Our client wanted a cover that encapsulated the iconoclastic spirit of the Enlightenment — the birth of skepticism, secularism and the full flowering of the scientific method. The natural candidates for this were Voltaire, the great French thinker and Emile du Chatelet, his intellectual equal and lover. We selected three period-appropriate typefaces for the title: p22 Declaration, based on the penmanship on the American Declaration of Independence, Bodoni, designed in 1798 and Requiem Text, based on the humanist typefaces of Renaissance Italy. The typefaces and painting formed a harmonious combination, and Voltaire stares out at the viewer with a frank air of challenge.

Located on the rural/suburban edge of Melbourne, the City of Whittlesea works hard to present an extensive series of cultural events, ranging from music festivals to heritage walks and a huge community festival. Chameleon Design was set the task of presenting this diverse range of activities in a bold, colourful and highly readable fashion. Our design incorporated images of festival performances, art installations and fireworks displays, against a graphic motif suggesting the roof of the big tent in which many of these events were held.

LiveBrush is one of the more fully featured programs available in the Adobe AIR format (see earlier post). While nowhere near as precise and powerful as programs such as Illustrator or CorelDRAW, it does have a few interesting aspects and the virtue of being free. Users select a brush from a fairly extensive list, and apply to a new page. The brush stroke is governed by the velocity and direction of the mouse, and the result is often very smooth, spontaneous and gestural — far from the quavery line many of us manage when drawing freehand. The brushstroke has a mind of its own — only notionally following the path you lay out for it. Each succeeding stroke has its own layer, and the artwork can be saved and exported at any time. Despite the many customisation options, Livebrush feels more like an interesting feature of a larger program than a standalone entity.  It’s most obvious use is as a means of producing some loose, interesting brushwork and importing same into a drawing or layout package.

In the realm of layout and design, Adobe products tend to loom very large. Most designers submit to their gravitational pull and use at least one and usually all of the big three: Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. However, there are plenty of people whose design needs are not extensive enough to justify the purchase of these quite expensive products. They recognise the diabolical shortcomings of Microsoft’s drawing and layout programs, and hence strike out for an alternative. Scribus and Inkscape may appeal to those with a DIY frame of mind. Both are free, and both were developed by a fairly egalitarian community of developers.

Scribus is a page layout program. Its capabilities largely mirror those of InDesign and QuarkXpress, but it cannot open files created with those programs (for practical and legal reasons). Those familiar with commercial layout packages will find the Scribus interface very familiar. Additional and improved features are added on a rolling basis, and new builds can be downloaded from their website.

Inkscape is an Illustrator/CorelDRAW analogue. The drawing tools are adequate for all but the most demanding users, and files can be output into industry standard formats such as EPS and PDF. As per Scribus, the developer community surrounding the program is open and cooperative, and the program continues to evolve.

One of the interesting aspects of cloud computing are programs that run over the web rather than residing on your PC. Examples include Google Documents, Google Calendar, online accounting solutions and online databases. Other programs install on your computer, but run on a constant stream of data from the web, such as Google Earth, or are strongly integrated with the web, such as Picasa. Google Docs and Calendar have fairly limited capabilities compared to programs that reside on a single PC, mostly due to limitations of bandwidth.

In the graphics field, the tentative beginnings of a revolution may be underway. A company named Aviary is offering a suite of programs available online, no installation required. The programs include both an image editor and a vector drawing editor. The drawing tools are frankly primitive compared to those available in Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The fundamental interface is very similar, and it could prove a useful introduction to people learning to use vector packages. As a pointer to the future, however, it is very interesting indeed. If a user could access a professional standard drawing package online, would it make sense any more to install it on your machine  (assuming reliable internet service provision)? Updates and improvements would be instantly available to the user, projects could be stored and distributed online, and collaboration and file sharing would be much easier. The same reasoning would apply to photo editing packages and even page layout programs.

The financial model would be subscription or membership based, with some offerings perhaps free in return for advertising placement. Bandwidth would have to improve dramatically for this to become a reality. Barriers to entry for new software providers would be much lower. Personal computers would become windows to a much larger realm rather than kingdoms in their own right. Perhaps the only role for the home computer would be to mirror the data generated online in as a form of insurance. Perhaps each of the programs to which the user subscribes could have an offline version for moments where the web is unavailable, resynchronising when the connection is restored.

ColourLovers

Individuals really matter on the Internet. They improve open source software, edit wikipedia, help SETI find extraterrestrial signals, produce podcasts, blog, twitter, aggregate news, break news, leak official documents and more.   Blogger Glenn Reynolds calls it the ‘Army of Davids’ effect.

ColourLovers has generated its own passionate Army of Davids, all focussing on an area dear to many designers: colour. ColourLovers contributors add patterns and colour palettes to ‘their’ website in dizzying profusion. Their offerings are then rated by users and ranked according to those ratings.

The site packs in a lot of visual information without losing clarity and offers a generous resource for anyone seeking colour ideas and interesting patterns/textures. The patterns are available at high resolution and the palettes can be exported to a number of image editing packages. With a constant stream of new colours and patterns, and a certain air of competition between contributors,  the site is always fresh and interesting.

ColourLovers exemplifies the new generation of websites that are striving to meld the profit motive (the site takes advertising and sells merchandise) with a very open attitude towards anyone with relevant material to contribute.

Awaiting the return of a book from the printers is a nerve-racking time. Authors worry about errors, page ordering mistakes,  the cover design and the overall feel of the work. In the end, a book is an artefact as well as a collation of words and ideas. If the book looks flimsy, poorly bound, the cover curls up and the paper type feels wrong, disaster may be in the offing. What many authors don’t know is that printers are happy to make up a ‘dummy’ of their book before printing. The dummy replicates the paper type, weight, cover stock, binding style and page extent, but is completely blank. It is not a proof — that comes later in the process.  A book dummy allows the author or publisher to assess the feel and quality of the book before printing it. In conjunction with the printers proof and thorough checking, it is a means of ensuring the quality and accuracy of the whole production. In addition, your leftover book dummy will make a dandy notebook.