Alex Hardy

Once again, I find myself trawling search engines for logos and photography for a project. The client shall of course remain nameless, but suffice it to say they are a Very Large Company.

A company who, for all their people and resources, are apparently unable to provide us with brand logos in a sensible format like Illustrator. Nor are they able to supply product photography better than I could do myself in moments with my digicam and a white wall for a background.

This is not uncommon. It happens all the time. You feel like a chef on a special edition of ‘Ready Steady Cook’, where you are challenged to make a delicious meal not from budgeted ingredients, but rather from what you were able to fish out of a wheelie bin.

A wonderful thing about the web is that it’s a leveller. With a great website and well executed marketing activities, the smallest of companies can compete with the largest. So it never ceases to astonish how often companies will either not have their logo - the foundation of their corporate identity - readily available or how often they will turn to cheapskates over decent photography.

People instinctively judge on appearance. If your product looks like shit, your customers will reason that it is shit.

Thirty years after Sylvester Stallone first introduced the underdog backroom brawler from Philadelphia in the Oscar-winning ROCKY, Rocky Balboa returns for one last dance. Speculation as to whether Balboa, in his prime, would have been able to defeat lackluster champ Mason “The Line” Dixon spurs Dixon’s management to set up an exhibition fight between the two… Life hits harder than any man can, and one’s ability to keep getting up until the final bell rings is the true measure of self. Corny? Perhaps. But when Bill Conti’s legendary score kicks in and Rocky starts pounding the heavy bag, the metaphor feels truly profound.

First up, an admission: I had never seen a Rocky film. It’s my understanding that the original is seen as something of a classic, its numerous sequels declining sharply in quality.

This is a film where you really have to leave your 21^st century cynicism at the door. It belongs to a bygone generation of films from the late seventies and early eighties - it’s an uncomplicated parable about self belief. The notion that a sixty year old could fight a man thirty years his junior to a standstill takes some swallowing, but the story of the film makes it surprisingly easy to suspend your disbelief.

Stallone’s script stays lean (it hints at Rocky’s developing friendship with Marie, but resists forcing a love story into the 102 minutes) and the pace doesn’t drag, even though at least half the film passes before the Big Training Montage. At the end, you want to cheer Rocky! Rocky!

I want to see the first now.

[rating:3]

Miyamoto is Nintendo’s Senior Marketing Director and General Manager, Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development. He’s the creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Wave Race and Pikmin for Nintendo’s consoles.

Put simply, the guy is a genius. He’s been described from time to time as the “Spielberg of videogames”. This is unfair - Spielberg has made some rubbish. Joe Versus the Volcano was two hours of my life that noone can give me back.

Miyamoto will deliver a speech at GDC 2007 where he will “reveal how a singular creative vision drives his work, not only in terms of his world-renowned software, but also in generating key technologies, including the current global phenomena, Nintendo DS and Wii. And he will challenge the audience to apply his approach in their own distinctive styles”.

One for the diary…

Today I had cause to reinstall Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2). In the absence of a convenient uninstaller I had to read the PDF file to do the job manually. As I got grumpier by the minute from failed attempts to reinstall CS2, I had time to reflect on Adobe products in general. I thought to myself “what was the last really compelling version of Photoshop?”

Having started using Photoshop extensively at version 4, I would say that Photoshop 7 is the most important release so far. I could quite happily use it even today in place of CS2 (which is Photoshop 9 in all but name).

Some of the great stuff we got between versions 4 and 7:

• The History palette (multiple undos woohoo!)
• The Actions palette (sooooo much time saved on repetitive tasks)
• Improved type controls (although it still isn’t all that great)
• Layer effects
• Layer sets (grouping layers together for easy manipulation)
• The Healing brush (brilliant, so much better than the clone tool for removing imperfections from images)
• Imageready integration (I was finally able to dump Fireworks for web graphics output)

Between 7 and CS2 we were treated to:

• A horrible nagging three disc installer
• A horrible nagging updater (“…the updater must update itself before it can check for updates…”)
• That Adobe Bridge bullshit that noone ever uses
• Annoying changes to the layer selection system
• A poorly conceived rebrand of the applications in the collection, that sacrifices easy recognition for brand uniformity - putting Adobe’s corporate vanity ahead of user’s needs

Photoshop CS3 promises an even worse icon design and universal binary versions of the applications. It’ll be a worthwhile upgrade for the performance boost on Intel Macs alone, but you could have ignored CS and CS2 entirely.

It seems to me that the Adobe of recent years is more busy pushing the perception that its products are great than working on the reality. As the second largest software company after Microsoft though, it appears that there’s almost noone left with the nerve to challenge them.

OK, so here’s my first (in fact my second, but it seemed pointless to upload an image that I’ve already moved on from) visual for the blog section of this site’s upcoming redesign. The sarcastic little “gradients” flash is a placeholder - I want to put a pic of me there, assuming that Jo has enough time to do one. If not, I’ll come up with something else.

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David is sending off our application to take part in the Great Manchester Run on Monday. The difference is that we’re each running for charities of our own choice because it was a pain for him to chase up all the cash last time.

Any suggestions then for what charity I could run for?

Meanwhile back in web development land, I found a nifty little web app the other day that I thought I’d call attention to.

CSS Tweak squeezes your CSS files down in size. It will remove comments and white space, as well as optimise declarations for fonts, backgrounds, borders and lists.

It’s probably best to postpone using it until you’ve finished your work, then run it on a duplicate of your CSS file (uploading the duplicate in its place). The reason being that the file will be not so readable after CSS Tweak has done its work.

Nifty stuff - every little helps, and there’s even a Dashboard widget.

I’ve been hoping ever since Jade and her tribe got back on telly that this would mark the beginning of the end for Big Brother and other shows like it… No more sad wannabees clawing for a taste of fame, no more (sadder) has-beens trying to recapture it by disgracing themselves for money.

Shilpa Shetty has no business on a show like Big Brother being an actual, real, movie star. In a way she’s brought it on herself. If she wanted exposure to new audiences, she couldn’t have picked a more ridiculous way to do it.

Jade Goody is an ignorant, abusive pig. I’m going to skip the racism debate, because it’s unacceptable to speak to people the way Jade, Danielle and Jo have spoken to Shilpa because of racism. It’s apparently totally peachy to do so because of “cultural or social differences”, according to Channel 4.

I hoped it would be the beginning of the end for Big Brother because it completes their production line:

• Step 1: Make some talentless simpleton famous for nothing at all.
• Step 2: They profit from their ill-deserved fame.
• Step 3: Invite them into a “celebrity” version of same show, thus proving what a shallow freakshow the whole business is.
• Step 4: The public sees that they have created a monster. A monster who has made more money than they will ever know for being an idiot. Cue the backlash. The press line up for - their favourite part - the vilification before they disappear again.

And that, dear reader, is the celebrity life-cycle completed. Now for pity’s sake, switch off.

A bit of tweaking and I reckon this is the one. I need to do a design for this ‘ere blog page and a contact form now - if the disgracefully talented Ms Blakely can do some illustrations I’ll look at incorporating them. I’d like to add a bit of humour to the design as we did for her folio on Design Inc.

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A new year means a new phone. This time it’s the Sony Ericsson K800i.

I was happy to annoy the Carphone Whorehouse salesman when I called up O2 and they were able to offer me a better deal than he could For £30 a month I get 400 cross-network minutes and 100 texts. I also get to claim £200 in rebates over the course of the 18 month contract.

I can only assume contracts are becoming longer because the increasing sophistication of phones is making it necessary in order for the networks to subsidise them.

This is my fourth Sony Ericsson mobile - I tend to go for them because I like the design and the UI doesn’t feel quite so clunky as some other phones. The main features of this new model that interest me are the 3.2 megapixel camera, push email, RSS feeds and 3G.

3.2 megapixels! My “proper” camera is only 4! Mobile phones are becoming a viable alternative for casual photography. As Dave rightly points out, there’s more to a good camera than resolution (shutter speed and low light performance for instance), but they’re getting there. It doesn’t escape my notice either that the resolution on this camera is markedly superior to that on the iPhone. I expect that the iPhone will get several improvements before it reaches UK shops, if not it will look seriously underspecced.

I’ll have to resort to third party plugins to get it working with iSync (thanks a bunch Apple), but I’m sure it’ll do nicely for the forseeable future.