Audience

Audience.  Audience.

To convey meaning one must consider some things.  These things, of which one considers for use in order to achieve the greatest effect, one must weigh, if nothing else, audience alone.

There is a singular nature to it.  It is a thing of utmost importance.  For this thing is, in fact, consisting of many things.  People, of course being the things of which I speak.  And so it is that with much vehemence and fervor that I implore you to consider the things most important in prose.

If we can agree that such things are the things behind, or the motivation for, the figurative spur in the proverbial horse, if you will, or the inspiration for the prose of which I previously spoke, then the persons gathered like vapor to the core of a cloud, prose, must, I mean, must BE the priority of the author.

Mind occasion.  It is and must continue to be a relevant component for efficacy.

Consider this: if one were to stand upon a stage and produce not a commencement speech, for which one were hired, elected, or otherwise chosen, but rather a dull, gleam-less, lackluster oration that’s redundancies pronounce themselves clearly to the astonished parents and sleeping relatives of impatient graduates, one would find himself or herself (if one were so politically inclined as to make certain the omission of discrimination, of course), caring not for the occasion or the audience.

In this manner a writer, or speaker, for that matter, would be ineffective.

There is something to be said for efficiency.  However, I find that curtness takes too much effort to accomplish.  It could be argued that tight writing grants not the reader much respect.

Allowing the mind to flow without hindrance, to waver not in the winds cast by a flustered professor or his or her bored pupils (the winds being the impatient sighs and complaints ushered by such prose as this), is a gift from the artist, the author, to the eyes, the reader.

Take care in mining purpose from your hills of thought.  I sometimes use a technique, a technique utilized by only minds intent on growing into great minds.  One, such as myself, may pose to myself, questions.  “Questions?” you question.  “Questions,” I say.

Of the like: “What, in this prose, is my purpose?  What, from this prose should one draw?  Who, in this prose must I address?”  And most importantly, “About it, how must I go?”

These, you say, as you should, are proper and valid.  The validity of which I will not expound upon, but will, instead, highlight with this line.

I gift you tools.  I offer advice, sound, I think.  I put forward for you an outline.  I hand down the wisdom of ages to such listeners as you who listen; who listen intently to the words that clarify the words boggled and cluttered by “efficient” writers and their improper ways.

Ostentatious authors who propound false methods of efficacy and dim the minds of the budding adolescence for which these very words were written.

Remember, my friends, your audience.  Without them you are not even ink.

Lifeline

A friend needed a life-timeline from a friend.

Kuan.. here you are.

1987 :: Born January 1st, the morning after a champagne only party at my parents house in Fairfax VA. (my mother didn’t drink for all you wonderers out there)

1987, July :: Very proud to say, I took my first steps.  I refused to crawl.. my parent’s said I wanted to be like everyone else.  (damn conformist).  This unbridled brazinity (maybe a word) gave me the scar that now sits quietly adjacent my left eye.

1987-1990 :: Literally no memory.  This is okay, as I’ve been told it was a very trying time for me.  Apparently I cried and pooped a lot, who wants to remember that?  Oh yeah I got a baby brother!

1990-1993 :: Climbed all things I could get my grubby paws around.  No specific events come to mind.  This may also be a blessing.. I may have been a terror.

1994 :: Spring Hill Elementary school.  I begin to realize girls exist as their own species. Hobbit = first book every read to me (that I understood).  Hobbit simultaneously becomes favorite book of all time.  Hobbit gets read to me each night for 2 years.

1995 :: I only wore sleeveless shirts.  Wasn’t particularly buff, just didn’t like sleeves.  Never understood the cold my be the cause of my persistent colds.  (I swear I had responsible parents, I was just stubborn).

1996 :: BLIZZARD!! There was so much snow, school was out for two weeks.  Enter my first mac computer.  I remember it was a desktop, beige and clunky but totally awesome.

2001 :: Freshmen year, high school.  First Tuesday of classes, planes hit two buildings I didn’t know existed.  Start watching the news, regularly.  Pick up the Washington Post everyday.  Dad so pumped about this.  Download first patch for a video game.  I remember it was Unreal Tournament III.. one of their only mac releases.  The patch was a cd crack.

2002 :: A sniper attacks 7 people block from my high school, we go into lock down.  We remain this way  for a month when the sniper gets caught.  Purchase a Powerbook 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4.  With 1.25 GB of RAM it steamrolls the competition.  And it’s silver, which is cool.

2003 :: Editor of our lit mag.

2004 :: Spend time in the Dominican Republic doing service work.  Learn Spanish I will forget in the months that follow.  In those months, however, I fell in love with Dori.

2005 :: Senior year, I take advanced Java programming.  Learn what a boolean is.  Graduate from Georgetown Preparatory High School for boys in May.  Begin at Syracuse University in the Fall and realize the world is much larger than I thought.

2007 :: Introduced to Flash and Photoshop.  Always knew what they were but didn’t know how to use them.

2008 :: Take a Flash and Photoshop class, through which I get my first and present design job and brother goes to college, yikes.

Present :: Have first blog.  Know and love technology.  Still a mac enthusiast.  Still working on my kick ass Powerbook G4 I got 6 years ago.  In fact, writing this word with it.  Still with Dori.

You’re welcome Kuan

- Drew

Levels

Over the weekend I messed around with the newest version of iPhoto and I should say right off, it’s Luddite friendly but tech-nut technical if you digg.  Do you digg?

This log is about light levels, specifically how much an image is exposed to.   In iPhoto the the mechanism we use to manipulate these levels is aptly named “Levels.”  In an earlier version of iPhoto the same mechanism was called the “Histogram.” I thought it might be useful to trace their name reasoning:

Histogram is statistical terminology for “a graphical display of tabulated frequencies.”  This is important because to ensure accurate measurements the light levels that any one of your photographs has been exposed to is displayed as a graphical display of tabulated frequencies.  And the best part?  You can manipulate this graphical display of tabulated frequencies.  Okay.. that’s that last time, I swear. graphicaldisplayoftabulatedfrequencies.  Oops.

Ok let’s fire up iPhoto.  Let’s say that we’ve already uploaded some photos of a lake.  A really perfect lake that we like to play on.  Unfortunately not everyone can be there so we take some pictures.  Those are the pictures we’ve uploaded already.  iPhoto does us a favor and automatically sorts them based on the date they were TAKEN.  Not the date they were uploaded.

*this is a default setting that cannot be changed.  There are some minor adjustments that you can make, like the amount of time between each event.  i.e. 1 event per day or 1 event per week.  you can find these adjustments in preferences/events/autosplit.

We can see three different events.  Each is dated and perhaps named.  Hold on a minute.. there is only one picture per event.  What is this tomfoolery?  This is your “Key Photo.”  A photo, of your choosing, that represents the event.

key photos can be changed to best represent the event

Now Apple did something kind of cool with this event tab.  If you mouse over any of the key photos and then slowly slide your cursor over that image, iPhoto will cycle through all the photographs in that event.  There isn’t much utility to this function (in my opinion) but if you want a quick glimpse at a group of photos this is a nice way to do that. What we want is the “Photos” tab, just below “Events.”  Click that and this is what you’ll see,

a good graphical organizer, yellow boxed pics = highlighted

Now in my image you can see that the individual pictures are quite small.  This can be changed at the bottom right of the screen.  Just move that slider to the right. So we’ve all our images loaded and we see some that came out just terribly.  All washed out, too dark, far too much red eye.  I know I don’t like demons in my Christmas photos.  All these images that we would normally, “command + delete” are salvageable.

Let’s choose a picture.  I’ve decided on one that turned out pretty well, but I’m going to manipulate its levels anyway.

skyline, with a messy foreground that I think I'd like much darker

The image is a bit small on this log so if you’d like a closer look click the picture.  At the bottom of the screen you can see a small icon “Edit.”  Once selected this will change our options a little bit.

The two semi-transparent screens become available if you choose the center-most of the options on the footer, “Effects” and “Adjust.”  Adjust is the one we want.

LEVELS! here we are.  As you can see by the graphical display of tabulated frequencies. hehe.  This is all the light our picture was exposed to when taken.  It is quite a dark picture, most of the light comes from the top half of the picture which renders the street below hidden.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to say we really want to see that street.  That is the focus of this photograph, not that picturesque skyline or vibrant sunset!

Normally, I would give an detailed play-by-play of how to make your picture use the best light.  But in this case, playing is only way to learn.  Grab your cursor and pull those left and right triangles in and out.  Moving the right triangle inward will expose it to more light.  Moving the left-most triangle in ward will make it darker.  Moving the center closer to the right triangle with constrain the amount of light the image gets and vice versa.

event images get organized linearly on header, options expand on footer

Levels is an incredibly useful tool.  I would issue one caution.  Sometimes what’s in a picture is its rawness.  The moment when the shutter snaped.  Use levels to recover, clean up, restore but don’t get obsesed with changing every photo.  It’s time consuming and many times the minor changes you’ll make will be so minor, they will have little effect on how the photograph is received.

I mentioned “Effects” earlier.  Click that.  iPhoto will give you a seemingly limited selection of alterations you can make.  Namely, “black and white; sepia; antique; fade color; boost color; matte; vignette; edge blur;” and most importantly, “original.”

*Another really useful and largely unnoticed element of iPhoto is the “revert to original” action.  iPhoto automatically saves the original image as default setting when you import you photos (you can turn this setting off to save disk space).  This way you can change an image all you want and in the end when you realize that what’s in an image is the rawness of the shutter snapping, you can simply choose “photos” in the iPhoto menu then “rever to original” (have the image selected of course).  It may even be possible to batch revert a group by selecting them all at once.

I say “seemingly limited selection…” because once you choose one of the effects listed you can then make fine adjustments to that effect by clicking the left and right arrows that prompt you.

i see a timberland shoe symbol and an Australian skyline

For the casual photographer iPhoto does everything Photoshop can do at a fraction the price.  It is an organizer first and an editor second but this doesn’t make it any less powerful a program.  There are even a few things that it can do better than Photoshop.. like red-eye remover.  It’s such a simple process that I won’t devote a tutorial to it.  Simply click “red-eye” then click the red eye.

Happy hunting friends.

Layers & Levels

What we can naturally perceive, designers will always grapple with recreating.  We see layers.  Have you ever looked at a photograph and liked it but  didn’t know why?  Sometimes it’s that one thing that you just can’t put your finger on.. perhaps the light was just right.  Or the way the shadow came down from the roof made your neck-hairs stand cold.  For me, in the photograph below, its the shadow of the leaves in the bottom left corner.  No matter what element drags you in or even repels you.. something about it is relatable.

Depth, texture, lighting, and shadow (where necessary) are all layers vital to a realistic image.  As limitations are shattered by faster computing, game consoles, photoshop, and graphic engines, we’ve moved away from was that doctored? and are steadily approaching a realm of “that wasn’t real?!”

If you asked most people, “when did photo doctoring really become commonplace” they would likely say, “when photoshop was developed.”  Photo manipulation is actually much older than we might assume.  Would you believe that even this iconic photograph of Lincoln was consciously altered for effect in 1860?!

According to Photo Tampering Throughout History, a whole slew of political leaders utilized the capabilities of photo doctoring.  Today its rampant, especially in the world of celebrity.  It’s borderline plague-like.  Much obliged, President Lincoln, we can now credit you with two social revolutions!

Okay.  So we’ve established that things we perceive as real are sometimes easily recreated.  We’re going to have to correct and complicate my original statement.  Designers won’t always grapple to recreate what we perceive as real but they will always have to mimic human perception in order to get our attention.  Depth, texture, lighting, and shadow (where necessary, of course).  So the next time your out shooting some scenery, take a minute to consider what your capturing.  It might help you snag an award-winner.

There are some really useful tricks that we can take from them to improve the quality of our photographs.  Something in all this falseness can be salvaged.

In my next post there is both a Photoshop and iPhoto tutorial regarding light levels and basic photo enhancement.  Skip if uninterested, there’s some cool stuff in there that might make mom happy come christmas time!

design_matters

“…because together with language, it is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human, which puts it on a level far beyond the trivial.”  – John Heskett.

3:00 am, Thursday.  It is cool outside and I can see about 300 yards in all directions.  I can’t tell if my eyes have adjusted or if the night has just gotten lighter.  In my head I’m watching reruns of a conversation I had a few weeks ago..

Despite the Syracusian heat, she is wearing long, multicolored socks.  Her eyes sit close together as though conferring with one another.  She considers me with short stares as we talk.  The topic is “originality” and she is saying something I have a hard time swallowing.  “There is no originality.  What you consider original is simply the product of selection and arrangement.”   I’m unsure of how to respond, the right half of my body (clearly connected to the corresponding hemisphere of my brain) is in a process of motionless revolt, I strain to remain civil.  The other side accepts her words so quietly, so unAndrew, that for a moment I question its loyalty to the rest of my person.

I think it’s safe to assume two things, one – good design should be original design.  Two – if originality is, in fact, dead, that presumes that it was once alive.

Let’s break physical law and visit a bit of history.

According to Hesket, author of Toothpicks and Logos, even humankind’s earliest innovative endeavors (if ever there were a time to be original…), were frequently, if not always, modeled after natural forms, i.e. metal dippers shaped like conch shells.  Naturally occurring tools likely break down.  As each would have been an improvisation, human-made iterations could account for variables like durability, efficiency and power.  Clam shells were not built to dig holes, but they were used with regularity to accomplish that end.

Modern design is comprised of layers.  One design is inspired by a preexisting form which was inspired by a preexisting form which was inspired by…  Early human borrows from Nature, modern human borrows from ancestor.  With all this borrowing going on, originality kind of is dead.  But in a way, it never existed.  There was only nature and its products.

The left side of me is calm.  The right side, however, is still grumbling.  I think our definition of “originality” needs to be complicated a bit.  It seems the word is much like “perfection.”  Both can really only exist relatively.  In regards to design, we are not just copies of copies, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, as the saying goes.  Without them, who knows how many generations it would take for an idea to grow out of infancy.. shed abstraction and become something real?

At the moment, my two sides are in a state of relative rest.  My hands seem to be reconciling their differences and for now we say, “that is all.”