Camera phone lense flares are so cool.

The obligatory sky/cloud shot. This is my phone wallpaper, good for grey overcast days.

I’ve managed to set up Bluetooth connectivity on my G5, meaning I can transfer stuff to and from my phone, cool! Gonna post some bad camera phone photos soon!

Mother Natures lungs stripped bare, winter is definitley here.

Went with Lang to an Adobe Creative Suite 2 Seminar today. It was free and although I kept thinking, they are just applications, it did feel like we were going to see some stars… its just a tool, applications.

The sessions were pretty cool, they just went through all the latest and greatest features for each product. Here’s a list of things that caught my ear for each. This stuff would not make any sense or be of any interest if you don’t use these applications on a regular basis.

InDesign CS2.
• Drag and drop files from the Bridge Preview application straight in InDesign
• Turning layers on and off from imported Photoshop/Illustrator/PDF files
• Drag and drop text
• Object Styles, pre defined styles that can format a whole page of text with one click
• Being able to lock column guides independant of base guides
• The pages preview pane now scrolls as you shuffle pages around
• The ability to create a print safe PDF’s without printing a .PS file first and distilling it

Photoshop CS2
• Pasting vectors or hi res images into the layers pallete as “Smart Objects” allows you to edit for example, the vector graphic in Illustrator and it will update in Photoshop without resolution lose, very very cool.
• Spot Healing Brush, think of the Rubber Stamp tool on steroids, You can basically remove a foreground object from a photo and the background it was on will look like the surrounding. It was like waving a magic wond and ‘bing’ gone.
• Perspective tool, being able to draw a perspective grid on a photo and having objects automatically transform to the vanishing point.

Illustrator CS2.
• Live trace and Live Paint. Like Flash trace Bitmap but with more control and features

Acrobat CS2.
• Job options from Distiller is available to all CS2 applications, this means no more tedious printing PostScript files to Distill. I asked the demo guy wether its best to print a PostScript file from say InDesign, then distilling the PS file to create a print ready PDF, and he said, there’s no need as its quite alright to export a PDF from InDesign or Illustrator now as this was a bit dodgey in CS1. Somehow I’m not 100% sure just yet. A lot of the Acrobat stuff was really print preview, output, pre flight based technical stuff.

In a haze of post flu tiredness and back pain, I managed to watch something that was very disturbing on SBS’s Cutting Edge last night. It was a doco about global warming and how its affecting our planet.

Presenter Marcel Theroux discovers that the real war is not on terrorism, it is between nature and humans. Left unchecked, global warming could bankrupt the world economy within our children’s lifetimes. Marcel travels through Europe, India and Chernobyl to talk to scientists, insurers and even the chairman of global oil giant Shell, who all concur: if we are to avoid cataclysmic climate changes we must massively reduce carbon dioxide emissions immediately.

A few things I noted from the doco.

Nuclear energy, if adopted right now to replace fossil fuel energy would be a better option despite its dangers; dangers for example like what happened at Chernobyl almost 20 years ago, just imagine that, the risk of another Chernobyl nuclear meltown according to certain scientists and what the presenter of the doco ended up advocating is less risky then our current rate of burning fosil fuel. And frankly, green energy is not a sufficient option at present because any amount of alternative power will not supply enough for the current rate that we are using.

The second thing of note was that scientists analysing ice cores for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the period before the industrial revolution to periods after it. On the graph they displayed the years before showed a steady but low amount of co2 in the atmosphere. Straight after the industrial revolution the measurements went of the chart, the line that showed how much co2 was in the atmosphere went vertically up as a thick red line.

On a side related note from the doco, call centre jobs in India are the most sort after type of work amongst the people there. We all know how large corporations are outsourcing everything to India, especially their call support centres. I had to deal with Apple support early in the year, and yes, I was talking to someone from India who basically read off a troubleshooting manual. Anyway, part of the doco showed how India is growing economically, growing as a consumer society but on the other hand their environment is dieing because they are using up all the natural resources and producing large amounts of waste in turn killing the environment that is sustaining their daily life, its a vicious cycle. What can you do, tell them to stop prospering and feeding their family because their environment going to suffer? Sorry but that is not in my troubleshooting maual, thank you for calling.

Being fair, that same scenario is occuring all over the world, in every city, suburb and town. Its frightening to think that a majority of the worlds population, me included before seeing this doco have/had no idea. Just another case of out of sight out of mind, its too big to handle, what can I do sort of thing.

I have to go decide what font I must use for a clients design now… cataclysmic climate changes? Does that come in a thin weight?

Another great Absolut promotion, this time with two local graf artists, Phibs and Merda. Check out Absolut Ad for a wide collection of past ads. My favourite, Absolut Maeda.

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One of the sweetest blog site you will ever see, design and CSS functionality wise, Shaun Inman

Karaoke has gone stylish in the UK, Lucky Voice by de-construct. Saturday from London.

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Been meaning to do this for a while, since I blew the horn about Wordpress 1.5 coming out. Still sorting out a new theme and stuff, nothing to see.

Designing a logotype for your own magazine is very hard, its the image of the magazine, the first thing people see when they look at a rack full of covers. People are always intriqued by the logotype and the content of the magazine, they will either pick it up or pass it by. Its a tough one. Should I go for something simple thats just typed out or something thats more ‘designed’. I might just settle with keeping it open, where its different for each issue. One of my favourite magazine logotypes is the “IdN” logo, its simple, makes you work just enough to figure the d is part of the N.

Its winter in Sydney now, but I still see people wearing their Havaianas outdoors. Cool site though, the panning movement reminds me of Hi Res’s Jump Tomorrow site.

3 days till the snow season starts! woohoo! Planning to go down to Victoria for a week this year with some mates, Perisher and Thredbo are getting a bit on the boring side. Speaking of Hotham, they have updated their website again this year. Its taken some uber Belgium designers to do it, but Hotham has the best snow resort site in Oz bar none. Check out the interactive trail map.

Don’t know if anyone has seen the Kan Tong Wok Star TVC, but as a Vietnamese, it really annoys me. It just makes the asian sterotype worse than it already is. The commercial makes no sense, except for the vietnamese lines where the actors says “frustrated with boring food” “its very delicious” and “its very easy”. All the graphics are in Chinese? These ad people are just trying too hard to reach a wider asian demographic and they got it wrong.