Arteliance

1. Discover blogs.
2. Get a Bloglines account.
3. Subscribe to 300+ blogs.
4. Discover Furl.
5. Furl everything.
6. Open a Blogger account but constantly redesign it without writing any content.
7. Abandon blog.
8. Repeat three times.
9. Open a Blogsome account. Use a standard template to see if I can generate content without constantly redesigning it.
10. Start writing:
    1. Lists of links.
    2. My own sketches and drawings.
    3. Some actual things I wrote or liked.
    4. About being a blogger.
11. Find myself writing longhand using Markdown.
12. Start to wonder if I should start more blogs to focus on different areas of interest?
13. Consider taking Panexa instead. (link via: Signal vs. Noise).

What do designers need to know anyway? In the digital world, changes come too fast for that question to be answered specifically. We may get further by asking instead: What do designers feel an irresistible urge to do?

Men and women, boys and girls, gravitate to design for any number of reasons; but common to all of them is the itch to make something—a picture, an artifact, a plan. That itch is satisfied by drawing, carving, shaping, molding—somehow using the hand to realize a concept in the mind.

If designers are more cerebral than expected, it may be because designing is more cerebral than expected. In an age when digital no longer refers to fingers, the work of the designer is no longer hands-on. That regrettable circumstance becomes truly deplorable with the realization that hands-on is never all that far from heads-on.

AIGA - Noah’s Archive: Why Designers Can Think

Communication Nation: Visual thinking practice: Finding your visual voice

tags: communication design creativity visual_thinking

This is a summary of the settings I’ve tried so far:

* error message on update

I am trying this again in case it is related to server performance problems at blogsome.

Update: still no title. I wonder if there is a way to fix that?

Result: does not contain valid XML and it didn’t update even after about 15 minutes.

Update: trying the Moveable Type API that it gives for Wordpress on the Common APIs and URLs page.

Result: Server response does not contain valid XML but it posted fine (and with a title). Now to test updating posts from Writely with these settings…. Apparently because of the error message Writely doesn’t recognize the document as “blogged” so it doesn’t give me the option to update.

I am writing this in Writely using Markdown syntax (in blogsome that plugin has to be activated). How will it turn out?

Update: It turned out perfectly (except that it used the default category). Now I wonder if I can update posts the same way?

Update 2: Looks like it just makes a new post rather than updating the previous one. Also it adds in <br /> tags and gives an error for invalid XML sent but the post goes through anyway.

Update 3: I tried this again with the correct settings for blogsome i.e. using the Blogger API as per Writely Help but it still doesn’t update or remove posts and the post has no title.

In short, when you look at a snapshot you took at the beach, the limitations of the camera mean that three-quarters of the scene will have been lopped off, the range of tones will be compressed tenthousandfold, and the information that remains will never be what you saw. Any appearance of realism will be an inference informed by learning and shaped by convention. It is not realism but verisimilitude.

Photographs may seem realistic but the technology of film prevents escaping photographic conventions, which are actually quite limiting. Less limiting is a paintbrush. A brush can produce every effect a camera can plus a great many more. Before photography, skilful and observant artists spent millennia working out how to represent reality on flat surfaces using this superior tool. Their work forms the most complete guide available on realistic ways to put pictures onto paper.

I’ve always felt that a painting or drawing should be more than a photo, more than a realistic representation of the surface of something or someone. This article explains that and details how to improve digital photographs by incorporating the principles of perception and art.

TidBITS: Reality and Digital Pictures via: penmachine.com

If you’d like the contents of your attachment to appear in a new browser window without having to download the file, view the attachment as HTML. Here’s how:

1. Open the message containing an attachment.
2. Click ‘View as HTML’ at the bottom of the message.
3. When you’re finished reading the attached file, close the new browser window to return to Gmail.

Viewing attachments as HTML is a quick and easy alternative to downloading files. You can view the following types of files as HTML: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .sxw, .sxc, .sxi, .sdw, .sdc, .sdd, and .wml.

Gmail: Help Center - How do I view attachments?

This is going to be so useful to me as I don’t have Microsoft Word. I tried it out today on a .doc file and it printed out really nicely.

Examples of outstanding talent which may or may not have been overlooked or forgotten. Compiled by a working illustrator and designer.

This is a beautiful blog. 100 Years of Illustration is an excellent example of how good a blog can be when it is focussed on one topic that the author knows well.

1. Quality through quantity.
2. Do NOT mix generating and editing.
3. When to judge.
4. Don’t be afraid to re-use elements.
5. How to have “lots of ideas”: permute.
6. “Get through your first 50 failures as fast as you can.”
7. Don’t even bother “fixing” pieces.
8. Work fast.
9. Let your level show.
10. Don’t hide your failures.

the Scarlet Letters: Notes on Making Art