Hevetiki

Just discovered the work of Matt Moriarty of Smlfort. How brilliant is this.

10.6 glitches and fixes

It is been a couple of weeks with 10.6 and at I feel that my initial apprehension of upgrading blindly was largely unfounded. That said I did clone my HD before (as I do weekly anyway) and ran TimeMachine (as I do regularly). Justin Case. and here’s what I found.
1/ Freehand MX bombed. Completely. Bounced on the dock a couple of times then nothing. Nada. Zip. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my Adobe stuff, but sometimes FH is better. Much better. It is like my sketch pad before Illustrator, and a future without it was looking pretty bleak. Luckily after an hour or two hunting I found that the problem was because I only has a single user license and as we speak this is a big problem. The solution:
You reboot from a version of 10.5 you have as a backup. (I love you SuperDuper!) (System Preferences>Startup Disc) then open FH. Open FHMX, Help>Transfer Licence>Quit. Open FHMX again and enter a volume license. Let’s be clear; I paid good money for my software and expect it to work when I am. It’s just that the single user license isn’t supported and I have bills to pay and brief to meet. I am not supporting cracked apps at all but if you are in the same situation as me you will need a volume license like this WPD700-59309-14394-64786 to get back on your feet while Adobe sorts things out. Quit FH again and Reboot with your 10.6 Startup Disc. FH is back.
2/ Bold fonts in Firefox having upgraded to 10.6. While not a big problem it was annoying. And the fix for me was quite simple. I figured it was a Firefox issue, but as it happens all I needed to do was purge my font caches. I run Suitcase Fusion 2, so I quit the Core (System Preferences>Fusion Core>Stop). Opened Font Doctor X>Tools>Clear font Caches and restart.
Business as usual.

To pubish or not to publish

Looking over my webstats I find myself listed as a contributor in an upcoming Logo2 book by Zexis. Which is nice, although I have some reservations as I submitted work over 2 years ago, possible 3, so I am not sure how indicative of current design trends it can be.
In other news, the talented designer and friend Monique Kneepkens is featured in the soon to be published Form book. More details to follow.

Type on the Moon

There’s been a bunch of chatter about the ‘other’ poster for the brilliant film Moon. Which, if I am being honest is the main reason I went to see the film, and boy is a visual feast, specifically the typography and the interfaces. I hunted about and found that FontFeed has beaten me to it pointing out that it is Micro­gramma/Eurostile Extended that make the experience so original and, well, just right. Go see the film. seriously.

Font table

Fontplore Showreel from Mphasize on Vimeo.
Not exactly an essential piece of office equipment but would be more useful that the stereotypical table-football/tabletennis table that sits in the corner gathering dust in many agencies. That said I did work in an agency with a Scalextric track which was cool…

Mercenary space marines need logos too

Logo concept for upcoming science fiction movie.

A year in the making

It's nice to see (at long last, in fact well over a year) my latest banners fluttering in the breeze all over Christchurch city. Photos of some of them below, I'll try and get the whole set soon (you can see the illustrations here in the meantime).

The world through Kids’ eyes

Without a doubt this was the song of 2008 for me, so it is great to see a music video with a difference to go with it.


Via Creative Review

Speed of word processing: Size matters.

“A new study shows that we're faster at processing words that refer to big things than we are at processing words that denote small things.
It is suggested that a reason why bigger items might generate faster responses is related to imageability. While both bigger and smaller items can be equally highly imageable, it may be that the relative speed of accessing a stored visual representation is faster when the object is bigger.”
Via BPS / Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Where is the internet?