Thank You.

I am a designer. My main tool is what I have in my head (and my heart for that matter). 

However, I probably would have not been able to execute anything the way that I do and maybe what I actually do would not have been as seamlessly connected to what I initially have in my head if it wasn't for Steve Jobs.

To be a visionary is one (magically marvelous) thing. But to allow millions of people to materialize their own visions and make the world a better place via your own is magical, beyond comprehension.   

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Think Different Narrated by Steve Jobs.

Why, Hello There!

Okay, first of all, I don't own a desktop, (I wouldn't even thing of owning anything else but a Mac by the way), but this little little block of... magic made the idea tickle a bit, for a second... I really love the mobility of my MacBook Pro, but that is another story I'm not getting into in this post...

So, I was looking around the internet only to find out from another blog that Apple (very secretly) unveiled the Magic Trackpad which does everything the trackpads on the new generation Apple notebooks do. I have to say, the functionality and user friendliness of the new Apple trackpads make the use of a mouse virtually unnecessary. Well, that's if you limit yourself to just browsing the internet and working on stuff which don't require much precision; so, graphic designers, photographers, movie editors and musicians you can pretty much forget relying on this for making a living. 

I'm still getting one if/when I get a desktop Mac!

Apple, Adobe, Get a Room, Please?

Apple, Adobe, please go get a room... and don't come out until you resolve all the things that need to be resolved between you.

I have spent more than 24 hours of my life, let alone the time I took off work, trying to figure out how to install Adobe PDF 9 as a printer on my Snow Leopard running MacBook Pro. Freaking impossible! Apparently, Apple's security updates consider the Adobe PDF printer to be something untrustworthy and blocked it all the way out of the system! When I finally managed to do install that, (don't even ask me why, I went through so many forums, blogs, websites etc.) the PDFs would save at a secret place engaging a great amount of space on my disk. Thank God a good friend of mine (who hadn't updated her iMac to Snow Leopard) was able to help. 

Also, Adobe, why on earth would you remove InBooklet from InDesign? Oh I see; so you can sell  it as a separate product!

iPad + Velcro = ♥

I don't know if I'd put my (yet to be purchased) iPad on all possible surfaces, but this is an excellent (and risky) idea!

(via SwissMiss) 

Steve Jobs | How To Live Before You Die

Apart from being a huge Apple fan, I admire Steve Jobs for all the innovation he's brought into the realms of computing & design. Seeing this video (a fifteen-minute video that is), and getting to know HOW he made it, was more than eye-opening. 

There are some parts of the video (from the 2005 Stanford Commencement) that made a great impression on me. The one that I love the most is the part where he says that he dropped out of college and didn't want to take the "normal" classes, so he took a calligraphy class. (which explains a lot)

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them

 Whether you're a Mac or PC user, Jobs fan or not, the messages are there. It's worth the fifteen-something minutes. "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

The transcript of the commencement address can be found here.

Re-Budget

Finally unveiled, and Apple made me feel sick wanting one of these... like, NOW!

It was an adventure with everyone speculating on the name of Apple's large-area-touch-device. iTablet was by far the most annoying. I mean, did Apple ever name something in such a blatantly banal manner? Did they go and name their laptop series iLaptop or iNotebook? Or can you imagine: iMusicPlayer? (I think I barfed in my mouth) 

So, back we go, to the drawing table for the gadget-budget...