2008 Adobe Design Achievement Awards

I don’t support many design galas but when people the likes of Joshua Davis and Tina Roth Eisenberg are judging it’s kind of hard not to take notice.

There is no question I worship at the altar of Nakamura’s work with resounding pride. I only wish I lived in Japan to view it in person.

It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

I loved Helvetica and a film like this this was secretly on my wishlist ever since I saw it.

Markdown looks to work as well so it helps minimize HTML elements. I just wish Apple would give us a copy and paste soon.

I thought about blogging from vacation using it but even I’m not that big of a nerd.

Jack Shedd:

Write top ten lists and whore yourself on many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about you what love, unless what you love is popular on Digg. And for god’s sake don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.

Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven. It’s the type of thinking that leads to a sequel to the movie Garfield.

I don’t blog to try and gain readership or hope to sell sponsorship, if anything I write for me and a few friends that find what I find interesting, interesting. If those post suddenly become Dugg then so be it. It’s also the reason I removed comments from my site so that I would not receive unsolicited feedback or provide an avenue for spam.

Originally I wanted a blog that people read and created a community around, but honestly I don’t write that well and my topics aren’t narrow enough.

That’s not to say I haven’t found a great deal of pleasure from writing and designing my site. I’ve learned plenty from my experience with WordPress and often impressed with its capability. I just don’t want advice from others to say I could rank higher if you just write about certain topics and focus on this subject. Frankly, if there was just one subject I was interested in I would be a fairly boring person—I’m quite happy if my audience was just myself.

Just discovered Dave Gibbons poster of the Watchmen for last year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Maybe there will be an update for this year’s version at the 2008 Con.

When I first read the issues in 1986 I had no clue of how really good Dave Gibbons was as an artist. His illustration is indeed a work of art and his ability to set pace with the strict 9-panel grid is impressive.

The pace of the Watchmen is one of its significant strength it doesn’t break stride until chapter 12, just how Zack Snyder is going to achieve this is a challenge within a 3 hour cinematic framework. I have to go on record and say I am afraid that the Watchmen movie will not live up to the graphic novel nor will it come even close. I love to be wrong on this one.

Garret Dimon writes an informed review of the usabilty testing application Silverback by ClearLeft. There are neat features within the application such as recording mouse clicks, recording audio through iSight, special keypresses, etc., looks to be a very promising.

Garret Dimon:

Silverback will be a great addition to any web developer’s tool kit. With it’s thoughtful interface and ease of use, the team from Clearleft has a winner on their hands. It should be available to the public in the next few weeks for around $50, and it will work on both Leopard and Tiger.

I know it’s often referred to as the most celebrated graphic novel of all time but for those of us hardcore enough to remember the book was released as individual comic book issues and the anticipation for the next issue was only paralleled by the Dark Knight.

watchmenmovie.com

Oh lets see Microsoft Silverlight do this…

Radiohead and Flash; I mean how can you top that?

The book has a wonderful collection of creators contributing: Pia Guerra, Leah Moore, John Reppion David Mack, Hope Larson, Ryan Kelly, Jonathan Hickman, Colleen Doran, Eric Canete, Ted McKeever, Jock, Anthony Johnston, Dame Darcy, Carla Speed McNeil, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Mark Buckingham, Ivan Brandon, C. B. Cebulski and many more, including an introduction by Neil Gaiman. The cover and book is designed by Modernist designer extraordinaire Tom Muller.

Comic Book Resources also just released a creator blog so you can view the creative process of making the book.

Tori Amos:

I have been surprised, excited and pleasantly shocked by these comics that are extensions of the songs that I have loved and therefore welcome these amazing stories of pictures and words because they are uncompromisingly inspiring.

It shows you thought is a powerful formidable essence and can have a breathtaking domino effect.

I’m bringing some friends with me who have never gone and are bit skeptical that it’s going to be a nerd convention, of course it is what are you expecting. Having said that there seems to be much more than just comics, Trekkies, geeks and gamers at SDCC; over the years its transformed itself into quite a show for popular culture, from movies, books, to video games.

I’m not saying it’s not a freakshow it definitely is in some respects but I think there is something for just about anyone. I’ve been attending as a professional since 1997, when it was still somewhat of a big deal “whoa you work in comics” however, I think they give the pro badges out now. Still if you are into anything from toys to bad t-shirts to manga it’s all there. Who knows you may run into a B-list celebrity or two I actually ran across David Hasslehoff and Traci Lords one year, talk about surreal.

Obviously if you have any artistic inclinations potential attendees such as Ashley Wood, Adam Hughes, Jim Lee, Travis Charest, Jeff Campbell, Art Adams, Mike Mignola are all illustrators and artists worth checking out.