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Archive: 2006 March
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Cartography Word of the Day: Benchmark
Little brass discs with a lot of legal weight
In computing, the benchmark is a test run to determine the baseline performance of a component or system. It is a stable point of reference to which all other performance or sets of attributes can be referenced to.
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Typography Word of the Day: Yogh
It looks like a 3, but it isn’t…A “lost” letter, it recently made news
The yogh, in Lucida GrandeAs the English language came forward from its Old and Middle English origins, evolution occurred. Some letters that were in common usage only three or four hundred years ago are all but unknown today.
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Mapquest Extends OpenAPI Mashup Contest Deadline
New contest deadline now 1 May, also open to Canadians
Recently we reported that, in celebration of thier new API, OpenAPI, Mapquest called all masters of the mashup to battle; The Mapquest OpenAPI Developer’s Challenge seeks the most innovative mashup of the new OpenAPI–not merely plotting points on a map but delivering value over and above to a non-commerical audience.
Read more on Mapquest Extends OpenAPI Mashup Contest Deadline…
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MacTel Photoshop More Than A Year Away
CreativePro.com is reporting the Universal version of Adobe Photoshop will not be seen until CS3 is released in Spring 2007.
Bad news for creative pro users of the new Intel-based Macintosh computers: Adobe Systems has confirmed a compatible version of Photoshop—and other Creative Suite applications—will not be available until at least Spring 2007, when they expect CS3 to be released. The current suite will run on the MacTel machines thanks to the Rosetta translator technology, but performance takes a hit.
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Worldlabel.com SVG Templates Version 1.0 Released
PRESS RELEASE
Worldlabel.com Incorporated, New York, N.Y., a major manufacturer of laser and inkjet computer printer labels in over 50 sizes has developed and published SVG Document Templates Version 1.0, free label templates.
Read more on Worldlabel.com SVG Templates Version 1.0 Released…
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Here Comes Xara LX!: The First Xara Xtreme Open Source Versions are Released
At the end of 2005, Xara announced they would be releasing Open Source versions of their popular drawing application Xara Xtreme for Mac and Linux. That day has come! The first Open Source versions of Xara LX have been released for Mac and Linux.
Read more on Here Comes Xara LX!: The First Xara Xtreme Open Source Versions are Released…
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A Fake Circus, but a Real Opportunity
A showcase for designers, new and old, to help them have more presence in the creative world
Recently I came across a site called Fakecircus. While the name deceived me at first, I had the pleasure of speaking to one of the people who is behind the project and once I really understood what it is about, I found that the project was an excellent idea.
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Drop Shadows Not Bombs T-Shirt
In four simple words, this t-shirt, a first from Playground of the Stars, makes a statement all graphic designers can jibe with.
Thanks BoingBoing for pointing this out.
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PDFs from QuarkXPress 6.5
No need to fear these Jaws: they bring PDF production under the XPress hood.
One of the most praiseworthy additions to QuarkXPress 6.5 has been the needed provision of PDF generation from within the application itself. To this end, Quark incorporated Global Graphics’ Jaws PDF creation technology and have made it integral to the XPress application; no separate program is required.
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Preflighting with InDesign
Want a happy relationship with your printer? Follow the guidelines in the first of a series of articles about preflighting with InDesign.
I remember the face of the guy working in the service bureau I used most when I told him I was going to use InDesign. Sweat pouring off his face that had assumed the typical white coloration of someone who just saw the scariest thing in his life. Turning over to me on his swivel chair he said in panic: “Why don’t you just stick with Quark? You don’t know how many prepress problems you are going to run into with InDesign!”
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How-To in Illustrator: I Heard it Through the Grapevine
Here’s how to make a grapevine in Illustrator, complete with winding tendrils of vine and juicy grapes!
For this week’s How-To we’ll construct a grapevine in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s start off by making the leaves to use for a scatter brush. Open the color palette and mix four new green colors. As you mix each, add it to the swatches palette by dragging the chip from the color palette to the swatches palette.
Read more on How-To in Illustrator: I Heard it Through the Grapevine…
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Type Slugs 2006-03-24: Font Magazine
This edition: A look into FontShop.com’s Font Magazine, Issue 004
Well, we knew this…Font Issue 004 Front coverThis last week at Designorati:Typography Main Mission we were thrilled to at last get our copy of FontShop.com’s Font Magazine, issue 004. With an attention-getting cover we figured we were looking at something if not slightly iconoclastic, at least insipriational and challenging. Leafing through it, we found we were right, so, we’re going to devote this edition of Type Slugs to a look at its design and features.
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Map Keys 2006-03-24
This edition: Experts not convinced on Mi Yo Tong Map; Extremely Small Scales; Google expands in a Big Way.
They May Have The Punters, But…
As mentioned here previously, chinese attorney Liu Gang released his findings on the authenticity of the “1763/1418″ Chinese world map my Mi Yo Tong, which is claimed to support the hypothesis that Zheng He traveled to the Western Hemisphere in advance of Columbus and the European navigators of the Age of Discovery. As perhaps expected, the map was declared authentic, with added passionate commentary and rebuttal to crtiics at no extra cost.
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Freeware Friday:Cyberduck-FTP for Mac OS X
This free little duckie will help you waddle the FTP pond painlessly and graphically
The Cyberduck IconAre you using Mac OS X? Are you on dialup? Do you have poor connectivity? Do you find the CLI version of FTP irritating and confusing to use?
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Freeware Friday: The Gimp
There is nothing gimpy about this week’s robust Freeware Friday offering, GNU Image Manipulation Program, other than its nickname: The Gimp. See for yourself why this free image editor and paint program has so many fans!
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Freeware Friday: Two in One
This week featuring two freeware downloads: Ghotscript and the ReplaceInPlace Xtension fror QuarkXPress
I am seeing scripts… err… ghosts!
Back to the time when I was still looking learning how to make PDFs and didn’t know much about the PostScript language, I came across a free utility called Ghostscript. At the time I wasn’t really impressed with it. I found it was clumsy and some fonts didn’t embed properly or in some cases they didn’t embed at all, especially if they were True Type fonts. However I was also using QuarkXPress 4, which, when making EPS files, just didn’t embed True Type fonts; I suppose that the same problem occurred when making PostScript files and the probabilityiesof success were already slim by the time I converted them to PDF with Ghostscript. Add my lack of expertise to all that, and you can see how frustrating my Ghostscript experience was.
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Mo Yi Tong Map Authentic, Says Owner
Liu Gang releases carbon-dating results of the so-called “1418/1763″ World Map, rebuts critics
On Thursday, 23 March 2006 (Beijing time) Liu Gang, the Chinese attorney whose uncovering of a map that is reputed to prove the so-called Menzies conjecture, which claims that the Chinese mariner Zheng He circumnavigated the world almost 70 years before Columbus did, released the findings of a radiocarbon-dating analysis of the map to an invitation-only audience at The Bookworm, a cafe in the Sanlitun section of Shanghai.
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Jump To It: House Industries’ New Catalog Is Out!
Get yours quick; these tend to go fast!
Digital typefounder House Industries have announced the release of their new catalog with, as they put it, “a zillion new fonts by Tal Leming, House action figures and all kinds of split-fountain fun…”
Read more on Jump To It: House Industries’ New Catalog Is Out!…
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Xara Day: Xara Xtreme’s Live Effects
With Xara Xtreme’s Live Effects, you can use your Photoshop-compatible filters on both bitmaps and vectors; and because they are applied as Live Effects, they are completely editable and reversible.
This month on Xara Day, we look at Xara Xtreme’s Live Effects tool. Adding filters to enhance images or make them more artistic is easy in Xara Xtreme. Because Xtreme supports both Xara Picture Editor Tools and Photoshop-compatible plug-ins, you can add almost unlimited effects with ease. The difference in applying these effect in Xtreme as opposed to applying them in Adobe Photoshop is that Xtreme applies them as Live Effects.
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Mozilla Releases Next-Gen Firefox Alpha
Intended as a developer preview, is released for testing purposes only
Statring today, the first developer previews of the next generation of Mozilla’s Firefox, codenamed “Bon Echo”, are available from Firefox’s Bon Echo site. Writing in the “stuff-to-hack-on” dept on Slashdot, correspondent Cmdr Taco quotes one Mini-Geek describing some of the new features:
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Three Thumbs Up!
A fun new way to improve your artistic craft and garner some notice along the way.
The 3 Thumbs Up badge, available for display from the site “Threethumbsupaward.com“While beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, it seems that bad art abounds these days. Designer and illustrator Von Glischka wants to change that, and he wants your help.
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Free QuarkXPress 7 Hands-On Training
Training for both designers and printers will be available at the Ipex exibition
The release of QuarkXPress 7 is near—at the Ipex Exhibition in Birmingham, UK, Quark will demonstrate their latest and yet-to-release version of their layout program, and will offer training for both designers and printers. The exhibition is one week long from April 4th to April 11th, in the National Exhibition Centre.
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Outcompete your neighbors online
Are you ignoring the town next door?
Newspapers live in the land of terra firma. Each newspaper primarily covers the communities it can reach, with a car and a print subscription. Yes, the paper itself probably covers the entire world with the assistance of the wire services, but the target audience is local.
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Results of Carbon Dating of Mo Yi Tong Map To Be Revealed
Owner of contoversial map to reveal test results in Beijing
Liu Gang, the Chinese attorney who owns the recently publicized Mo Yi Tong map, reputedly drafted in AD 1783 after records said to have been dated AD 1418 which is said to support the Menzies conjecture of Chinese fleets reaching the “New World” 70 years prior to Columbus, is to reveal results of radiocarbon dating on the map itself, as announced by the official 1421:The Year the Chinese Discovered the World site:
Read more on Results of Carbon Dating of Mo Yi Tong Map To Be Revealed…
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Typography Word of the Day: Anti-Aliasing
Type’s smooth operator on the digital display
Anti-aliasing is, most simply put, minimizing aliasing, But what is aliasing?
Designers using digital media and design applications use displays to view thier work. Though not obviously visibile (but obviously known) is that any digital display (in the current technology) is actually a pixel grid. Any attempt to display anything on this grid must be made in terms of this grid.
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