Inspiration and intrigue…
Oct 20Like many designers, I’m interested in – and often intrigued by – random things.
Picture this: skilled furniture-makers creating a piece from a variety of materials; to resemble a scene created by Mother Nature millions of years ago.
The Montanera sofa, created by Gaetano Pesce for Meritalia; is one of the most striking items of furniture I’ve seen to date. I first noticed it when browsing the ‘Market Report for Milan 2009’ in the September 2009 issue of Metropolitan Home magazine. My eye was drawn straight to it. I couldn’t stop staring at the photo, even though it was quite small.
The detail and clarity of the imagery certainly look stunning. It is a real statement piece: measuring 9 feet (2.74 metres) in length, it would need ‘breathing space’! The photos on Design Boom show the sofa with a black wall behind, fading to a white floor in the foreground; and vice-versa. The black-to-white really catches the eye. It would have been even better to see the sofa in a very minimal room setting of some kind…how about a sparsely furnished reception area – or a tongue-in-cheek location, such as a log-walled cabin?
For many, the Montanera may be too literal; too graphic. Radical design often provokes a love or hate reaction – rarely anything in between.
I’d love to see the Montanera for real; to see how comfortable it is and how the graphics look close up. According to Metropolitan Home, it’s available for US$23,500 from Moss in NYC – so I won’t be seeing it anytime soon…
Blurb user experience – update
Oct 14At last! My book cover preview in blurb now displays properly. The cover preview looks a bit over-saturated, but I'll take that over the inverted image that had been displaying for the past month or so.
Good on Blurb. Now I will look at creating my next book, using the InDesign templates again. They worked very well for me.
Digital Evolution | Part One: A front-row seat
Oct 07Depending on what you read, I’m either from the Generation Jones demographic, or I’m a Gen-X’r.
Whatever. All I can say, is that I had a front-row seat at one of the most startling shows in recent history.
I’ve been using Macs for 20 years now; how time flies. From the Macintosh SE/30 to the latest iMac G5 and so many in-between. Apple really have me over a barrel. It wasn’t always this way.
Back in the late 1970s, we had the pleasure of clunky old typewriters for written workplace communications. If we were really lucky, we got a modern electric typewriter! At first, we used sheets of typing paper, with sheets of carbon paper between for copies. Before long, the photocopier was the way to get multiple copies.
A typing mistake was a major pain. We had Tipp-Ex correction fluid – first in bottles and later as Tipp-Ex sheets. (Think Wite-Out or Liquid Paper in North America). We used to make jokes about owning shares in Tipp-Ex and there was even a t-shirt kicking around with the slogan ‘Cover Your Boobs with Tipp-Ex’. I guess not many guys were using typewriters at that time…
Then something momentous happened in my working life.
In the mid 1980s a colleague and I completed a short course on a new-fangled office machine called a IBM-PC. It had two 5.25” floppy disk drives. To boot up, you had to follow what now seems an elaborate MS-DOS disk-swapping procedure. I was thrilled to be learning something new but my older colleague struggled badly; I tried at length to help her remember the procedure for this but she still didn’t get it. The change was unwelcome for her; she liked her IBM Selectric and for things to stay as they were.
Luckily for me, the engineering company we worked at embraced this new technology and invested in a whole bunch of IBM-PCs. We had to evaluate word processing software and and then pick one for the company. We chose a product called WordPerfect 4.2—which was incredibly sophisticated for it’s time—and we did courses on that, too. Best of all, we didn’t have to type and re-type the same stuff over and over any more: a real revelation. Our typing mistakes could easily be eliminated and no-one need know about them. Mail merge? That saved hours! With the flick of a switch, we were connected to a dot matrix printer…wow!
It just got better from there. I was sent to do a PageMaker course. It was pretty confusing at first, but I was learning something new again…it was so exciting and proved to be a turning point in my career.
A year or two later…a new marketing role and cute new toy to play with: a Macintosh SE/30! Wait…where did MS-DOS go; what about all that disk swapping to boot up? You could even store files on the built-in hard drive. The disks were smaller and more durable too. The screen display actually looked like normal text on a piece of paper. You could make the fonts bigger or smaller, and they would print out onto an inkjet or laser printer! This really felt like a giant step forward. If all this were not enough, I could take the little guy home and work there. There were fun things to play with: how about MacDraw? PageMaker for Mac? HyperCard? Wingz? Excel? FileMaker Pro? WordPerfect for Mac? Talking Moose? Sounds assigned to key strokes? Wow! It was like having Christmas every day.
Next: to the 1990s and beyond…
