George Chen DOT COM

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A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, originally uploaded by George Chen.

When I was in school, the designers I look up to are Neville Brody, Clement, the three Michaels (can you name all three of them?), David Carson (I still have the first Ray Gun magazine somewhere), Paul Rand, Designers Republic, Peter Saville, etc. etc… They all have their distinct styles.

I am totally out of touch these days, I have no clue who are the designers design students look up to these days. Or do they look up to any “Designer Heroes” at all?

Also, I was very lucky to have worked with Clement and Susan Kare in the past… Food for thoughts….

Great collection of corporate vector logos.

Alison is a Washington Mutual customer (not me). Picking up the mail today, I saw "WaMu" branded mailer from Washington Mutual.

I have mixed feeling about this.

It’s one thing "Apple Computer Inc." changing their name to "Apple Inc.", or Nike being associate with the "swosh". I guess other financial institution simply has a easier time with their name such as "Schwab", "Fidelity", or "BA" (Band of America). "Washington Mutual" does seems long and serious.

Even before WaMu officially started calling themselves WaMu, customer (such as Alison) has been calling their bank "WaMu". 

Interesting side note, "WaMu" direct Chinese translation is "華美" – which is the Chinese name used by the East West Bank in the US. Branding crisis, anyone?

I love Marty’s writing style. He’s able to summarize complicated case studies, and business school mumbo jumbo in an easy to read 200 page book. If you haven’t read The Brand Gap I highly recommend it.

His new book is coming out in August. It should be great. 

Adobe Lightroom Beta 2 is out. I haven’t spend much time with Beta 1 yet, but in case you want to try it… here’s the download link. Right now, RawDeveloper still works better for me. What’s new in Beta 2:

• Now a Universal Binary—this version runs on Apple’s latest Intel-based Macs.
• Crop and straighten your photos with new tools in the Develop module.
• Add music to your slideshows.
• Create nested keyword sets for easier organization.
• Import and export XMP metadata (*please see the Known Issues list for
  details).
• Try out the improved Edit in Photoshop capabilities.
• Take advantage of better metadata handling.
• Utilize new white balance support for the Nikon D2X, D2Hs, and D50 cameras.

Downloaded it Sunday night and had about 2 hrs to play with it. Over all my impression of it is good.

I use D2Hs 4MP RAW so the performance is not a huge issue to me, but
it does run slower than "advertised". Converting NEF to DNG file is also a long process. For the record, I use a 1.25Ghz Ai Powerbook with 1GB of RAM.

I am not a pro, so the organization part is not too useful to me (plain
old folder will do just fine). On the "develop" part of the work flow, I feel
Adobe spent too much time on "pretty up the UI" rather than making it
feature packed and easy to use. I can’t seems to find the crop tool, am
I missing something?

For pure developing and touch up, I’ll stick with RawDeveloper right now to output JPG and Tiff which is very very fast.

One of the very few internet application that "changed my life" (I know, so over used) recent is Flickr. I’ve always a photographer which I spent 2 years as a college paper photographer (which I, proudly, got beaten up by some gangster during the Rodney King Riot). I’ve also spent my share of time with the oh-so-hip Lomo camera and took a tone of saturated blurry pictures and they are crappy. Not to mention, during my Cal Poly days I also spent more time hanging out with photo majors rather than the fellow design majors. Don’t know why.

I’ve finally got the Nikon D70 during April of this year. I mean, it’s ok… but since then, I have been slowly buying more and more photo equipments and eventually got the pro camera D2Hs and a few new glasses. Photography as a hobby came back to me just in time when I want to spend less time in MMORPG. A couple of things I want to point out/notice in regarding digital photography in case you want to get beyond point-and-shot:

1. Ignore all the uber tech talk type photo people online/offline. They might know a lot about f stops and exposures, but when you take a look at their work, usually you’ll find boring and shitty pictures.

2. Forget about the notion that digital photography is "perfect". In fact, eventually you will run into dirt spots on your image capture processor or "hot pixel" on the processor. Ironically, if you shot film or slides you never have to worry about issues like those.

3. Mega pixel is not everything, but it does help. But less mega pixel also forces you to be a better photographer. Garbage in garbage out. Doesn’t matter if you shot 4 mega pixel or 16 mega pixel.

4. Whenever I hand over my camera to friends or family these days, they no longer hold the camera to their face and look through the viewfinder. They try to use the LCD display as a viewfinder. /Sigh.

5. If you are really serious about digital photography. A Master Degree in Color Science helps.  I know we all use Photoshop here and there; especially graphic designers or Web designers… but serious digital photography means you have to use Photoshop in a very different manner.  I actually prefer to stay away from Photoshop when I edit my pictures these days.

6. Be conservative with your shutter speed. If you *think* you can shot at 1/30. Think again. It will most likely come out blurry. Try 1/60 instead.

Happy shootin’.

Wow… Sakamoto + Maeda + NewOrder + Saville?! Isn’t it cool that they all work on the same project? Irma Boom and Michael Nyman are also involved in the colorcalm project, but sadly, I don’t know much about them but I guess I will find out!

This is a perfect gift for your designer friends or for anyone that has a plasma or LCD tv.  Flaming Lips has a similar DVD project a few years ago.

Picked up the Nikon D70 about a week ago. It’s my first digital SLR. I am pretty happy with it so far.