New muslim pop culture heroes…

Source: www.baltimoresun.com

CAIRO – Abu Essam’s footsteps echo loudly as he walks through the narrow alleys of Damascus’ old city. Around him in 1930s Syria, tall stone buildings block the scorching sun. Cautiously, he walks on. …

Article about historical references used in Muslim comic books and video games … not unlike our own Western games…

Anti-billboard activists recall rebel tradition

Source: www.baltimoresun.com

Rebellious thoughts on advertising and Paris’ long tradition of street posters that originates back to 1881 (Art Nouveau) – how has advertising changed the way we see our streets?

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.france22feb22,0,7348127.story

Popfly by Microsoft

Microsoft released Popfly which spotlights Silverlight, a rival-in-the-making for Flash (we’ll see Microsoft, we’ll see). You can create 3D games, interactive mashups, videos, and more.

I’ll be interested to see where it goes after BETA. It would be nice if it were cross-platform, but hey, I’m not holding my breath. It’s Microsoft, so whatever.

Article >>

This is Thriller…

Awesome mashup / audio compilation.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1885588

Quark Vs. InDesign – the battle rages on

So I’ve done an unofficial poll of people in higher ed, printers, graphic designers and non-profits, and found that there’s some disparity in the opinions of people in the industry about their professional page layout program of choice.

Quark has been a long-standing application used in the print and graphic design world for the development of multi-page format documents. It goes back years and years, and for a long time had only a minor competitor in Pagemaker (which, honestly, never really compared). In general, there are mixed feelings about Quark. Alot of higher ed institutions are torching the program – it’s difficult to upgrade, and Quark has always been incredibly stingy with their upgrades and educational pricing. Alot of higher eds I spoke to simply said that they might keep a class or two that utilizes Quark, to simply keep it in the mix for posterity’s sake, but I wonder how long that will last.

Professionals seemed split – designers say about 50% of their clients are using or requesting Quark. Nonprofits seem the most disparate – many people are using Quark, InDesign, or possibly still using Pagemaker or even lower end products that weren’t really intended for large scale document design and development.

InDesign was released years back as part of the evolving Adobe Creative Suite. Honestly, Adobe went about it in all the right ways – releasing a product that was part of a package, cheaply priced, and with GUI so similar to the powerful Photoshop and Illustrator, that designers found themselves comfortable with it almost immediately. The packaging, the price, the ease of use, all seem to connect and more higher eds and non-profits seem to be leaning towards the Adobe compatible product line.

Printers seem indifferent. Many of them request PDF files over anything at this point, (especially for smaller documents), so the authoring software is irrelevant.

In the end, there seems to be a common consensus – if you know and understand design conceptually, it doesn’t matter which product you use – InDesign, Quark, letterpress, camera, it just doesn’t matter. Good Design, is Good Design, despite the tool you use to create it.

Microsoft better look out :)

This is probably old news, but I was pretty psyched:

http://www.openoffice.org/

Open Source = Rock On.

Design Matters

A fantastic archive of Friday audio lectures on Graphic Design.

http://www.sterlingbrands.com/ListenLive.html

Manual Typographicum, Ala “Digitized”

They refer to this as the “digitized” version of Zapf’s “Manual Tyopgraphicum“. I call it copyright infringement, but while it’s there, I’m going to take advantage

Professional Groups

AIGA – http://www.aiga.org/

Figleaf Software’s Industry Discussion Lists: http://www.figleaf.com/Community/listserv.cfm

Baltimore Graphic Design Meetup: http://graphicdesign.meetup.com/135/

DC Web Women: http://www.dcwebwomen.org/

Fight the Creative Tax:  http://www.fightthecreativetax.com/

Art Director’s Club, Metro Washington: http://www.adcmw.org/

Baltimore AIGA: http://baltimore.aiga.org/