I just wanted to share the settings I use to convert video for the Nexus One with Handbrake (the freeware video converter). The Nexus One has a wonderful screen and it would be a shame to not use it for video podcasts. But some podcasts (the Nasa Edge for example) encode their 720p video in a way the Google phone does not recognize.
I included the screenshots of the important settings and if you want to set them in a quick way just select the ipod classic preset und change the settings to 800 pixel width, Anamorphic none and the Avg Bitrate to 1500 kbps and the Audio to 2 channel AAC and you are done. Enjoy.
There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:
Quite out of date
Not very compelling any more
The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do. …click here to continue…
Google launched a couple of weeks ago a new version of it’s image management software Picasa. You already read about the new version everywhere – Facial recognition. This feature was formely only available on the web albums. Now I think that many of you already tried out the new version and this amazing feature and you might think that it’s a nice feature for private users, but not for the corporate use. Actually there are a few interesting uses after you did the preparational steps – Use the facial recognition to tag the images of your co-workers, employes, clients, … – first assign the right names and when you are done, you can add iptc-keywords according to the person shown:
Use this tagged pictures and upload them to your DAM (digital asset management) – finding a picture of your boss have never been easier.
Now it’s easy to tag photos people you don’t know. Trainees can go through your library as humans are quite goog in recognizing faces
If an employe hast left the firm you can easily group the fotos containing him an block them so that they are no longer used (works great for ex girlfriends too).
Easy celebration cards. Many firms celebrate their emplyees if they stay for many years. Why not make personalized greetings cards where you show the evolution of a person through his pictures.
These are just a few examples from my own daily work – but you can come up with more, don’t you?
Not many TV commercials try to break new visual grounds. Partly because the big budget campaigns tend to stay on the safe side. They have to be “different” but common enough to not frighten the audience.
In the last few years we have seen some fine photography experimenting with the look of miniatures, but the new tv spot from german Telecom uses a mix of animated miniatures as stage and actors and life actors. The spot aired only in Germany is integrated into a environmental campaign.
Very nice, I want to see more of this creative spots in the future.
It happened during my vacation. I wanted to get me an inflatable mattress (Lilo) – just a simple one to have fun while swimming in a lake. But where in the hell should I get one. I scratched my head and my first impulse was to open the laptop and search google for a shop to buy one. Well guess what – the result was no very satisfying. I couldn’t get any good result – there is no local vendor search in Europe. Ordering them online was no option (I don’t wanted to pay 5 Euro of shipping for a 4 Euro item and wait 2 days).
You think that I could have just run down the street to the next mall or shop who sells sport items. You’re right, but I actually didn’t remember where I could buy an inflatable mattress – I was blinded by online shopping. And there are good reasons for this:
I live (for the most time) in a rural area – the next mall is 150 km away
Local “we have all” stores are gone a long time – even sport shops just have clothes on their shelves. There is actually just one shop who has “sport-hardware” in my 30 km neighborhood and even they have only a limited choice of goods.
I’m used to buy exactly the item I want, not the item the vendor decides he wants to have in his store (Clothes are an exemption – I want to try them to know if they fit). It’s frustrating to go/drive from shop to shop to find the product I want.
Online shopping has therefore become my main shopping experience – If I need something I look for the best product (recommandations/reviews), look online for the best price and buy it.
I’m so used now to shop online for the goods I need that I really can’t tell you where in the neighborhood I would find the things I need. I did finally buy a mattress at a local sport shop – I was lucky, I stumbled over it driving by and they had one left. There was no choice but in the end I had fun with it in the lake.
Did you experience something similar – your stories are welcome.
Swarovski is a well known brand for jewellery around the world. The great marketing idea of applying techniques used for diamonds to glass made the company big and rich. These “techniques” are not only technical but also marketing skills. They sell you low cost glass at a high value by giving it the touch of exclusivity. They sell not only jewellery but also figurines and much much more – from beautiful to awful everything is covered.
Now I for myself don’t care much about the Swarovski hype – I don’t like much of the design and the associated prices – but I respect the marketing effort and how well they constructed their brand over the last 50 years. About 15 years ago they opened their “Kristallwelten” (crystal worlds). A sort of museum with works by famous artists inspired by the crystals. Andrè Heller was the curator of this magical place and everyone was delighted.
I will list now in a few words why this “Kristallwelten” is dismantling the brand of Swarovski:
It’s expensive – you pay 9.5 Euros (about 13.4 US$ at the time of writing) for getting in. There are 15 tiny rooms with “inspired art”, that’s close to a dollar/room. If a ordinary museum would charge at this prices… and not to forget – this is a marketing stunt, so free entry should be the minimum
If you are not interested in the “art” you cannot enter the shop directly – you have to pay to get into the shop basically. Ok, you get 2 Euro off you purchase with the ticket.
The so called art is a hoax – maybe 2 or 3 pieces of this exposition is worth the name of art. I studied art and I can tell the difference. They have a separate room for the “gallery” as they call it – the room with real masterpieces from the Swarovski art collection – see the difference in the naming
You don’t get any information about the production process or about Swarovski – there is only one room about the jewels itself and this is a little bit frustrating as you go there to learn about Swarovski
It’s old – 15 years and nearly no addition. You can tell the date of the art pieces and the updated rooms are just fitted with larger screens.
The shop has not all products on stock. The shop is big and they have nearly all products on display, but not all sizes. The factory is 50 meters away, we are at the heart of the Swarovski production site and they are not able to stock the rings on display in all sizes (and they just do S, M, L and XL – not like the jewellery ring sizes which are 22)
On the good side I have to admit, that the “crystallized” section, where you can buy single items to combine by yourself are quite neat.
The prices in the shop are the same all over the world. So if you travel to the Kristallwelten in Austria and you think that the shop nearby the factory is cheaper your wrong. No outlet – no factory sale.
So what is the conclusion – I stumbled out of the Kristallwelten and felt like I’ve been betrayed. The website is actually beautifuler and the respect for the firm was gone. No content for real money and no “magic” and all. Common’ Swarovski – we know it’s a marketing stunt, but don’t take us for fools. Get rid of the entrance fee (or do a full rebate on a purchase) and spice it up with more about the firm.
In various posts around the web you can find opinions on the new identity of the tv channel SyFy – formerly known as Sci-Fi Channel. While I don’t want to go into the design details I want to express some thoughts why the probably made this change. At first it seems quite unusual to change a well established brand so radically. It seems even more radical as the new name is also a new term that sounds like the old name but doesn’t has the same meaning – it actually has no meaning.
This puzzled at first even me. Science fiction was born over 100 years ago and the abbreviation sci-fi has become wide spread. Everybody knows what sci-fi is and therefore naming a tv channel who broadcasts sci-fi shows should be called sci-fi. But here lies the big problem. The vast majority of people “thinks” the know what sci-fi is all about. Basically science fiction is all about ufo’s and space travel. Science fiction is obviously much more than that and actually most of the movies and shows on tv are some sort of science fiction. How can you break this misinformation of the general public?
There are two ways. One way is to educate the people, but this would cost much more that just do it the way SyFy has done it. They changed the name and claimed that SyFy is the tv channel where you could “imagine more”. The name sound familiar enough to sci-fi fans to recognize the term and is new enough to new viewers to just be a name.
How far SyFy is more than just space crafts and aliens shows the spot – well done and good luck to the “new channel”.
Update: As @Lazarus2000 on Twitter pointed out giving a brand a unique name has another advantage. You can trademark the brand.
Sometimes the biggest time savers are in front of your eyes the whole time but you can’t see them. Mostly because this great features are so part of the system that nobody actually talks about them anymore.
One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.
The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
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One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.
The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. 
Another cool way to use this feature is for 
