not just in the adjustments needed for users to new interfaces and workflows but also in lost features (or temporarily missing features) and bugs.

With each new season of changes and updates there is a predictable outcry from the Apple using community about changes and bugs which is followed by a few weeks or months of bug fixes and, in the case of the major app rewrites, the return of many if not most missing features. The end result is that within a few weeks or a couple months everything is back to “normal”. iOS or OS X has returned to a stable state with it’s new features and everyone is happy. By January or February the end of the world has passed and by April Apple geeks are anxiously awaiting WWDC. By August they are beside themselves as they await the new iOS around the corner. The cycle repeats.

But along the way Apple has built an increasingly complex and collaborative ecosystem which is, increasingly, taken for granted. I remember the days of OS 8 and 9 and near daily crashes of my Mac. A week without a forced restart was nearly unheard of. I considered an uptime of 3 days amazing. Now? My Mac goes weeks without a restart, often months. Often restarts are only after OS updates that require it. That is absolutely fantastic. My iPad and iPhone? The same. Not only do my devices just keep running but they now work together in ways I would not have expected before. In just a few weeks even more so with the release of Yosemite.

But right now, even before Yosemite, my 2012 Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM is my daily workhorse with 8–12 apps open at any given moment. An example: Safari, Mail, Wunderlist, iTunes, Illustrator, Photoshop, Messages, Calendar, Filemaker, and Coda. I bounce from one to the other with no crashes. None. This MacMini also functions as the household iTunes server. iTunes, often derided as bloated and somehow a problem, performs fantastically in our household. Always on, it serves 6552 songs, 170 GB of television shows, and nearly 1 TB of movies out to multiple iOS devices including 2 Apple TVs and a couple Macs. I wirelessly back-up my iOS devices to iTunes with no effort on my part beyond initial set-up. The only time I have to plug in an iOS device is to charge it or import photos into iPhoto.

I regularly open or create documents from iWork or Byword on my Mac which are then edited, seamlessly, on my iPad. Sometimes it is the other way around. Thanks to extensions in iOS 8 and apps like Panic’s Transmit I can easily use my iPad to access and edit an image or html file on my Mac Mini which I can then upload to one of my servers. With the same device and app I can share an image on my Mac’s desktop to Facebook or Twitter with just a couple taps. I can use my iPhone to control media on my AppleTV or stream a video from a Mac to AppleTV. These little sharing workflows are things we do in our household everyday, many times a day without a second thought and more often than not they work flawlessly. We just assume they will work and they do. The list goes on and will only grow as apps are updated or new ones created. With the release of Yosemite it will get better with Handoff and Continuity. I’ve already taken phone calls to my iPhone on my iPad, with Yosemite I’ll be able to take (or make) a call on my Mac.

It’s a fantastic time to be in the Apple ecosystem and I’m just as excited about the release of Yosemite as I was iOS 8. In the first weeks there will be bugs and the usual chorus of complaints will erupt on my feeds. I’m not suggesting that people should not mention the problems with Apple releasesd, be they OS, software or hardware, only that they keep a bit of perspective. Honest and factual critique helps us move forward, dramatic headlines and exagerated problems do not. Take a deep breath. Expect excellence from Apple, not perfection.

Poster Design for Los Alamos Beer Co-op

Client wanted a bright but rustic flyer to advertise a beer festival sponsored by her beer brewing co-op. I used several fonts beginning with one of my current favorites, American Captain. I ended the design with something a bit more whimsical and reflective of their current branding and website, Brain Flower Euro. In between, Playball, Oklahoma, and Rockwell. I used a grunge paper texture faded in the background to help create a rougher, rustic feel.

The client was excited about the final result!

Ad Design for Pizzaria

This was an ad for a Georgia pizzeria.The client wanted an old world aesthetic with reds and greens as well as earth tones. A rough paper texture was used to achieve a rustic feel that might be mistaken for an old earthen wall somewhere in a Tuscan village.

Ad Design for JoJo and Sofia

It’s been a very busy 6 months! I’ve not been keeping up with the blog but have determined to make it a priority. I’ll start with highlighting some of my recent work, in particular a series of vintage themed print ads for JoJo and Sofia’s new line of men’s pocket-squares. This is one of two. A lot of fun to do.

Features two of my favorite fonts: Rockwell and Antique Book Cover. Good stuff.

Kaleesha Williams: Author Website, ePub and Printed Book Design

My partner here at Make-It-Do Farm and Tucker Creek Creative (she is also the creative force behind Daisyblend Organic Creations), Kaleesha, just recently published her first book. In fact, the Kindle and ePub versions have only been out a week and the print copies are due to arrive next week so when I say recently what I really mean is just! It is an understatement to say we are excited about her accomplishment!

I’m happy to have been able to play a supportive role in the effort. Relative to the writing of the book, my tasks were fairly quickly and easily accomplished. In preparation for publishing the book we set-up her Kaleesha Williams author website months in advance to allow time for google and other search engines to find it. We added in book teasers and she actively provided book excerpts and other related content to the blog.

After months of writing and editing she put the final touches on the book and we assembled it first in Apple’s iBooks Author. Strangely there is no easy way to export from Apple’s Pages app directly to iBooks Author so I added the chapters one by one. The final result is very nice but still waiting approval on Apple’s end. Next was publishing from Pages to ePub which is an export option and was fairly easy to do if one pays attention to the details. To get it all right it is essential to use properly named styles. For example, each chapter title should be a Header 1 style which helps to create the Table of Contents. Another important point, block quotes need to be in a style named block quote. It may seem obvious but if you’ve not used Styles with Pages it requires a bit of digging. It is the “proper” way to do long form layout and a real time saver. Using styles allows the designer to make changes throughout the publication in just seconds. Decide you want less of an indent in the block quotes? Just update the style and the changes occur throughout the document. Very similar to using CSS style sheets in html documents.

One hang-up that was not resolved: Kindle formatting. While the ePub translated fairly well into Pages and third party ePub readers such as iBooks and those available as extensions for Google’s Chrome browser, the Kindle platform has become fragmented. While our export was technically correct and works perfectly on most Kindle versions some formatting is lacking depending on the device and app used. It’s not a deal killer but would certainly be nice if the engineers at Amazon would unify the layout on the platform. We persevered and finally got the Kindle version published.

Last and probably the most exciting was laying out the book to be printed at Amazon’s Create Space. The process was fairly straightforward with just one big hiccup. The newest version of Apple’s Pages, 5.1, no longer allows for layout using facing pages which is essential. As a result we exported to the old version of Pages and designed the print version from Pages 09. It required a few tweaks but nothing too difficult. The cover was designed to Create Space specifications using Photoshop. We received the proof copy yesterday and are now awaiting the first shipment of books!

New Website: Castor River Ranch Campground

The folks at Castor River Ranch Campground have a beautiful river-side retreat just 90 minutes south of St. Louis, in the southeast corner of Madison County. The scenery is a picture of comfort and relaxation. The campground is nestled amongst forested hills and open fields, just a stones throw away from the picturesque Castor River. The charming village of Marquand, just minutes away, is home to the Durso Hills Winery, an art gallery, various historical sites and a community performance center which hosts a variety of live entertainment throughout the year.

The CRRC has been built with a quality experience in mind. All of the RV/Campsites are spacious and are furnished with picnic tables, stone fire pits, septic, electric (30 – 50-110 amp) and spring- water. They offer canoe/ kayak/tube out fitting and a shuttle service for float trips.

I enjoyed working with Jon on the web site. He was careful in his direction and provided me with all the materials I needed to get the job done. Most importantly Jon and Mary are great business people that value excellence and doing a job right, values which always make a project worth doing. The end product is a delightfully laid-back website which not only informs potential guests of all that CRRC has to offer but does so with an authentic, rustic style.

The Mac Mini at 10 Years

Original Mac Mini still being used by the kids for home school!

It’s been 10 years since the Mac Mini was released and Brian Stucki over at Mac Mini Colo has written up a great post/timeline to celebrate. It was released on January 11, 2005 and I remember being pretty excited. I’d recently purchased one of the new G5 iMacs but my sister was in need of a new Mac for her business and the new Mini was my suggestion. She bought one and I set it up with a custom FileMaker Pro database to track her customer billing and iCal for appointments. In the off hours the Mini was used for web browsing, iTunes and photo organizing via iPhoto.

A little over a year later I traded her my iMac for her Mini because she had need for more power (her husband was increasingly interested in using iMovie and iDVD) and I was mostly using my 12“ Powerbook. I wanted the Mini for a power sipping iTunes media server. Today, nearly 10 years later, that Mac Mini is upstairs still being used by the kids for their school work. I retired it from media server duties just a year ago when I moved that task over to my primary work machine, a new Mini (late 2012 model). The kids have used it ever since. Actually, until recently, the eldest, Farra, was using the above mentioned 2003 12” Powerbook (one of my all time favorite Macs!).

Upon seeing that first Mac Mini being presented by Steve I knew it would be a hit. How could it not? A $499 Mac in such a small form factor would, I thought, be what the higher priced G4 Cube (2000–2001) should have been: an affordable yet stylish introduction to the Mac for potential switchers. The Cube was a beautiful bit of design but at $1799
its high price made for an impractical purchase. The Mini did indeed succeed and is still in production. The original form factor was used until 2010 when a beautiful new, unibody aluminum enclosure was introduced. With it came a built in power supply, hdmi port and easy to upgrade memory via a twist off bottom cover. This new Mini was updated again in 2012 and as recently as October 2014 after a 2 year gap between updates.

A month ago a visiting friend had occassion to be in my office and observed the Mac Mini on my desk. He was surprised that I did all of my design work on something as lowly as a Mini which prompted a bit of a chuckle from me. Not only is the Mini my workhorse but this tiny machine generally handles my projects with plenty to spare. Only the largest Photoshop or Illustrator files ever require that the little beastie break a sweat. Exporting or converting movie files from iMovie or Handbreak also pushes the processor but that’s to be expected. The important measure with such work is of course the time it takes to complete the job and I’ve been nothing but pleased with the speed of the Mini in such tasks. All this with what many consider the bare minimum of memory in 2015, 4 GB.

It’s been a good 10 years.