![[decorative element]](http://designorati.com/wp-content/themes/d3/images/nav1_topics_OFF.png){kind=small}
Archive: 2006 April
-
A New Atlas for the Motorcylist
Just released, the Rand McNally Atlas is designed to appeal to the Harley rider
This week, Rand McNally announced the release of a new publication, the Harley-Davidson Ride Atlas of North America.
-
The Map Book
Beautiful new coffee-table book connects the development of maps to historical cirucmstances
We’ve recently noted what we hope is a trend toward truly deep and thoughtful books on cartography for the masses–books that not only make an inventory of historically important or notable maps but also that attempt to connect them, with enlightened and witty commentary, into the history of its time. One such recent book is 100 Maps, which we mentioned in this posting here.
-
Cartography Word of the Day: Isoline
The wavy lines on weather maps, topo maps, and others.
A temperature and pressure map depicting isobars (lines of equal barometric pressure) and isotherms (which are the boundaries of the colored areas depicting temperatures). From this map we can infor the structure of the weather systems over the United States at the time the map was generated. (Map courtesy NOAA) (click image to enlarge) -
Typography Word of the Day: Italic
That slanted script–don’t fake it!
A comparison between true italic and “fake” italic, or oblique, typeset in QuarkXPressItalics are a style of glyph that slant at around 15-20 degrees from the vertical, and are more cursive than roman but less roman than script.
-
Freeware Friday – Freemind
Freemind is the ultimate free planning tool for designers. Using a mindmap view of your plans will help you generate ideas for a website, book or video more quickly than a just having a features or requirements list.
-
Xara Day: Using the Xara Picture Editor
Xara Xtreme’s right-hand man the Xara Picture Editor—or XPE for short—gives you Xtreme control over bitmap handling in and out of Xara Xtreme
This month for Xara Day we will take a look at Xara’s Picture Editor, a nice little bitmap editor that works with Xara Xtreme to give you more control over bitmap images than you thought possible with a vector program. The Xara Picture Editor (hereafter known as the XPE) lets you edit any bitmap with all of the most commonly used bitmap editing tools. It has a one-click auto enhancement tool, redeye removal, crop and rotate tools, and exposure and color correction tools. It also uses Live Effects.
-
An Obsession With The Book
Everything’s In PDF format or can be downloaded these days. So what is the compulsion to go to the bookstore? A personal reflection.
I hold in my hands a slate-gray volume that was published by Rockport and I bought today. The title? 100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers, written and designed by Plazm. Bought at Powell’s Books, the legendary bookstore here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.
-
Paragraph Style Sheets in QuarkXPress 6.5
The ins and out of a layout artist’s right-hand power tool; a paradigm defined.
The concept of a style sheet has become a bedrock of textual presentation, and it’s obvious why; style sheets allow quick and consistent specification, facilitates fast revision, and establishes standard treatment for modes of text (headlines, body copy, captions, et.al.) in a document.
Read more on Paragraph Style Sheets in QuarkXPress 6.5…
How To: Illustrator—Quick Wrinkle Flowers
For quick spring flowers to kick up a spring illustration, try Illustrator’s polar grid and wrinkle tool along with Illustrator’s brushes.
When you need a quick addition to an illustration, try these wrinkle tool flowers. They take seconds to make in Adobe Illustrator (versions 10 and up), and can have many different looks by using different colors and brushes.
In any debate--particularly on the Internet--one can count on the participation of two types of people, and they will invariably follow a staged behavior.
- Deconstructing A Photoshop Illustration
My illustration for the How-To on conditional actions uses a variety of Photoshop techniques.
My favorite tutorials are often the ones that deconstruct real-world graphics; Scott Kelby and Photoshop User magazine comes to mind as an example, with their re-creation of cool graphics floating around our heavily-branded environments. So after a few requests I decided to break down the techniques used in my illustration for the How-To tutorial about conditional actions; you can see the completed graphic in Figure 1, or check out the Designorati homepage.
- Basking in heat from above
If your newspaper is anything like my newspaper, you would have noticed stirrings of change coming down, surprisingly this time, from above.
From my view, pressure is building to embrace online news delivery — resistance has crumbled, if not outright vanished. It’s not just the little guys and gals in the trenches wanting to experiment and try new ideas. Ideas that once would have marked me as a maverick to rein in suddenly get noticed and embraced. One year ago I saw skepticism and hesitation; today we can’t move fast enough to please the powers that be.
- Adobe Acquires Trade and Technologies France
Acquisition Further Extends 3D Visualization and Collaboration Technology and Expertise for Manufacturing Industry
PRESS RELEASE
SAN JOSE, Calif. — April 21, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced it has acquired Trade and Technologies France (TTF), makers of computer-aided design (CAD) data interoperability software. The acquisition will help build on the existing 3D visualization and collaboration capabilities of Adobe® software and solutions for the manufacturing industry and other markets. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
- Freeware Friday: Wizz RSS Reader 2.1.2 for Firefox
Handy free RSS reader gives Firefox what it should have in a convenient sidebar or free-floating format
RSS, even though the jury may be out on it, is mad popular right now, and if it be a work in progress, it’s a wicked useful one.
Read more on Freeware Friday: Wizz RSS Reader 2.1.2 for Firefox…
- Map Keys 2006-04-21
This edition: Online Map Wars!; Yahoo Maps has Satellite Views.
My May Can Beat Up Your Map
Perhaps it needn’t be said that online mapping services (Yahoo, Mapquest, Google) have gone over big amongst net users. CCAer observes that this article in Forbes magazine notes that online map use overall is up 20%, and the big winner, despite the earlier arrival of the other two, that Mapquest is still king, drawing 46.4 million users–more than Google (19.1 million) and Yahoo! (20 million) combined.
- Type Slugs 2006-04-21
This edition: MyFonts’ Latest–Making it even easier for Wintel users to get fonts; The LinoLetter 2006-04;
My Fonts Latest-Just Point And Shoot
MyFonts has nominated thier Rising Stars for this month, with three very intriguing offerings.
- Freeware Friday: A Better Finder Rename & Attributes
It’s not a Photoshop plug-in, but for renaming large batches of images A Better Finder Rename is a good tool for changing or tweaking file names.
Can you tell I have batch processing on my mind? First I published my article on speeding up your batch processing by running Photoshop in the background, and now I’m writing about a shareware app that helps rename large batches of files. I’m talking about A Better Finder Rename.
Read more on Freeware Friday: A Better Finder Rename & Attributes…
- Freeware Friday: Phoenix Slides
Does waiting for iPhoto drive you crazy? Phoenix Slides is a lightning-fast photo browser/slideshow program that also does lossless JPEG transformations and can display EXIF data. This may be just what you’re looking for!
- Cut Your Batch Processing Time In Half
Photoshop’s batch processing abilities make mammoth tasks into laughably easy ones, and the time saved can be significant. What if I told you that it’s possible to double that time savings by processing images twice as fast?
- Scribus Team Announces 1.3.3.1 “Printemps”
Minor bugfix edition available for free download now
On 10 April the team developing the free/open source page layout application Scribus (http://www.scribus.net) announced the release and availablilty of version 1.3.3.1.
Codenamed “Printemps”, this succedes version 1.3.3 “Egalité” and is intended as a bugfix release for it. According to the Scribus team:
Doing simple maps in Illustrator should be a snap with this technique
Adobe Illustrator is a very apt application for drawing simple maps-street maps, navigational maps and the like. Vectors stand in very well for streets, transit lines, and the like, and the Illustrator Symbol feature is tailor-made for duplicating highway shields, informational icons, and the like.
- Cartography Word of the Day: Quadrangle
A useful term to know when ordering from the USGS
The mathematical site Mathworld defines the term quadrangle thus:
A plane figure consisting of four points, each of which is joined to two other points by a line segment (where the line segments may intersect).
- Dr. Walter W. Ristow, 1909-2006
Renowned and beloved curator and historian dies at 97
The map community, from academics from affectionados to collectors, have noted the passing of Dr. Walter W. Ristow at age 97.
More than merely a notable figure in the American cartographic community, he occupied a number of important postitions, according to the obituary on file at the Washington Post (registration required) he worked for US Army Intelligence during World War II and chief of the map division of the New York Public Library, then spent 32 years in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, the last 11 of those as Division Chief. He carried with him the title of Director Emeritus upon his retirement.
- Typography Word of the Day: Ess-Tset
“Double-S”, in German
The ess-tset, in Adobe Garamond italic and regularThis curious character looks like the Greek glyph for ‘beta’, but is most assuredly not.
It is a letter commonly found in German, something of the 27th letter of the alphabet, the ‘ess-tset’, and it’s used to express the “ss” in such words as Strasse (road). The term for it is a combination of the German words for the letter s and z (“tset”), and perhaps this is why an alternate way of referring to it is “sharp s” (scharfer ess).
- Now Shipping PhotoLight 2.5
A press release dated 12 April announced that PhotoLight version 2.5 is now shipping for Mac OS X and Windows.
PhotoLight is a Photohop/Element/Corel plug-in that enables you to add natural light source to photographs, and includes more than 500 effects including glows, fog and cast light or shadows through shapes such as windows and grids. PhotoLight displaces and diffuses light according to the objects’ shapes so it creates a more realistic effect, and allows customizable and/or multiple surfaces and textures.
Suggested Links
domain registrationWorldlabel is a source for equivalent Avery® labels sizes and free label templates for designing.
