A Short Rant & Some Color Swatches

PORTFOLIO UPDATE! I'm almost done with Interactive Documents on Lynda—tortoise and the hare much? Our IT guy actually called my boss to tell him that I'm the best Lynda student. That'd be flattering if it wasn't so very sad. But it does get me thiiiiis much close to building this thing-a-jigger(s).

Of course I haven't been able to transfer my files over to Herbert yet. Who'd think they'd make H.H leave his Nimbus 2000* behind for this Quidditch match? I know that the Firebolt** offers faster processing and transferring, but iBooks didn't come with a Firebolts Steve! Lord (Voldemort). It's ok because I'm "borrowing" my work Ethernet cable tonight—this shit is driving me nuts! But onto fun stuff...

HEX-a-mania y'all!

This first swatch is straight up stolen from http://www.colourlovers.com/ Ask me if I care. I don't! It's too lovely to not use. I think ded4b9 looks like paper and that would be awesome to incorporate my bookish feeling for my portfolio. I work in publishing—why fight it?

Brookyawn

Which brings us to our second adventure, this time in monochromatic-ania! I call this one newsprint. Gee, really thinking outside the box on that title Sarah. But it might be nice to off set the dazzling display of children's publishing with a basic LBP. (Little Black Palette)

Newsprint

Finally we really have to use our imaginations with Golden Opportunity (he!) but something about sunshine and bees just gets my goats a-going.

Golden Opportunity

Friends joke about my hyper design of shapes on shapes or patterns on patterns, but I love 'em. I'll probably cause seizures with anything other then a simple color palette. I'm into the monochromatic, clean design but I can't help it if it just feels boring. Anyway, this is just round 1 in a never ending color explosion of ideas.

...Monochromatic orange you say? Interesting. Bring on the epileptic fits!

* Firewire
**I keep forgetting to call it "Thuderbolt", and keep defaulting to "Firebolt" I feel this Harry Potter reference works.

Migration assistant fail

When I bought my supped up computer I knew I'd have to transfer music, photos, the odd actual work files to it. What I didn't expect is for it to be a huge pain in the ass!

A friend at work was kind enough to lend me his firewire cable, easy-peasy. Everyone with a firewire connection raise your hand...not so fast iMac. What's that you say reader? "Surly the new and improved computer would have easy file transferability via cable!" Alas I regret to tell you no.

What it does seem to have is an excellent Time Machine transferability. A whole lot good that does from OS 10.4.11. (See the old bullshit I was dealing with?) Anyhoot after updating Migration Assistant on the old computer she still couldn't find Herbert wirelessly. I'll have to Google the shit outta this later for now I write this entry while sitting on a friend's stoop in Kensington via my phone anxiously awaiting his arrival. I'm helping him move today and of course it's a huge pain in the ass.

Some people get all the luck!

It's here! It's here!

Once every few years I get to watch this video. I thought I'd share it's latest installment with ya'll. It's a bit shaky from my excitement.

"Yuuuup!" Is right!

Anyway, arriving a few days early, this little bundle of joy is the latest and greatest addiction (pun!) to the Kaufman Klan. I've already admitted to a few friends to singing the opening theme of The Little Mermaid while pulling the beautiful white packaging from the ugly brown box it was shipped in. But let's back up a sec and reflect how this little man came to be.

I bought it form a friend—an excellent friend—who shipped it from her store in LA to my office in Manhattan. Since I wasn't expecting it until Wednesday, most likely Thursday, I wore a very pretty blue dress and ballet flats to work. Interestingly enough this huge box was wedged into my cubicle before I walked into work this morning. Oh the pure joy I felt! Oh the excitement and disbelief of the United Parcel Service's speed! As I bend over to pick up my new baby I realized, this shit's heavy! 

Home Depot has an excellent array of trolleys and pushcarts for your purchasing pleasure. 

$30 later I had my trolley, all bungeed up and ready to wheel Herbert Hoover out the spinny doors of my building and down to the underground. Onward to Brooklyn! Did you know the service entrance to the R train at 57th St has been dismantled due to MTA budget cuts? Neither did I! Ramming poor Mr. Hoover through and over the turn style hurt a bit, but I'd be damned if I was walking back up the stairs and dragging his ass across 7th Ave to the other entrance. Plus I was already getting pit stains on my dress...which is of course a cheap form of polyester. Stupid synthetic fabrics.

But! The two of us had a lovely ride home. I read my book, The Inverted Forest, while he sat fat an happy in a bushel of apples. Roughly an hour later we'd reached 25th St BK, no one the wiser that I was lugging around a very expensive brown banged-up box. 

Three flights of stairs later and a small snag in my dress, BAM! We're here, alone at last. And I sit, stare at it's awesomeness, type away on it's wireless keyboard and click it's smart mouse. Yuuuup!

iMac of my Dreams (prt 1)

Finally OS X Lion! Took you long enough, geesh. Ok to be fair I know you were hammering out issues with the new Final Cut--also I've been on vacation for quite some time so we haven't really had a chance to meet. That all changes this Thursday(ish). I finally bought my new iMac! Let the peasants rejoice! Here's to our bright future together, 21.5", 2.7 GHz, 1TB hard-driving friend. Cheers.

So come this weekend I'm starting on my digital portfolio project, how about we watch it grow together? Awesome! Of course I still have to finish up that whole "how to do it" part of the project, but that can't stop me from fiddling with it, right? Totally. I've already started some old fashioned sketches:

I realize these are the most boring sketches of all time. Hell blue prints of colonial homes are more dynamic. And really this doesn't tell us anything of how the piece will function or even look. But I feel like it's excellent rough draft of ideas. Clean, simple, and not too flashy. Ok maybe that's too much justice. But it did help me organize the piles and piles and piles of PDFs I would love to showcase. The market for picture books and throbbing teen supernatural and/or dystopian novels won't know what hit 'em.

Now on to HEX color guides! Color gurgle.

Digital Portfolios and Me.

A freelancer we use at work has her entire portfolio loaded on her iPad. Lord was I jealous when I first heard of it. First I was jealous of her iPad. Then I was jealous of her cunning use of it for actual professional development. I like the idea of always having a dynamic portfolio with me. If I were to meet with a client and needed show (the limited) multi-media design work I've accomplished so far, surely having it saved on a tablet device is much more interesting then just reviewing my own (current lack of a) website. But how do I accomplish this? Besides the obvious problem of not being able to afford an iPad, how do I make something more interesting then just a quick flip through a PDF?

Enter the awesomeness of InDesign's interactive PDF and SWF capibilities. I've starting taking Interactive Documents on Lynda.com and have found it daunting and addictive. I love it all! Buttons, actions, lite Flash, and borrowed Action Script files can potentially take my teaching guide examples into new heights of interesting showmanship. I think the most helpful way of organizing all my pieces will be to utilizing multi-state objects. Pages within a documents with a built in slide show? Yes please! Now to actually build the thing...and get it to live somewhere.

As to what I'm going to put all this on for one on one interviews remains semi-unclear. I think I'd be best to have it as a micro-site, then also as a downloadable PDF for anyone who wants it. Hell I don't care if you have examples of my work, download it all! Reference me to your friends, spread the word on my interactive document awesomeness. Now does it live on its own, here...Tumblr? Well, it's not a perfectly thought out plan, but it's a nice start of a cool idea. Hopefully I can use this to watch it grow.

Oh, and if I have to purchase a Nook Color ($270 y'all!) because it has Flash capabilities and might just be handy to whip out for a quick demonstration, well so be it. Worst comes to worst I can get library books on my poor man's iPad (aka digital portfolio) now.

How awesome is all that?

iCloud, uCloud

So Apple moves towards the Cloud—happy day! Honestly, I didn't know what the Cloud was until those commercials with those people stranded at the airport said it. It's also interesting that commercial is for Window 7 but I'll digress on that. I've been using the Cloud since... forever? Seriously when's the last time you can remember not having total access to everything you've ever downloaded no matter where you were? Ah, iTunes... right. Bit of a problem.

I'd never backed up anything I'd bought on iTunes. I stupidly believed if anything ever happened to my computer I could access the MP3s I bought through my Apple account through a different computer. Nope. I first realized this huge problem in 2005(ish) when I switched jobs and didn't think of taking the music I downloaded on my work computer with me when I left. Imagine my surprise. I can't have something I bought within an environment that provides me with just about everything imaginable? And Apple never fixed that! It's odd that it took Apple so long to get on board with this idea—at least for MP3s and downloads. But I don't know the legal issues involved, frankly I don't care. I want access to all my files 24/7. I expect it. Hell I even demand it! Now as a devoted Mac person, I get to have it. Happy Day!

An interesting topic turns out through all of this though. We've all been using Cloud for years, whether we knew it or not. But the main company we all use to buy and listen to music hadn't. With iTunes we bought music, we had it on our hard drive, and in a sense we owned it. But now we don't have to. We still buy it, but now it can be accessed from anywhere. So do we still think we own anything? Or we just have access to it all the time?

I'm not sure what this means really. I know that I need to change my way of thinking when it comes to marketing within publishing and design. I'm interested in how I'm going to take an idea I use every day, an idea I wanted to happen for every company I'm heavily involved in and make it work for my job. Is the future of publishing just a big 'ole paid-per-check-out-library? That'd be pretty awesome. It wouldn't sell many books, and I'd be out of a job, but I'd love all the access to all those sweet words.

Design Fundamentals

When I first was learning Flash, I knew I'd need a ton of help. I took a formal class at FIT for a month and I've still only scratched the surface of that program. Hell, the only ActionScript I know is to make something loop 3 times and/or stop. While I could continue to Flash 2 through formal training, sitting through 3 hours a week in a classroom after working just plain sucks. Why not take it to the web? Arguably the best source for information regarding any computer program is Lynda.com. I've used Lynda to get quick updated Adobe Suite CS features "What's new in CS5!" and learn entire new programs. Unfortunately for me I can't really afford a year long all access membership—but my job can.


My request for a Lynda.com account has finally been accepted! Last week I was given my log-in and password, it's been a video filled adventure ever since. First up, tackling web design fundamentals.


I'm a bit embarrassed about my lack of web design experience actually. I say I wasn't old enough for the birth of the Internet, that's true. But I'm also too old to have taken part it its current form. Facebook didn't exist when I was in college, and my email address wasn't a gmail account until well into my first office job. I don't think I missed the birth and quick acceleration of web design, I obviously went along with it as a consumer, but that's just it a consumer. Starting to acknowledge the internet and its many forms of architecture is daunting! Did I mention I only know 2 Action Script codes?!


Luckily for me, a nice man put together a Web Design Fundaments course to just sort of lay out the entire "...Web design and development techniques and technologies, fundamental concepts, terms, and best practices involved in professional web design." Oh Christ. 


After an hour of videos explaining what are: URLs (Ha!); DNS; DTDs; XML; RSS feeds; JavaScript; AJAX; PHP, .NET, JSP; SQL; CMS; and JPGS, GIFs, PNGs (those I know!) The realization has quickly set it that I need to first learn HTML and CSS. It's going to be a long, long, long road. I have a lot of catching up to do.