Medium Voice

tlbox.com is a site which is kinda like a digg for designer tools. It lists the top color, css, fonts, html, icons, images, inspiration, tutorials, and widgets as voted on by users.

Body Type is a book by Ina Saltz, showing off tattoos of type. It focuses on rare typefaces, different categories of presentation, stories, and above all photos of tattooed letters. The book is $20 and you can see some examples at www.bodytypebook.com.

Smashingmagazine.com asked 35 top designers five designs questions. They received over 80 tips, design ideas, fonts, books, and over all suggestions. The five questions are as follows:

• 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
• 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often.
• 1 font you use in your projects very often.
• 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
• 1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline).

There is a lot of great information in this article. Some of my favorites is the priority some artist give to different aspects of design. I am always fascinated to learn how other artists work. It is always good to learn and practice different work flows even if at the end you prefer another way. Many times you can adapt different aspects which work good into your previous work flow. Of course as we have learned from this article, the internet is becoming one of the greatest sources for a designer.

This is the first film from Satellite Films where 60 filmmakers all recorded 20 minutes of film on August 5th, 2004. Currently you can not watch the movie but you can look at the trailers and gallery.

This is a very creative idea. The chance to see what is happening around the world to different people at the same time is very interesting. If anything it gives some small feeling how unique this world is.

As many have heard by now Adobe has released it’s first full family of software since the purchase of Macromedia. While some were worried this would end the greatness of flash and other fireworks, it appears they have kept all former Macromedia software. The question is how well they integrated the two different companies’ software. As of this writing I have not personally used any of the new CS3 family so I will not speculate as to how well the integration was pulled off. I would rather have users post their findings.

Collections are offered in 6 packages, design premium, design standard, web premium, web standard, production premium, master collection. Prices range from $999 to $2,500. Personally I think Adobe charges too much for their current software packages. Even though this was a completely new release across the board of all their main software including macromedia’s old software it still seems too expensive. I was hoping with more time Macromedia would drive some of Adobe’s prices down, oh well. Lets all keep our fingers crossed for Google’s new gPaint.

I have had the fortunate chance to experience 3d software such as 3D Studio Max, Maya, and Softimage. The problem with either an expensive package is it offers everything you could need which causes many newcomers to get frustrated with the amount of buttons they need to memorize to get even the most basic model started. I have also tried my hand at some free software such as Wings or Blender. The problem with many free packages is they can be just as confusing to use as the expensive packages and usually they don’t offer much after the initial learning curve is reached.

I remember hearing about SketchUp back when Google purchased it in 2006. But I never got the chance to use it. A couple of weeks ago I ran across a model done with it and decided it was time to download it and give it a try. I was surprised to find how clean the interface is. It has a nice intro tutorial in the opening screen to help most users through the basics. This small tutorial should be enough for most to get a decent model started. If not there are a ton of resources such as The SketchUp Wiki and The Official SketchUp Training Site.

SketchUp is a pure polygon modeling program. You will not find any nurbs or sub-division modeling in sketchup. The coolest tool is their patented “push/pull” technology used on their extrude function. The advantage is when you are extruding in, lets say on a window, it will recognize at the point where it will be pushing through the other poly side and connect to that side. This is very useful when you are modeling a lot of “holes” in an object. Another great use is their styles. There are some great NPR styles available to give looks such as a blueprint, crayon, or even paint.

There are a few areas SketchUp falls from including animation and lighting. But there are a world of plugins that add some of this functionality back. There is even a global illumination plugin which produces some great results.

SketchUp is a very easy but powerful program. It may not offer all the tools of a bigger program but the ones it does offer are some of most intuitive tools I have used.