Vootie's blog

While our digital tools have acquired an astonishing sophistication, it's hard to imagine a future in which the fundamental humanity of the hand-drawn line has lost its ability to move us. The CD accompaning the latest IdN Magazine — Interactive Design: Perfecting those Air to Surface Missiles — celebrates the place of traditional techniques within contemporary motion graphics by assembling 23 current examples from 21 artists. The trailer above provides a sense of what's on the almost two-hour CD, which is included with the magazine or can be purchased separately. You'll find a sampling from the magazine below.

And the salary guides just keep on coming. First it was the AIGA|Aquent Survey of Design Salaries, followed last week by the Paylandia Salary Guide. Coroflot, the portfolio hosting site, has now released the latest iteration of its annual Design Salary Guide. What makes this different from the others is that the data is submitted by designers worldwide. In fact, you'll need to fill out a short form to submit your own salary information to have access to the detailed results.

Or will you? It all depends on whether you're a member of Adobe Creative Cloud. Is you in or is you out, as they say? Because if you're out, you'll increasingly have to watch helplessly as new functionality is added to your favorite image editing app -- functionality which you simply won't have access to, even if you upgraded to Photoshop CS6.

We have to thank a Canadian firm, buyral, for taking online promotion to its logical conclusion. After seeing this video, you may never click on an elevator button again.

We recently had the AIGA|Aquent Survey of Design Salaries showing us how well (or how badly) we were doing. But you had to be an AIGA member to access the meat of that survey. Now it's the turn for The Creative Group, a specialist in the placement of creative, advertising, marketing, web and public relations professionals, to depress... er, I mean, inspire us with Paylandia, which provides an overview of hiring trends, salary info and job descriptions for those involved in design and production, interactive, content development, and advertising, marketing and PR. I know you're in there somewhere. The 2013 guide is available as a downloadable PDF.

When you think of contemporary product designers, people like Philippe Starck or Jonathan Ive come to mind. We've come to see designers as larger-than-life entities, who from some Olympian perch survey the foibles and anxieties of the masses (at least, those with some disposable income) before setting the Chinese factories in motion to crank out yet another disposable bauble. The Fixperts project features a very different side to the practice of design, having as its objective the creation of "meaningful content that showcases how the design process can solve everyday challenges." Solving everyday challenges. What a concept!

While "to Photoshop" is now synonymous with altering a photograph with intent to deceive, this not only pre-dates our digital era but can be traced back to the early years of photography itself. Having a product become closely associated with dubious practices might be seen as a negative thing but Adobe would seem to have adopted Mae West's famous adage, who once said: "Honey, there ain't no such thing as bad publicity." At least, that's one interpretation of its sponsoring role in a current exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Still think of Adobe as just the developer of Creative Suite? If so, you're missing its increasing emphasis on tying those tools to a data-driven marketing solution. Kevin Lynch spelled out this shift in a recent post: "We are moving to the cloud with our software, and are in fact building two at the same time. One is a re-imagining of our software for creativity, and the second is creating a new place for marketers to do their work. Part of the magic of these two clouds is how we can connect them, as creative work is an integral part of marketing, and as insights from marketing can drive new creative work. There is no good solution in the world today for this, and we’re very excited to be bringing these worlds together."

Thanks to advances in browser support and growing libraries of quality typefaces, the use of web fonts is seeing exponential adoption. But what has been missing is a workflow that reflects the way designers actually work, providing them with the flexibility to test using thousands of fonts throughout a layout, not just on a small sample of type, and explore the use of such things as OpenType variations and paragraph indentation. And why not be able to automatically generate HTML and CSS from such tests to pass on to devs, as well as easily share your prototype designs and even generate a style guide for clients and partners? Typecast, now in beta, would seem to be able to do all this and more, reminding me how far the use of type on the web has come in just a few years.

We've been hearing a lot lately about the relative value of global brands, with Apple easily taking the top spot in recent rankings. But when looked at from the perspective of simplicity, apparently Apple comes up short, beaten out by Amazon and even, gasp, Dunkin' Donuts. This conclusion is from Siegel+Gale's third annual Global Brand Simplicity Index (PDF), which claims to "demonstrate consumers’ demand for simpler communications and experiences across industries and around the globe."