"In order to create something, you must first destroy it" - John Lydon

My family's house is finally geing gutted so I'll soon be out of this high rent trap that I'm in. It gives my a lot of pride to know that my son will be the fifth generation to grow up in that home.

I lost a lot from the destruction to the house, including a lot of documentation of my family history that was in there, but I can at least start again and won't have to live paycheck to paycheck as I've been. I've started to redesign myspace sites for bands and so far, it's been pretty fulfilling. I've modified my own (The Elder Myspce) to be more of an advertisement for that service. At my day job, I'm usually relegated to production because I'm so good and so fast at it. It can be tiring because there's very little opportunity for me to flex my creative muscles but hey I can write HTML and CSS faster than I can write English so I guess that's what I get pigeon-hold with.

While taking my son for a the other morning I came across a house that had a make-shift Katrina memorial in the front yard. On it there was a sign that read "The only certainty in life is change" and I guess that about sums it up.

I speak for most people in this city when I say that hopefully, sometimes soon, there will be a period of time with some level of permanance.

CS3 9-Slice Technique

The 9-Slice Guide Feature in both the Fireworks and Illustrator CS3 versions is an incredibly useful feature that will save you a lot of time in producing graphical assets.

Let's take a look at how you can take advantage of this feature in Fireworks CS3.

First, go to the Edit Menu and click on Insert and choose New Symbol. Make sure you click the check box to Enable 9-Slice Guides in the following options box.

This is what the 9-Slice Symbol window looks like -

Next, let's add a graphic element to the symbol. Select the Rounded Rectangle Auto Shape from the Tools palette.

With the Rounded Rectangle Shape selected draw a rectangle in the symbol window and make sure the edges of the rectangle are within the boundaries of the 9-slice guides. Here's what that should look like -


To add some flair to the symbol, select the symbol and click one of the styles from the Styles palette.
In this case, I used the Dark Chrome style.

Now your symbol will look like this -

Next, return to the main canvas/stage window and select the Text tool and add some text to the shape

Now, you can make some copies of the symbol, modify the text on it and use the scale tool to make the symbol fit horizontally with the text without distorting it's corner radius.


Have Fun!

CS3 Suite First Impressions

Just got my hands on the Adobe CS3 Suite. I wasn't too impressed with a lot of it but Illustrator is way better with the Flash/Fireworks type features..particularly the Styles and Symbols workflow. They have a dumb name for editing symbols called "Isolation Mode"..that's an attractive name, don't you think? Yeah..it's editing an object oriented graphic by just double clicking on it and they give it the name "isolation-mode"...too funny.

The two things I was disappointed with are the presence of the inferior Info Palette and the range of the Find and Replace tool. I had hoped they would drop the non-interactive Info Panel in favor of the Property Inspector that all Macromedia apps have. When I select something in Flash, Fireworks or Dreamweaver and I want it to to be flushed to the upper left corner of the canvas/stage/page..or whatever, I can select the object, go to the Properties Palette and put the number zero in the x and y coordinates and wham!- the object is is positioned exactly where I want it!

Also, in MM apps like Fireworks I can Find and Replace any property but in Adobe the scope is limited to text-based properties.
I love that kind of control cuz I'm used to dealing with code and I like changing an objects size and position in precise, numeric fashion but sadly, Adobe did not adopt this and the info palette is still just an informative type of feedback rather than an actual interactive control over the properties of an object.


If you want that kind of control, you'll just have to stick with Flash or Fireworks and that's fine with me. I still like Photoshop's brushes and pixel-level controls over Fireworks but for prototyping, Fireworks is still the best with the new Illustrator and any version of Flash coming in a close second.

G Reader Rocking

The idea of marrying email-like functionality with news readers like atom, xml, rss, etc... seems to be a big killer app as evidened by the new Google Reader. Judging by my first impressions of porting over My Google content to the GReader, software incompatibility is starting to seem as antiquated as the horse and buggy. Props to the G Entities.

My old "My Google":
















Now! Enter Google Reader
Migrating same content to Reader (waaay more usable evidenced by this single "initial state" of the app) -



Dayam..talk about situational awareness. Before I was suffering from Tofflerian info overload but the Reader app seems to really alleviate this dilemma.

Does Google need flex to achieve the same kind of rich internet apps and seamless production flow? I'm not really sure but their stuff seems to be faster than anything else (not even going into maps, etc..).

Seems that since they've built their own javascript/xml/css/xml-style sheet/declarative syntax framework, they have hit the interoperability and rapid deployment nirvana state.

I humble before the power of Google. Most of my subscriptions are traditional media outlets (other than the development-related stuff,) but just imagine tons of conspiracy crazy feeds, alternative energy feeds, political and futurist feeds ready to facilitate societal activism and and the inevitable downside of facscist, socialists, & terrorist networking that will ensue. This must be how mac and 60's hippies felt the coming paradigm shift about the occur. Imagine, the multimedia capabilities of something like Reader and it's potential usurping of traditional media outlets.

Shit, I could go on but no one listening, not yet anyway.

L8R,
CEL

Adobe: Fireworks Better for Web Pre-Production than Photoshop/Illustrator

From the horses mouth. Adobe affirms what I've been saying for years.

...building out a few variations on two different themes is incredibly time-consuming. Applications like Photoshop and Illustrator (that are layer-based and not page-based) can become very complex very quickly — hundreds of layers organized in "layer comps" to represent pages, sequences like step wizards. Trying then to flatten these layer groups into some sort of format the client can view (such as a flattened JPEG placed in PowerPoint or converted to PDF) is all throwaway work. In addition, defining a click-through navigation to communicate site navigation would require going further — say, to Dreamweaver — to tie those flattened pages together.

Read the original article from the Adobe Edge Newsletter.

I'll forgive the guys I work with for for being misguided on this issue because they're younger but I've been using Photoshop since about version 2 and when I got my hands on the first beta of Fireworks I dropped Photoshop liked a hot potatoe. I had already been accustomed to object oriented vector graphics using Symbols from Flash and FutureSplash before that. So I've been sold on objects over layers for some time. I see tons of time being wasted digging through layers upon layers of static content all day. The fact is that Adobe's Image Ready was a hurried knock-off of Fireworks that came out almost a full year after the first version of Fireworks. It's a fact.

Now, let me walk you through a scenerio that really demonstrates the superiority of Fireworks' vector paradigm over the Image Ready workflow.

In Image Ready, you create a slice using the slice tool.

You want to modify the slice, so you have to change to the Slice Selection Tool and if you want to resize the slice to pixel accuracy, you have to transform the slice with the transform handles while looking at the Info panel.

In Fireworks, however, you create the slice and if you want to modify it, you just select it as you would anything else (Ctrl+A) with the same selection tool you use to select anything else. If you want to resize it, you have two options. Use the same transform tool you use to transform anything else or as I prefer, to use the great Property Inspector and edit the X, Y coordinates and width and height of the object with pixel precision. None of that dragging the resize handles while while looking at the Info panel.

Another awesome feature that none of the Adobe products can pull of is the find and replace tool. Say you want supply the client with a bunch of different color variations of a layout. All you have to do is add a frame for design varient, paste the contents of the first frame to that frame and find and replace the color on that frame with the new color. Fireworks even replaces the color in gradients, text, strokes and solid fills or any combination of those elements. To create variations like this in photoshop or image ready you would have to make tons of different layers, selections and different fills. On the other hand, in Fireworks, everything is editable all the time.

Now when it comes to slices and html capabilites, Fireworks is way more developed. In Image Ready you can't specify if the slice should contain html and enter actual html in the slice as you can in Fireworks. How about being able to open an html document in Fireworks? Symbols. Convert an element into a symbol and you can edit the symbol with a simple double-click, edit and all the instances of the symbol are updated in your document. You sure can't do any of that in Image Ready by a long shot. I could go on and on but the rumor is that Image Ready is going to scrapped and replaced with Fireworks. I find this endlessly amusing. My current team has pretty much persecuted me for using Fireworks but it looks like if they ever want to go to the next version of the adobe creative suite they're going to have to get with the Fireworks program and lose their misconceptions. If I had to use Image Ready and not use Fireworks I would have to find another job..that's how strongly I feel about it. Photoshop is a great tool for print graphic and photo editing but leaves a lot to be desired as a web graphics tool. Being constantly hassled about what color mode I'm in and creating layers filled with content that can't be edited in the real time way that Fireworks vector objects is brutally antiquated to me. As far as the html output, I code by hand and don't really trust any program to write code for me but the extensibility of the html and xhtml export options with JavaScript makes it possible to output in any way you desire.

The future does indeed look bright for Fireworks and rightly so.

Started New Job Today!

A brief but notable post: First day at a new web design job. I've got a good feeling about this one. Talented group of people. Very fluid...lot's of different clients. Also working in downtown New Orleans is cool. I can really get drunk at lunch...hehe...just kidding.

Client-side Abuse

I would very much like to see Google 'flag' pages with elaborate functions called by OnLoad and OnOnload Events. With modern CSS and RSS, client side functions should really be at a bare minimum. The trick would be to differentiate between basic cookie functions and unnecessary and or intrusive functions. It would have to be a very sophisticated algorithm, but in so doing the end user experience would be dramatically improved and result in self-regulation of bloated web development practices.

ABC's Person of the Year is Bloggers! Incredible. The decentralization of intellectual thought has really changed the human landscape. This is a beautiful thing, man. Bless you, Blogger. What a killer app you are. This was all foretold in the mid-seventies by Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

Phil Anselmo has basically gone into retirement...obviously fearing retaliation from Dimebag's death. I thought he had said he was indestructible? If I can ever become a full-time rock musician, I hope I can keep my head in check and not become obsessed with my own cult of personality as Phil obviously has. Phil has always said kind things about my work and I the same but I think he's lost his way and I'm sure he realizes it now. I hope this tragedy will make him smarter and stronger but what a price to pay for enlightenment. No one from the New Orleans scene was welcomed at the funeral. We have a bad rep here...were perceived as totally dysfunctional and wasted. Sadly, there is a lot of truth to that. Are we as bad as the rappers east vs. west feud? I don't see that tribal attitude in anyone I know but the trash talking in the aftermath of this incident seems more and more vitriolic. I hope we can take a step back and realize that were all just trying to realize our dream of making cool music and living outside of the boring mainstream of society. If we keep feuding, we'll wind up being the subject of some FBI investigation of the metal sub-culture.

New episode of Lost tonight? I believe so. It's about time. I've noticed several continuity errors while viewing the past episodes. My interest has diminished somewhat but I'm still intrigued. Hurly WAS on the plane so my theory about him may be off the mark. One thing I'm sure of, however, is that the island is able to 'make-real' the thoughts of the survivors. Locke making it rain, Walt manifesting the polar bear from the comic book, the appearance of Jack's dead father, etc.. This might explain the abduction of the pregnant girl...under the circumstances, the unrestrained imagination of a new born child could be very dangerous to everyone on the island.

On to the Iraq War...assasinations, car bombings and intimidation techniques are on the rise due to upcoming election. Why can't we set up boobie traps for these terrorist fuckers? Hide a bunch of special forces inside what looks like a defenseless convoy..wait for them to attack and then ...wham...suprise, suprise, suprise. UBL has come out with statements that make the argument that Democracy is an evil western construct. What a lame proposition this is. He is making our case for us.

An incredible earthquake in the ring of fire has caused devastating tidal waves in Asia. I fear the effects of the platetonic shift are not completely realized yet. God help all in the pacific rim.

Virtex

This is one of the coolest projects I ever worked on. It was too bad it ended so quickly but it was fun while it lasted. Looking back on it I can't help but notice how bad the sound design was...I promise...I did not create the music. I had my hands full with animating and flash production. Some really nice animation and drawing in there, though. Props to the crew --- Casey, Jeff, TeeJay, Joel, Elvin, John & Cesar.


Exerpt:

ActionAce.com had set up a new channel on its website called NeoGlyphix – a section for original animated content with new and licensed characters. VIRTEX was to be the first of the series developed, targeting ActionAce.com’s core audience of anime, comic, and action figure fans.

Casey Lau would serve as Executive Producer and Jeff Kwan would lead a team of animators and artists working in Macromedia’s Flash and USAnimation’s ToonBoom animation software to develop the four part “Queen of the Damned” animated series. This would basically pick up the story where it had left off in the comic book series and have VIRTEX confront the next outlaw – the deadly walking corpse Harvester.

Read Complete Article at Digital Webbing/ The Virtex Depository/ Animation

Virtex home page

Overtone Project

I recently created a site for the local band Overtone. It's a work in progress...more content will be added as the assets trickle in from the band. I should have some more links for various projects that are in development soon.

I've finally done and gone it...

..yes..that's right, kids...I've finally gotten off/on my ass and started blogging. This morning I really felt the need to purge some random thoughts from my brain. I figured this could be a pretty cathartic little activity where I can get stuff off my chest and also go back in time to see what I was ranting and raving about. Hey, I might even learn something about myself. I've also had my Maskeeta Blog for a couple of months or so but have been slacking on that pretty badly. I promise to get back on the ball with that so check it out for all the band related stuff. Check this blog out for more random thoughts about life, the world, beliefs, music and art, etc... So, I guess I'll just dive right in and say what's on my mind today. First of all I've got to say that I'm a little jazzed about the sweet blog template I've chosen.
I've been visiting Simple Bits for some time and have to say they've made what is easily one of the sweetest blog templates ever.

I hope everyone in the country makes a point to check out Senator Zell Millers speech at the RNC Convention last night. If you didn't get to check it out on the tv, go to the GOP site or MSNBC.com video (scroll down about midway through the page and click the LAUNCH button next to the headline "Miller Attacks Kerry") or read a transcript. Hearing someone say what this courageous man said was really refreshing.

Category 4 Hurricane Frances is headed toward florida. My thoughts and prayers are with ya'll... get the hell out of there!