I have a hard time coming to terms with the new aesthetic being peddled in the corporate identity market. There is trend away from the mono-chromatic, simple and witty icons of the 19th century and towards a more slick, conceptually vacant and multi-color mark of the 90’s internet boom.

Assigning a logo assignment in school has always been about a)clarity of message and b)designing within strict limitations. Yes, this is quickly becoming an old-fashion way of looking at a logo, but I truly feel something is being lost. And that, that is being lost is metaphoric of what is being lost in graphic design in general.

The 1980’s AT&T logo (designed by the amazing Saul Bass) is a classic example of wonderful design. You can imagine the design brief from the client stating that they wanted a mark that communicated that they are a “global communications company.” If you take away the text the mark still works. It references the global nature of the company by it’s circular shape and the lines in-force this (latitude lines) and at the same time makes the viewer think about satellites and data. The mechanical nature of the rendering connotes precision and competence.

Wonderful. A tremendous amount of clarity in a small package. And it works just as well in black and white—which means the client can save money on things like bills and invoices where printing in color would cost more money. Plus they’ll look great when they send out faxes and when their logo gets photocopied. Boo-ya!

Now, take our new logo. Take away the type and what do we have? Okay, now imagine this mark in 5, 10 years when the memory of the old logo is now longer with us. What do we have?

In my mind the reality in which this mark is rendered leaves little to the imagination. While I had no problem suspending my perception of scale with the old mark, with this one I am inclined to view it (and that also means interpret it) as a small mark. It looks to me like a rubber ball I’d by from a machine at the grocery store for 25 cents. The blue transparency has a lot to do with that perception as well. Rarely do I see perfectly translucent globes in scales larger than a couple inches.

So without the suspension of my perception of scale, this mark connotes playfulness, simple, classic and affordability and at the same time, once I’m thinking in these terms I also believe the mark means ‘easily losable’, childish, and cheap. The strips do not look mechanically precise anymore. They communicate a random, organic and in-precise manufacturing process. Does this mental frame communicate AT&T? I think not. Does this mark survive a trip through the fax machine or photocopier?

This new mark is all style and no thinking. It looses whatever thought went into it in a couple years. It’s what design has become. This way of thinking about design is not sustainable. If the internet has taught us anything it’s once we put the tools to create in the hands of everyone, everyone decides what is acceptable. And anyone can create style; you don’t need a fancy design degree for that.

Not everyone can create the old AT&T mark. That requires talent, and a fancy design degree can help bring out that talent. Design should be just as much about how something functions, or solves a client’s problem as it is about making something visually pleasing. The visually pleasing part is getting way too much attention, and other professions are taking away the ‘making things work’ part of design.

Apple’s new pro photo tool, Aperture looks really nice. It’s priced a bit higher than I, essentially a photography hobbyist, would be willing to pay, but the educational price is within my range. (Legally I don’t know if I can say what the educational price is).

I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it to buy if my computer is 2 years old (1Ghz powerbook) and my camera does not shoot RAW files (a Leica Digilux 1). I think I’ll wait for some published reviews.

I have noted elsewhere that I have a new job. I’m really happy at Frog Design. Plenty of smart people, a nice mix of interesting work and an appreciation for good design within all levels of the organization.

My job search was getting a bit depressing. I was spending a couple hours a day looking, and after a couple months I was fairly listless and just wanted to sleep most of the time.

The current trend in the design industry is away from the model that prevailed in the eighties and nineties—the design firm. Most companies are bringing creative talent in house and/or hiring out creative work to lone practitioners. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but generally there is less large scale work that requires the resources of a firm being commissioned. Most of this work is being done in house, and contract workers are being used to fill short term staffing needs.

This means the bulk of the job interviews I was going on were not at design firms, but were at large corporations. Even after being called in for second and third interviews I was being told that they were not comfortable hiring someone who did not have work experience at a large company. The fact that I spent the last 9 years at a small design firm was a source of discomfort to those hiring.

During one interview I was let know that it was unusual (and not in a good way) that someone my age (31) would spend 9 years anywhere. During another I was told that they didn’t think someone could have the skill set I claimed to have (mild DBA skills, workable knowledge of PHP and server side scripting, HTML/CSS and fairly decent visual design pedigree). Why in the world would anyone with this skill set work at small firm when they could work for themselves and make a small fortune?

Ultimately it comes down to values and what I want from my life. I don’t like working alone. I learned my technical skills because I love making things, and had a desire to know hows things work. Ultimately I found that engineering goals and design goals are often at odds and it’s really hard to play both sides. I reached a point where all this technical knowledge was making my designs worse, and not better. Design is where my heart is and I’d rather leave the technical side of things to those who do it better than I.

I’m a whole lot happier now, more focused and rarely do I feel like sleeping more than 7 hours a day.

Thanks to the kind folks at Veer, I’ll be at TypeCon this weekend.

I rarely work on projects that are completed within a week. It’s alot fun, and very satisfying. Especially when the client gives you direction like “I want a website so my photos are online; so I can just send people to my website if they want to see my work”

Single purpose websites are so easy. (Looking around the internet, they are also easy to mess up with superfluous decoration)

So, after one week: Kathleen Creighton Photography.

My favorite photo is one of her earlier, hand painted photos. And although I know it’s simple to do, I really like the simple urls the site generates. They are perfect for emailing.

For the last 4 days this is how Flash MX 2004 has been treating me. I loath flash right now.

Every time I moved the frame marker, edited an action script, cut and pasted frames or basically tried to do anything in flash I would get the spinning rainbow cursor of pain. Usually it was only for 5 or 10 seconds. Sometimes it was close to a minute.

A large part of the problem is because I was importing After Effects animations into my flash movie. When After Effects exports SWF files, it treats each object in every frame as a new symbol. Flash on the Mac, it seems, has a huge problem with files with a couple thousand symbols.

Opening the library to view all your symbols takes over 2 hours on my 1GHz powerbook. I forced quit Flash after 2 hours, so I don’t know how much longer it would have taken.

I hear Flash runs better on Windows, but since flash refused to install on my Windows machine (Win98, the installer kept complaining there wasn’t enough drive space—I guess 1 gig is not enough), I don’t know if Windows Flash is any happier working on a file with an excess of symbols.

I am so happy that I’m done. I hope I never have to use flash again until I can use without seeing that !@#$%^& rainbow cursor.

I’ve got motion graphics work (fun!). While I love working in After Effects, the client needs one of the three output formats to be embedded flash within a webpage. (Screen saver and video projection are the other 2).

Using After Effects and Flash goes over some things to consider when composing flash animations in After Effects.

Right now After Effects seems to be doing to knock up job of producing SWF files. I’ll need to do some final prep work in Flash MX at the end (all text needs to be in an external xml file), but defining motion in After Effects is so much easier than in Flash.

I wonder if Motion can export SWF files… (then again, Motion can’t run on my powerbook).

Asilomar is changing it’s name to The Information Architecture Institute. I helped them out by creating their new identity

My new favorite television show is Project Runway. It’s basically a reality tv show crossed with those spiffy PBS specials about ‘the design process’. Then they throw in some cute models and fashion and top it off with Heidi Klum.

If you have ever wondered what taking studio classes at a design school is like, this show comes pretty close. (Minus Heidi Klum, of course—and give the cute model girls tattoos).

Not knowing exactly where my work life is going to be in a month or two, I have been assembling my portfolio. I always feel naked when others look at my work, so showing other people my portfolio of design work is positively stress ridden.

Well, I have about 70% of my work that I feel comfortable showing together and online. I plan to do a final proof read tomorrow, so if you see any glaring and stupid errors, be kind and let me know.

I’ve decided that the typographic protest has run it’s course. At this point the novelty has probably worn off and all I’m doing is punishing the readers. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro Bush, and as much as what’s her name with the strawberry blonde hair (and the oh, so elegant hands) likes to think, I don’t enjoy causing pain and suffering in others either.

As for why I’m against the current administration, I don’t think I’ve outlined exactly why here. It is not so much about the foreign policy (although I’ll get to that in a minute).

I believe the current economic policies benefit the executives of big business, but not the actual businesses. I survive and make my living in a small firm that makes money by offering premium services to larger businesses. Companies are not spending money on services that they can either move in house or delay buying. This has been the case since the beginning of 2001.

Granted the bubble bursting and the attacks later that year have a great deal to do with the state of the economy. I think the current administration’s policies have not helped the situation. People smarter than I say similar things.

Right now I am faced with a choice: I can either find a new job, most probably in house at a corporation, or I can sustain myself on a diet of freelance work. Neither is appealing.

In house creative work is difficult to do well. People respect you less. No longer are you the outside expert giving sound advice, now you are an internal employee who has an (opposing) opinion. Plus, trying to remain user focused when your perspective is one of the corporation itself is a very difficult and conflicted task.

The freelance work out there (and there is more than there has ever been in the last three years) is a better environment for doing good work, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to financially make it work. Businesses are still tight with their budgets, and another designer who is willing to forgo health insurance and student loans so they can eat is going to underbid me everytime. This means I need to find companies that want a job well done and are willing to pay for it, and I need to bill enough so I can survive when there is no work.

So yes, a craptacular situation. I could blame the go-go 90’s or Al Qaeda, or I can make a choice about something I have control over—namely my president. When I look at the elected officials that have the most power to do something about the economy where I live (Mayor, Governor, President)—they only one I truly believe is doing a good job is Mayor Bloomberg.

So for me, foreign policy is just the icing on the cake. I deplore violence, it seems like a method of last resort for conflict resolution. I was willing to grudgingly accept that the war in Afghanistan was needed. What really scares me is that country where war can help a president’s poll numbers go up is a country that is at war early and often. And I would really like to be able to break that cycle as soon as possible.

In past years I have had a website up were I would post classroom assignments and notes. The last three weeks has been less than stellar for me (health wise) so I have not yet found the time to get one up. (For some reason, back in June my Moveable Type installation exploded, so I couldn’t just use the site from last semester).

What I did complete, was a site to let me keep track of attendance, grades, and assignments. The HTML interface is still very sparse, in fact it’s barely usable, but the app logic is almost done.

I needed a way to get the project data in this site into a nice printed sheet of paper for me to give the students. I could have gone the html to printable style sheet route, but that never gives really nice output.

I spent today playing with Adobe InDesign and it’s XML interface. I actually just found that article on XML.com, I got my system up and running by just poking around and reading Adobe’s online help. It’s that simple if you have some knowledge of XML and InDesign.

The XML interface is also very different from what people may be use to with browsers. Carriage returns and tabs matter and will be seen when your xml content is imported into your InDesign template.

Mapping tags to document styles (either paragraph styles or character styles) is simple. It’s a one-to-one relationship however. You cannot map a