The Distinct Studios Blog

When I was sitting in Washington, D.C. InDesign User Group Meeting on May 2nd , I thought….it’s here.

What’s here?

The Adobe Creative Cloud is here.

We are talking big deal. It’s a  game changer HERE.

The first game changer is the business model. Instead of buying an upgrade to the Adobe Creative Suites and waiting another 12 months or so for the next upgrade, the Adobe Creative Cloud  membership subscription plan is available.

The old option is still offered but the extras offered with the Creative Cloud make it appealing.  The Adobe Creative Suite 6 Master Collection is available for the membership as well as additional services that include the Adobe Touch Apps, Cloud Storage, and Adobe Typekit.  The new software tools, Muse and Edge are only available with the Cloud Membership.

The creative cloud is modeled after an online app store. After you purchase your membership, you download the Creative Suite software to your hard drive. Also like an app store, they will be updates available for download as they are completed.

The Software

The enhancements to the Adobe Creative Suite software are another notch in Adobe’s toolkit. The engine for Adobe Illustrator 6.0 has been rewritten for speed and performance. The pattern creator and the image trace features are now useful instead of marginally interesting. Adobe Photoshop 6.0 has been optimized for better performance in addition to having  a new interface look. Skin tone aware selections and a background save option are among the many feature improvements. Adobe InDesign 6.0 offers up Liquid Layout and Alternative Layout Features as improvements to their digital publishing capabilities. While Dreamweaver 6.0 doesn’t have a new interface, it does have fluid grid templates to help you create responsive web sites.

Work Anywhere, Anytime

I’ve only touched on a few of the many tools that are available. I recommend spending time on Adobe.com to learn more.  My Lynda.com subscription has also come in handy since they’ve been posting new Adobe CS 6.0 courses.

There are two other big points that Adobe has been making as it’s been rolling out these changes.

You can do your work where ever you are.

Your files are where every you are.

Adobe has surfed the mobile and cloud trends of the last few years and reinvented their process.

This is a new way of getting the tools into the hands of artists, designers, and filmmakers.

I’m game.

Communication is key to reaching communities in need of health care information. A recent Health 2.0 Stat Meetup showcased projects that targeted influenza, low reading literacy levels, older adults and disaster information  management . The format is short rapid fire presentations presented by a project team member.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF INFLUENZA

Christine Cotter, a digital and social media associate at Westat , shared her experience working with the CDC on their  2011-2012 National Influenza Campaign. The innovation was to partner with social media site, Meetup.com to inspire groups in at-risk areas to organize and get vaccinated together.  The Meetup groups got the word out and a total of 17 groups were vaccinated.

REACHING LOW LITERACY ADULTS

Beth Maloney, the President of Palladian Partners presented a project with the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The website that Palliadian and NIDA developed is called EasyRead. It’s audience is low reading literacy adults who may be struggling with drug abuse and need information. Video and animation were effective tools in communication. Focus group testing with the target demographic was also helpful in keeping the development team on target.

Stefani Cuschnir followed Beth up with a brief discussion of the technology ReadSpeaker that is used on the site. The technology is installed on a web page and when activated reads the page.

REACHING OLDER ADULTS

Kevin Chaney, a program manager for the Health IT portfolio at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality spoke about the barriers to using technology to promote well-being and independence in elderly adults. Kevin is the program official for AHRQ funded, Active Aging Research Center at the University of Wisconsin . The goals of the center is “to develop means by which technology can help older people live independently and stay home”.

RESPONDING TO DISASTERS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

Siobhan Champ-Blackwell, an Aquilent senior business consultant spoke about the social media tool twitter and how the National Library of Medicine uses it to improve access to disaster health information.

At the Disaster Information Management Research Center of NLM, Siobhan works with the Specialized Information Services Division.  SIS manages several tweeter accounts and has found the social media dashboard software, HootSuite to be effective. In addition to HootSuite, they are developing a tweetbank for storing and tracking NLM twitter communications.

You can follow SIS at @NLM_SIS

August Heffner presented an educational lecture to an engaged crowd of  AIGA DC members earlier this month.  It was a tour of his experiences as a designer and Assistant Creative Director for the in-house design studio of the Museum of Modern Art. He did an excellent job of speaking to how design constraints can lead to creative solutions.

He began with an overview of the history of MoMA design that included the early business cards that the first director Alfred Barr designed, the unique Franklin Gothic No. 2. logotype design by Ivan Chermayeff and the custom  typeface developed by Matthew Carter in 2004.

Most recently, a new MoMA identity system was designed by Paula Scher of Pentagram and Julia Hoffmann, MoMA’s Creative Director for Graphics and Advertising. This system that includes poster templates creates a structure for the overall look and feel of MOMA’s exhibit advertising. The design team has to remain true to the guidelines but also draw the audience into the art work of the exhibit.  Each exhibit experience is different as demonstrated on the portfolio site for the MoMA Design Studio.

Let’s face it. He and the MoMA design team have really cool content to start with! Top that off with a personal engagement with the institution and the mission of outreach to the community and you’re going to get compelling, intriguing solutions to design challenges. Some of the exhibits August discussed included, Talk-to-Me , Abstract Expressionist New York , I am Still Alive , Marina Abramovic and Andy Warhol Motion Pictures.

Yesterday, I was very sad to hear about the passing of Hillman Curtis. He was a role model, an artist and groundbreaking designer in digital media .  I spent countless hours with his book, Flash Web Design. It opened up a new direction and showed the potential of the web for creative visual expression.

I used his book MTIV, Process, Inspiration, and Practice for the New Media Designer as a text book for my multimedia design courses at George Mason University. While I loved the book personally, it was an extra joy for me to see it light a fire for students. Today, I keep the book on my shelf in my home studio.

In recent years, he focused on film making.  I plan in the next few days to take a look at his Artist Series but can recommend his first feature length film documentary on David Byrne,  Rise, Ride & Roar.  I wrote about the film in an entry last summer that I called Learning from a Master at Work.

The film is a homage to ideas,  hard work and the creative life.

Last night,  we drove to the National Mall to see the new “liquid architecture” exhibit at the Hirshhorn by the artist, Doug Aitken. The Mall itself had a red glowish tint in the early evening. We parked closer to the end of the mall then we needed to but it allowed us to walk up to the experience and see it unfold. As we rounded the bend after the Smithsonian Castle, we saw a grouping of people leaning against the sculpture garden wall. The scene was quiet and respectful. All you could hear was the song “I Only Have Eyes for You” as a series of images appeared against the curved Hirshhorn’s facade. The walls seemed to dissipate. We quietly walked into the rotunda area and around the museum. We saw small but intently focused groups of people taking in the work. Some couples were quietly removed from others while larger groups seemed to have formed spontaneously. No one was speaking but everyone seemed at rest.

Photo Credits: Jay Townsend

(Click on a thumbnail to bring up the slideshow)

The DSEE Digital Print and Design Conference held some surprising charms last week. First due to some untimely fog in the Washington DC area, the keynote address by Stefan Sagmeister was moved to 4 in the afternoon not the scheduled 9:15 am.

What could have been a uncomfortable situation was saved by the outstanding Decoding the Power of Cross-Media presentation with Droga5. Hashem Bajwa and Neil Heyman provided a case study in creative smarts with a detailed discussion of the project, Decode Jay-Z with Bing.

With Decode Jay-Z with Bing, Droga5 engaged in what they called “method advertising”. The Droga 5 team immersed themselves in the culture of hip-hop. The result was a marketing campaign for Jay-Z’s biography ,“Decode”, that was fused with a campaign for Bing. It all derived from the hip-hop technique of sampling.

They took the book campaign into the locations of Jay-Z’s life by printing out large scale pages from his book and installing the pages in the locations described on a particular page. Using the bing engine, they created an interactive location-based game that required users/players to visit the page in order to play.

Later in the afternoon, Jake Lefebure of Design Army shared that his team starts projects with a sketch and they scan and save them all. I felt validated. I love to sketch and visualize on paper.

Another tactile item of note is that Design Army’s work requires them to keep a great deal of storage space since often they prefer the look that comes from a real environment and real props rather than something that is manipulated on the computer. They are very particular about the projects that they take on which include extensive photo shoots for the Washington Bride & Groom Magazine.

When Stefan arrived, the weather had cleared. He talked about his happiness project and shared some footage from his first documentary, “The Happy Film”. His ideas about taking a sabbatical every five years and how that can actually benefit you financially was of interest to the audience of overworked Washingtonians.

He also was the third designer/artist of the day to talk about how it important it was to start the design process away from the computer.

” There is something about being trained in design mechanically that sets up a need for problems to be worked on in three dimensional space not the flat screen. “

A key example was a Levi’s campaign where a pair of jeans was deconstructed and an image of a fly was constructed from buttons. Fun and certainly tactile!!

Thank you to the sponsors for the inspiring content and happy day!

It’s fair to say that this entry is an excuse to post another cool cat picture. It’s also another excuse to talk about the Phillips Collection exhibit SnapShot again. This image of a cool cat called a Caracal is at the National Zoo in Washington DC. I happened to call my Mom yesterday as she was watching this Caracal. She spent a minute describing it to me. I had the image in my mind’s eye  of this cat with big ears that I’ve seen on my own visits to the zoo.

Then I got on the phone with my brother, John.  John snapped a photo on his iPhone and it showed up in my email box in less than a minute.

Photo Credit: John Higgins

I love history. In fact, I’m kinda of crazy for it so I often look at situations in an historical context. After seeing SnapShot and enjoying the photos in the catalog all week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology continuously changes our ways of perceiving.  The first owners of personal cameras would have to send their cameras to Kodak for development before seeing their snapshots. I received this snapshot in a matter of seconds.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of spending a few hours at the Phillips Collection exhibit, Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard.

If you have any interest in the way artists respond to and utilize new technology – run don’t walk to this exhibit.

It will be  somewhat bitter sweet to think about the current bankruptcy proceedings of Eastman Kodak while appreciating the beautiful results that artists produced in the early years of photography.  I’ve been looking at the Post-Impressionists, Bonnard and Vuillard for years but never really understood how this tiny little box,  the first handheld camera changed their way of interacting with the world and art.

George Hendrik Breitner, Girl in a kimono (Geesje Kwak) in Breitner’s studio on Lauriersgracht, Amsterdam, n.d.. Collection RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History), The Hague.

George Hendrik Breitner, Girl in Red Kimono, Geesje Kwak, 1893–95. Noortman Master Paintings, Amsterdam, on behalf of private collection, Netherlands

You can see in the photography the use of unusual compositional cropping of the image, the spontaneous gesture and facial expression, the intimate scenes of home and daily life on the street. You’ll watch  their kids grow up and also see their parents age in personal photographs that found their way into their painting. I also discovered the artists,  Henri Evenepoel and George Hendrik Breitner who produced some very sensitive and intriguing photographs.

I purchased the catalog for Snapshot yesterday and recommend it. I’ll be making at least one more trip to the show before it closes in early May.  The shows next stop is the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Environmental Film Festival in the Nations Capital is celebrating  it’s 20th year.  The mission of  the festival is to advance environmental understanding through the power of film.  This year 180 films will be shown throughout Washington. The theme is the relationship between our health and the environment.

“The water we drink, the food we eat and the air we breathe are all essential to human life. The effects of toxins and pollutants on the human life support system can be disastrous to our health. Our films address the complex relationship between health and the environment with the warning that whatever we do to the environment we do to ourselves.”

The 20th Annual Environment Film Festival

I’m looking forward to attending the premiere of A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet March 25th at The Carnegie Institution of Science.

I’m not a big fan of the Q&A portion of lectures. That feeling changed on January 26 at a local AIGA DC lecture by Matteo Bologna of Mucca Design.

Matteo Bologna is the creative director and founder of the branding firm, Mucca Design. Mucca Design’s projects spans multiple disciplines including publishing, fashion, technology and restaurants with clients such as Rizzoli, Adobe, Harper Collins, Wired Magazine and the Patina Restaurant Group.   Their client work is diverse and reflects a passion for typography, color and the humorous insight.

Mr. Bologna is an adept public speaker who projected joy with humorous tales that included the journey that brought him from Italy to the United States to practice design.

It was no surprise that the audience of  creative professionals and design students had loads of questions about running a design firm, what he looks for in the talent that he hires and what it was like to design work for brilliant clients like Steve Martin.

It was getting kinda late when an audience member asked Mr. Bologna this question.

What  do you do inspiration?

I jolted awake!

Mr. Bologna was quiet for a moment.

Then, he said that he wasn’t sure if he believed in” inspiration” with a capital “I” .

What he did believe in was research.

He didn’t say that he used the research- oriented design method (that would be blah blah – click to check out lecture poster). He just followed the statement by explaining that when projects come into Mucca Design there is an amazing amount of research that goes into solving the creative problem for the client.

Since then,  I’ve been wondering if research leads to inspiration. Do you think inspiration is a brilliant flash that happens suddenly or is it the result of groundwork that goes into understanding a problem and it’s potential solution?  Hard work, sudden flash of brilliance or both?