, and one who worked on the microsoft account for many year, this really isn't that huge of a budget. the article is written to blow the number out of proportion, but in the realm of advertising budgets it's not insanely large. there are many clients that spend $100m a year or more on advertising. granted, this is for only one product, but essentially the next version of windows will take a big chunk of ms's marketing budget for that year.
I really don't see professional graphic designers, especially in print, picking up many free apps in any significant way. Things like printer compatibility and the like mean that apps tend to get entrenched. The fact that there still is a huge percentage of QuarkXPress users is a testament to that fact.
Still, though, if the free apps get enough polish to them, I could see scrappy web firms leading the way to greater [Ff]ree graphic software usage.
you won't see too many graphics people doing anything outside the core apps of macrobe for print or web now. graphics people aren't idealists. we're people who charge a lot for our time and we like everything to "just work." wasting time using other apps (as good as they might be) and possibly upsetting clients and vendors with odd file formats is just not a smart business decision. it's an insular industry that values its interoperability very highly. the fact that i can take other people's.psd,.ai,.swf files and just start working on them is a big boon.
i doubt, at this point, it would be possible for any free software alternative to be able to open, edit and save those file formats. that alone is the death knell. right now we're witnessing the slow death of quark because it's not as interoperable with other adobe apps.
If you are talking about digitally editing film on a budget, then no, any work with film is generally beyond the budget of a garage filmmaker. Unless you want to shoot on 8mm or 16mm (and I know some people do) then the film alone is going to cost more than the above setup.
digitally editing film isn't any more expensive than digitally editing video. the filmstock itself is more than video, but the editing process is the same once you get a dailies transfer done. unless i'm misunderstanding you.
You seem to know an awful lot about film production not to know that digital effects done at 2K or 4K are still much higher resolutions than the top end of hdtv -- ie 1080p at 1920x1080. And even still, reworking them in a higher resolution would not necessarily be the huge challenge you suggest it is. Film is already edited digitally using lower resolution stand-in footage to proof before it's rendered out in full glory. Increasing the resolution might require recapturing the frames (at higher resolution) and rerendering the color, effects, etc, but this process, though time consuming, is largely automated by software and hardware.
i'm not a digital effects artist myself. i only work with them regularly as part of overseeing the whole post-production process. i stand corrected on the resolution issue as i've yet to work in high-def.
Even today, almost all major motion pictures are shot on film. Film is higher resolution than DVD. They just need to reconvert the film into HD.
film itself has a very high resolution. but most of the post-production work done on film is done at a specific resolution (2k). so it woud be more than trivial to convert a lot of these movies into high def. a lot of effects work is done by hand and rendered out to the highest resolution needed at the time. for instance, nearly all title sequences would have to be re-rendered since nearly nobody shoots type on film anymore.
When's the last time you saw an AMD ad on TV, hmm?
from my recollection you're not going to see one. i worked on their advertising account briefly a couple of years ago as a creative director (i think we even suggested this public showdown idea). they've been concentrating on advertising in magazines and towards oem's mostly.
the customers they have now, they're likely to keep and increased ad spending isn't going to get them enough individual customers to make a difference to their bottom line. also, the got burned a few years back by another agency who convinced them to do some very expensive commercials with a well-known french director. the spots were quite interesting but i'm sure it had no effect whatsoever on their sales.
I've always seen Apple as company selling pretty things to women who want to send email. (brand me sexist if you like but we all know it's true) A sort of cute and cuddly company, not focused on tech like the linux/open source world and not ruthlessly focused on world domination like M$.
I don't buy Apple stuff coz it's never worth the money but I didn't hate them.....
This sort of thing make me hate them.
i'm sure apple is very concerned that your opinion of them went from "bad and misinformed" to "extremely bad and misinformed".
It does. I use it, but I refuse to go without a tape based or similiar backup. It doesn't happen often, but glitches happen, especially with FCP 4.5.
quicktime broadcaster also lets you tape directly to the hard drive. if you're worried about glitches, then get another camera and another powerbook off ebay (put in a 100gig hard drive). run the two of them together for redundancy. probably a cheaper solution than a lot of the professional systems out there.
at the coffee shops that i've seen with free wi-fi there is definitely a bandwidth squatter problem of people taking up tables but not contributing to sales. however, most of those places also have counter service only. table service where a server constantly comes by and asks you if you need anything else would solve a lot of those issues as squatters would be made to feel uncomfortable about using the space for such a long time. people who sit in coffee shops all day at a table with only one drink know that they're doing something that hurts the shop's business. but as long as they aren't forced to deal with any employees directly, they can sort of hide away and not feel guilty about it.
if i were going to offer free wi-fi at a coffee shop that i owned, i'd want to restructure the whole thing to at least get some value out of those multi-hour users.
Finder needs an equivalent to View, List in Windows Explorer. I don't want the full detailed listing, nor the big icons, nor the NeXT-like view. Just a nicely sorted list of filenames with a small icon next to them. While we're at it, View, Thumbnails would be pretty handy too.
you mean like list view? this has been a part of mac os since, well..., since mac os has existed. it's cmd-2 in the finder to change a window to list mode. unless i'm confuses as to what you're requesting.
I'm a recent switcher (I bought my Mac Mini the day after Tiger came out) and my biggest gripe is the control key placement. I love my Mac to death, but it's useless for any text editing because I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Pressing Ctrl + C on a PC keyboard to copy text is easy; Command + C on my Mac requires me to twist my fingers because the Command key is too close to the alphabetic keys to be a natural reach.
I don't think it's just a matter of getting used to it, and of breaking old habits. No, the placement of the Command key really is detrimental to its use, at least as far as my fingers are concerned. Until today I've been trying to live with it, but now I'm going to find a way to remap the keys so as to move Command farthe
honestly, i have no idea how you windows users have been contorting your hands for so long to reach that control key. using the thumb and just moving it over from the spacebar to the cmd key for hotkeys is so vastly superior from an ergonomics standpoint. it literally pains me whenever i use a windows pc. i end up using the heel of my hand to hit the ctrl key on windows machines to avoid bending my hand in weird positions to invoke a shortcut.
also, when using hotkeys, it makes more sense that the modifier key is closer to the centerline of the keyboard. that way doing a cmd-p or cmd-y is much less of a stretch than using the control key, which is an inch further outboard. plus, the thumb is a much stronger finger than the damn pinky. to me, the placement of the cmd key on macs is a SIGNIFICANT ergonomic advantage of the mac os over the windows os. all this from a guy who wears xxl gloves too.
Then why do Graphic designer houses have all MAC's typically as well as most vieo editing places nowdays
hmmm, maybe because the color matching software for macs was, and is, still superior to windows boxes. or maybe because most of the graphic design apps in use were first macintosh products and therefore the whole industry uses them.
i've been in the business for 12 years and for plenty of those years i had ugly beige computers on my desk. know what they were? that's right, macintoshes! nobody holds up the quadra and centris line of computers as the pinnacle of industrial design. i guess it just wouldn't fit in your world view to believe that macs are used by designers because they are the best tool for the job.
I hear this argument quite often when the topic of degrees comes up and it has almost zero real-world statistics to back it up. What a college degree guarantees is that if all other things are equal (experience, personality traits, communications skills, etc.), the individual with the degree will almost always be hired over the individual without a degree. I do some interviewing at my current position and this has held true every time. Most of the postions where a degree really makes a difference is in entry-level positions or positions that require 3-5 years experience. But you have to start somewhere, and getting that degree will surely help you find a better job when you are 22-23 than not having a degree.
it holds true for you because you are the specific case that he's railing against. start your own business and there's nobody to interview you or pre-judge your abilities based on a degree, or lack thereof. obviously not everyone can start their own business and make it successful, but buying into the "system" and relying on the degree making "the difference" is precisely what makes him (and other successful people, drop-out or not) different than your interviewees.
to me, he's at least encouraging them to think in different ways rather than the traditional "i have a degree now and i need a job at a corporation" method of "getting through life." having dealt with many gigantic american corporations and worked with people in the "heirarchy" you tend to find the worst of the "degree-whores" who spend their whole careers trying to simply fill a role and make it to the next level of management, all while covering their asses and avoiding, at all costs, having an opinion that can be held against them later. if they had used their energy creatively rather than wasting it toward political goals, who knows what they could have accomplished?
what we're talking about here is really the greatest example of the difference between theory and practice. college and higher education are all very good theory. but we've all seen people that understand theory very well only to fail miserably putting it into practice.
for me, it boils down to this: those who are brilliant at theory are not at all guaranteed to be brilliant at practice. but those brilliant in practice, will usually gain a comparable, if not superior, understanding of theory through doing.
in and of itself. but the point he makes is valid. in my field, a degree isn't really that useful and prospective employers rarely care if you've completed college at all. i know many successful people who have no college degree (myself included).
college degrees, especially these days, are a guarantee of nothing other than having a piece of paper. for many people and many fields the real learning is accomplished by doing rather than absorbing theory.
i dropped out, and luckily i have done very well for myself. but if asked by younger people who are still in the system, i certainly wouldn't RECOMMEND people leave school unless they already had a very clear plan of their future.
the educational system is geared towards very specific professions at the exclusion of many viable, valuable professions that don't require their teaching. i don't believe it's done out of any malice but rather just a lack of information.
In InDesign CS2 (and maybe CS, I don't know since I've been on CS2 long enough to have learned its quirks), edit->keyboard shortcuts -> set -> Set for QuarkXPress 4.0.
well, i decided to forgo using quark keys because the id keys are consistent with other adobe apps. besides i think i really meant some functionalities that are access through hotkeys are better through quark than id.
Which is the #1 selling Apple product sold today. You did know HP sells HP-Branded iPods right?
since when did hp start making ipods? they don't. they only sell ipods that apple has manufactured out of the country with hp rebranding on them. it's not like apple licensed the ipod design to hp to run off and fab themselves.
Indesign can't touch Quark for its pagination features alone. If you have a complex print job anybody with half an ounce of self respect for their time will use Quark. With Indesign you have to jump through hoops as do the printers, they hate it.
the printers go as the clients go. i've heard of print shops basically going out of business because they insist on taking quark files only and excluding indesign files.
your opinion might be that quark is vastly superiot indesign. but the transition is happening whether you like it or not. i'm a freelancer, which means i'm in a lot of different agencies and nearly all of them are at LEAST dual platform. many of the larger ad corporations have let their quark licenses lapse and just bought creative suite.
to say that "you know nothing abou the design industry" if you believe indesign is making strong inroads is just asinine. of the 8 agencies i've worked in this year only one of them still uses quark exclusively.
honestly, as an art director who used quark for 12 years, i have not on twinge of pain as quark dies a slow death. this, from someone who made their living being, in many people's opinion "the fastest quark user they've ever seen." they got extremely arrogant and decided they didn't need to bother improving their product since they HAD a monopoly.
when our agency switched to indesign, i decided the best thing to do was to just deal with the pain of switching at once and get onboard. i haven't looked back since. there are some things that quark does well (some of the hotkeys are still better). but we were the first large-scale roll-out of indesign for a whole creative department and production studio. nearly every art director and production artist had sworn off quark altogether within a few months.
quark is this decades syquest. believe you can fleece your customers forever with unreasonably high prices, very little innovation and a big fat monopoly and it will bite you in the ass. quark used to cost more than the whole adobe creative suite (might still if i even cared enough to look it up).
Uh, are you going to use a mouse for that? If you're serious about graphics, you're going to use a tablet, which makes this irrelevent to the article.
wow, i guess my 13 years in the graphic design and art direction industry have gone to waste! believe it or not, not every graphic designer prefers a tablet. i've tried various tablets over the years and never really liked them that much for graphic design work. i'm not at all fond of the 1-to-1 mapping of the screen area to the work surface.
when i mouse up to the apple menu, i don't want to actually have to move my arm all the way up to the upper-left corner of the tablet. with a mouse i can keep the mouse pointer's relative position on screen and then recenter the mouse to be in a comfortable position for my arm and wrist.
i've retouched many images for publication including a wall street journal 8 page insert using a mouse and probably 80% of the retouchers i've worked with or watched still use a mouse rather than a tablet.
just because a tablet is targeted towards graphic designers does not mean that they all use or even like them.
Slashdot Mirror
, and one who worked on the microsoft account for many year, this really isn't that huge of a budget. the article is written to blow the number out of proportion, but in the realm of advertising budgets it's not insanely large. there are many clients that spend $100m a year or more on advertising. granted, this is for only one product, but essentially the next version of windows will take a big chunk of ms's marketing budget for that year.
until we get research proving the long-obvious health benefits of mountain dew.
i doubt, at this point, it would be possible for any free software alternative to be able to open, edit and save those file formats. that alone is the death knell. right now we're witnessing the slow death of quark because it's not as interoperable with other adobe apps.
the customers they have now, they're likely to keep and increased ad spending isn't going to get them enough individual customers to make a difference to their bottom line. also, the got burned a few years back by another agency who convinced them to do some very expensive commercials with a well-known french director. the spots were quite interesting but i'm sure it had no effect whatsoever on their sales.
if i were going to offer free wi-fi at a coffee shop that i owned, i'd want to restructure the whole thing to at least get some value out of those multi-hour users.
also, when using hotkeys, it makes more sense that the modifier key is closer to the centerline of the keyboard. that way doing a cmd-p or cmd-y is much less of a stretch than using the control key, which is an inch further outboard. plus, the thumb is a much stronger finger than the damn pinky. to me, the placement of the cmd key on macs is a SIGNIFICANT ergonomic advantage of the mac os over the windows os. all this from a guy who wears xxl gloves too.
i've been in the business for 12 years and for plenty of those years i had ugly beige computers on my desk. know what they were? that's right, macintoshes! nobody holds up the quadra and centris line of computers as the pinnacle of industrial design. i guess it just wouldn't fit in your world view to believe that macs are used by designers because they are the best tool for the job.
i read it as he was "forced out of his company" at only 30. a company that he had founded at an earlier age.
what we're talking about here is really the greatest example of the difference between theory and practice. college and higher education are all very good theory. but we've all seen people that understand theory very well only to fail miserably putting it into practice.
for me, it boils down to this: those who are brilliant at theory are not at all guaranteed to be brilliant at practice. but those brilliant in practice, will usually gain a comparable, if not superior, understanding of theory through doing.
college degrees, especially these days, are a guarantee of nothing other than having a piece of paper. for many people and many fields the real learning is accomplished by doing rather than absorbing theory.
i dropped out, and luckily i have done very well for myself. but if asked by younger people who are still in the system, i certainly wouldn't RECOMMEND people leave school unless they already had a very clear plan of their future.
the educational system is geared towards very specific professions at the exclusion of many viable, valuable professions that don't require their teaching. i don't believe it's done out of any malice but rather just a lack of information.
In InDesign CS2 (and maybe CS, I don't know since I've been on CS2 long enough to have learned its quirks), edit->keyboard shortcuts -> set -> Set for QuarkXPress 4.0. well, i decided to forgo using quark keys because the id keys are consistent with other adobe apps. besides i think i really meant some functionalities that are access through hotkeys are better through quark than id.
your opinion might be that quark is vastly superiot indesign. but the transition is happening whether you like it or not. i'm a freelancer, which means i'm in a lot of different agencies and nearly all of them are at LEAST dual platform. many of the larger ad corporations have let their quark licenses lapse and just bought creative suite.
to say that "you know nothing abou the design industry" if you believe indesign is making strong inroads is just asinine. of the 8 agencies i've worked in this year only one of them still uses quark exclusively.
when our agency switched to indesign, i decided the best thing to do was to just deal with the pain of switching at once and get onboard. i haven't looked back since. there are some things that quark does well (some of the hotkeys are still better). but we were the first large-scale roll-out of indesign for a whole creative department and production studio. nearly every art director and production artist had sworn off quark altogether within a few months.
quark is this decades syquest. believe you can fleece your customers forever with unreasonably high prices, very little innovation and a big fat monopoly and it will bite you in the ass. quark used to cost more than the whole adobe creative suite (might still if i even cared enough to look it up).
when i mouse up to the apple menu, i don't want to actually have to move my arm all the way up to the upper-left corner of the tablet. with a mouse i can keep the mouse pointer's relative position on screen and then recenter the mouse to be in a comfortable position for my arm and wrist.
i've retouched many images for publication including a wall street journal 8 page insert using a mouse and probably 80% of the retouchers i've worked with or watched still use a mouse rather than a tablet.
just because a tablet is targeted towards graphic designers does not mean that they all use or even like them.
now you can even timeshift slashdot articles. if you didn't have a chance to catch the original, no need to worry!