Creative Community Bulletin 10 June 2011 Through 17 June 2011

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 10 June 2011 through 17 June 2011:

• Adobe sees a mar­ket beyond design­ers | Reseller News New Zealand – Russell says CS 5.5 focus­es on “the indi­vid­ual con­tent creator”whose job has become more dif­fi­cult thanks to the wide­spread adop­tion of mobile devices.

  “Print is slow­ly reduc­ing and design­ers are pro­duc­ing con­tent for many dif­fer­ent devices. Their role has got­ten quite dif­fi­cult,” he says.

  A focus on tablets and video enhance­ment tools are part of a large upgrade in ver­sion 5.5.

• The 30 CSS Selectors you Must Memorize | Nettuts+ – So you learned the base id, class, and descen­dant selec­tors – and then called it a day? If so, you’re miss­ing out on an enor­mous lev­el of flex­i­bil­i­ty. While many of the selec­tors men­tioned in this arti­cle are part of the CSS3 spec, and are, con­se­quent­ly, only avail­able in mod­ern browsers, you owe it to your­self to com­mit these to memory.
• iAndroid, an Android Simulator for iPhone – I’ve nev­er been a big fan of Android. I tried real­ly hard to like Google’s mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem but I nev­er real­ly made a deep con­nec­tion with it. That was until a cou­ple days ago, when I tried iAndroid, an Android sim­u­la­tor for jail­bro­ken iPhone.
• Perfect Layers 1.0 Now Available | PhotographyBLOG – onOne Software has just launched Perfect Layers 1.0, an appli­ca­tion that gives pho­tog­ra­phers the abil­i­ty to eas­i­ly cre­ate and work with lay­ered files in their work­flow appli­ca­tion of choice. Hitherto avail­able as a Public Preview, Perfect Layers sup­ports the cre­ation of lay­ered files that can be opened and edit­ed by Adobe Photoshop and can be used direct­ly from with­in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Bridge and Apple Aperture. Perfect Layers 1.0 is avail­able as a stand­alone prod­uct at the spe­cial intro­duc­to­ry price of $99.95 until the end of this month. From 1 July 2011, Perfect Layers will be avail­able for $129.95 and includ­ed as part of the Perfect Photo Suite 5.5. Owners of Plug-In Suite 5 can upgrade to Perfect Photo Suite 5.5, which will include Perfect Layers, at no addi­tion­al cost.
• Amazon​.com: Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Vol. 1 (9783836511018): Jan Tholenaar, Cees De Jong: Books – This book offers a nov­el overview of type­face design, explor­ing the most beau­ti­ful and remark­able exam­ples of font cat­a­logs from the his­to­ry of pub­lish­ing, with a spe­cial empha­sis on the peri­od from the mid-19th cen­tu­ry to the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, when col­or cat­a­logs were at their height. Taken from a Dutch col­lec­tion, this exu­ber­ant selec­tion tra­vers­es the evo­lu­tion of the print­ed let­ter in all its var­i­ous incar­na­tions via exquis­ite­ly designed cat­a­logs dis­play­ing not only type spec­i­mens in roman, ital­ic, bold, semi-bold, nar­row, and broad, but also char­ac­ters, bor­ders, orna­ments, ini­tial let­ters and dec­o­ra­tions as well as often spec­tac­u­lar exam­ples of the use of the let­ters. The Victorian fonts, sump­tu­ous and some­times unbe­liev­ably out­ra­geous, are accord­ed a promi­nent place in this book. In addi­tion to lead let­ters, exam­ples from lith­o­g­ra­phy and let­ters by window-dressers, inscrip­tion carvers, and cal­lig­ra­phers are also dis­played and described.

  Featuring works by type design­ers includ­ing: William Caslon, Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke, Peter Behrens, Rudolf Koch, Eric Gill, Jan van Krimpen, Paul Renner, Jan Tschichold, A. M. Cassandre, Aldo Novarese, Adrian Frutiger

  In order to include a vast amount of mate­r­i­al, we have divid­ed this text into two vol­umes. The first vol­ume dis­plays pre 20th Century type spec­i­mens, and the sec­ond cov­ers the peri­od from 1900 to the mid­dle of the cen­tu­ry. In the first vol­ume, edi­tor Cees de Jong and col­lec­tor Jan Tholenaar write about sin­gle spec­i­mens and types; in the sec­ond, Alston Purvis out­lines the his­to­ry of types.

• Is there a chart which shows what type­faces were pop­u­lar at what time? – Quora – Is there a chart which shows what type­faces were pop­u­lar at what time?
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  Is there a chart which shows what type­faces were pop­u­lar at what time?

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  Would like to a his­tor­i­cal­ly cor­rect under­stand­ing of what was pop­u­lar when.

• English Language and Usage – Stack Exchange – This is a col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly edit­ed ques­tion and answer site for lin­guists, ety­mol­o­gists, and seri­ous English lan­guage enthu­si­asts. It’s 100% free, no reg­is­tra­tion required.
• WordPress – Stack Exchange – This is a col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly edit­ed ques­tion and answer site for WordPress devel­op­ers and admin­is­tra­tors. It’s 100% free, no reg­is­tra­tion required.
• Samsung to final­ly roll out flex­i­ble AMOLED dis­plays for pub­lic con­sump­tion in 2012? – Engadget – Samsung’s been a fre­quent source of frus­tra­tion, teas­ing us with its fab­u­lous flex­i­ble dis­plays for years, while nev­er giv­ing us a date when we could buy one for our very own. However, word on the web sug­gests that Sammy is final­ly ready to unleash its pli­ant pan­els upon the world in Q2 of 2012. Apparently, the com­pa­ny’s mobile dis­play divi­sion opened a new man­u­fac­tur­ing plant with Ube (who pro­duces the plas­tic sub­strate for the screens) last month to mass-produce bendy AMOLEDs for watch­es and phones. Let the count­down to the duc­tile dis­play rev­o­lu­tion begin.
• Why is good design more expen­sive than aver­age or poor design? – Quora – Good design pro­vides the lubri­cant that allows you to effort­less­ly com­mu­ni­cate with your tar­get users/customers.

  Average or poor design offers the same lubri­cant pep­pered with vary­ing lev­els of grit. Too much grit is annoy­ing and a dis­trac­tion from your mes­sage. In turn, gen­er­ates frus­tra­tion and the rela­tion­ship breaks down.

  The good design­ers out there are prac­tised in the art of remov­ing these minute speck­les of irration.

  Edit: Noticed I did­n’t give a full answer.

  The rea­son why it is more expen­sive is that good design­ers have spent thou­sands of hours notic­ing and remov­ing these irri­ta­tions (knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence) or they nev­er start­ed with much grit in the first place (tal­ent, insight and vision).

• iCloud with­out Apple: your platform-agnostic alter­na­tives – Although com­pet­ing ecosys­tems can pro­vide com­pa­ra­ble func­tion­al­i­ty to iCloud, the ser­vice has some Apple-specific fea­tures that can’t triv­ial­ly be repro­duced by third-party alter­na­tives. For exam­ple, Internet users can now choose from an increas­ing­ly broad assort­ment of music stream­ing and syn­chro­niza­tion services—but iCloud is the only one that allows you to re-download your pre­vi­ous iTunes Music Store pur­chas­es. Of course, the down­side of Apple’s ser­vice is that it does­n’t have actu­al stream­ing func­tion­al­i­ty, like the com­pet­ing offer­ings from Google and Amazon.