With Adobe taking a break for the rest of the year, I’m going to lay low for a few days, squire around a couple of rowdy tots, and generally enjoy Christmas with the family.  Thanks as always for reading the blog and for giving me the chance to work on interesting projects here.  I wish you and yours all the best for a peaceful, blessed holiday season.  I’ll soon return to pepper your consciousness with silly, bullet-listed ephemera. 🙂  Until then…

Cheers,
J.

Oh, now this just doesn’t look safe:

If you like the technique, see also Nike’s “Human Chain” ad:

[Via]

• Cool industrial chops: I dig Tokujin Yoshioka’s Transparent Cell Phone.
• Creatures:
  • You can give your cat a Van Gogh’s Ear toy. Really. I have no words for this.
  • Owls! Super cute felt iPad sleeves and iPhone cases.
• Playing with light: check out interesting photos and sculptures.

Rather delightful:

Heh: a little stop-motion fun from the design team in SF:

Update: How could I omit the making-of vids? Thanks to Kim Pimmel (the guy in purple) for the pointer:

According to PetaPixel, Modern Times “is a low/no budget film created entirely against a green screen with friends as actors.”

As often happens, I find the making-of video more fascinating than the more polished outcome:

[Via Mark Coleran]

If using InDesign to publish to tablets is up your alley, check out this live demo/Q&A session:

Upcoming Ask a CS Pro: Friday, Dec 17th,  12pm PST: Producing publications with Digital Publishing Suite! Learn how to use the tools and viewer technology of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to produce publications for the iPad and other tablet devices.  Join Chris Converse from Codify Design to learn how to use the designer-friendly Digital Publishing Suite tools now available on Adobe Labs to create compelling content that combine the richness of print design with the interactivity of digital.

Dave Dickson and other members of the Digital Publishing team will be fielding questions alongside Chris. [Update: the recording is now online.]

Apple software engineer Andrew Carol pieced 1,500 Lego Technic blocks together to recreate a Greek computer that laid lost on a sea floor for 2,000 years:

[Via Deb D’Andrea]

Hah!

PHOBAR: -adjective, Acronym for ‘PHOtoshopped* Beyond All Recognition.’ A play on the the more popular acronym FUBAR: ‘F’d Up Beyond All Recognition,’ PHOBAR** refers to an image, usually a photo of a person, that has been retouched and airbrushed with digital image manipulation software on a computer so significantly, that the person in the photo is barely recognizable.

[Via Greg Geisler]

*Sorry as always, Adobe Legal.
**Not to be confused with a Vietnamese eatery, or CATOBAR, about which I was reading this morning

Gondrian! Escheresque! Inceptionoid!

I can’t help but think of Michel Gondry’s brilliant vid for “Come Into My World,” which you should see if you haven’t. (Give it a minute to get rolling.)

The Adobe Design Achievement Awards

celebrate student and faculty achievement. The competition showcases individual and group projects & honors the most talented and promising student graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, developers and computer artists.

Prizes include a trip to Taipei, cash, copies of CS5 Master Collection, and more.  Check out the site to see details (FAQ) and to submit your entry.  (You actually have a while–’til June 24, 2011–but if you’ve got good stuff now, why wait?)

For many years Photoshop supported a “No Color Management” printing mode.  Unfortunately the option caused user confusion, and it was difficult for Adobe & Apple to continue supporting.  In the course of modernizing Photoshop’s foundations (moving to Cocoa, 64-bit, Quartz, etc.) in CS5, we dropped this feature.

There are, however, people who need to print without color management. They print color targets which are then used to generate printer profiles for new printer/paper/ink combinations. These users range from printer manufactures to third-party ink suppliers to power users like Andrew Rodney who supply their own high quality profiles.

Therefore we’ve created the Adobe Color Print Utility, a simple app designed solely to enable printing without color management.  This way we’ve been able to simplify the Photoshop printing pipeline (both in terms of user experience & code maintenance) while offering power users a needed tool.  Please see the tech note for more application details.

Answer: You’d have something like the just-released GridIron Flow 2.0.  It can save your butt, for free. Why would you not start using it immediately?

The company has radically redefined what was already a unique & very powerful piece of software, enabling file sync & collaboration on top of automatic versioning.  Oh, and instead of costing a couple of hundred bucks per seat, it’s now free (!), with paid upgrades if you need more capabilities.  Read on for details.

I praised Flow 1.0 as being like an airbag, staying out of your way until it saves your bacon–by automatically versioning your files (think realtime Time Machine, with beautiful Adobe integration).  Trouble is, because the app is so unique, it’s sometimes hard for people to wrap their heads around & pay for up front.

The barrier to entry, however, is now zero.

The free product, Flow Essentials, tracks all files in a creative project and displays them in a visual map. You can now define projects and identify teams of people that will be part of the workflow. Flow 2 Essentials enables realtime collaboration, enabling users to add notes to nodes on the map, and to send emails (linking recipient to the node on that map) to the team or a subset of the group. The map allows you to see who worked on each asset, the size of the asset, and any attached notes.

This is all provided, along with 4GB of online Overflow storage (the Dropbox-style part), for free.  Unlike Dropbox (of which I’m a fan, by the way), Flow doesn’t require moving assets into specific folders; you can move and rename them while staying synced.

They also offer three premium services, each for $10/month per user, or $20/mo./user for all three (no contract required):

1. Time Manager allows you to review the time you have invested on each asset, and provides a control feature to allow amortizing total time across multiple projects. It also displays percentage of time spent in each creative application and offers a manual entry mechanism that allows you to include time that is not file based (e.g. design & client meetings, phone calls, etc.).
2. Versioning enables automatic file versioning & allows you to lock, delete, branch or drill down on any specific version. Versions are saved locally by default.
3. Overflow shares not only the asset but versions of that asset as well. The premium service adds 50GB to the 4GB of storage provided for in Essentials.

Why am I promoting this app?  Do I or Adobe get some kind of kickback for sales? Nope. It’s just that having been a Web designer in a big agency, I know the pain of lost/overwritten files & the drag of filling out timesheet.  What’s it worth to help fix those problems?  More than the cost of a few coffees a month, I’m guessing.

If you take Flow for a spin, please share your impressions via the comments.

One, I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to do computer animation in my youth.  An Apple IIgs ad featuring a rocket blasting off nearly made my head blast off.  Two, it’s hard to imagine that the app below predated Flash by just five years (FutureSplash by less).

[Via]

On a related note, I was struck by David Pogue noting today, “Think of all the commonplace tech that didn’t even exist 10 years ago: HDTV, Blu-ray, GPS, Wi-Fi, Gmail, YouTube, iPod, iPhone, Kindle, Xbox, Wii, Facebook, Twitter, Android, online music stores, streaming movies and on and on.”

Previously: Old-school imaging: Warhol on the Amiga.

Leo Bridle & Ben Thomas labored for 9 months to create their all-analog “Train of Thought“:

As often happens, I found the making-of video (in this case involving some Photoshop plus what one imagines were a heck of a lot of papercuts) even more interesting: