Ivan's blog

George W. Bush is undoubtedly one of the most popular figures of current times. He's infamous for many things he misspoke and his views on how to handle national security. His ideology affected not only the United States, but the whole world in a major way. No wonder he's been on top of mind for many creatives and became the hero of numerous advertisements in the last few years.

Here is a collection of some of the most interesting ads that dissect his character in order to sell an idea or a product. You be the judge whether they are successful in achieving this objective.

Let me start the showcase with this ad made for Milenio, a Mexican newspaper who claims they solved the inner workings of Bush's personality. Simpson + Texas cowboy = GWB. The tagline reads: "Such a complex world needs a good explanation."

In this highly diplomatic ad (what else would you expect from Britain) Marmite Squeezy claims Bush's just like the funny tasting sirup: "You either love it or hate it."

I noticed so many of us use the trackpad as the primary input device.

I though it would be interesting to check out what trackpad gestures can you use in Photoshop. Here is what I found out:

1. Hold the Alt (Option) key and double finger track to zoom within the document in and out.
2. Hold the Apple (Cmd) key and zoom in and out your entire screen. Useful when you want to show something to a friend across the room.
3. Double tap and hold to start making a selection. Once you're happy with the size just release the trackpad and your selection becomes active after a second.
4. Tap with two fingers results in a CTRL-click or right mouse button click.
5. Double finger tracking allows you to scroll and pan within your document.

Unfortunately none of the cool stuff that works in OSX standard apps, such as the rotation with two finders, switching between active pages with three finger swipe or zooming by pinching works in Photoshop.

Ideally Apple should allow us to customize what we want each gesture to mean and we should be able to add new custom gestures too.

For example we could add a lot of Photoshop menu shortcuts as three finger gestures. Each new gesture would be drawn with three fingers and the shape would remind the first letter of the menu item. For example:

• Down and right: Levels
• Up, circle and bottom right: Refine edges
• S shape: Save
• Circle: Open, etc.
• Three finger horizontal swipe: Change between document
• Three finger double tap: Exposé application windows
• Three finger triple tap: Exposé all windows
• Finally when you would tap repeatedly on the trackpad with three fingers it would bring up a random stimulating screensaver that will help generate new ideas.

Google launched iGoogle themes, which allows users to customize their Google start page.

Designers can create new themes and submit them to Google for publication. I think this is a great way to get some publicity if you are willing to share your designs for free.

Go ahead, create your iGoogle theme and submit it to Google.

Don't forget to comment here if they accept your design. I would love to see it. I'm planning to create one myself.

I personally like to open a new folder for each project and within that another folder for every version of the project. This way I can easily follow the progression, do not overwrite old files accidentally and can dump old versions easily once the project is complete.

Every time I create a new version of the project in Finder I simply press and hold the Alt (Option) button and drag the folder. OS X will create a duplicate of the folder and renames it with a successive version number automatically. Quite convenient.

A small drawback is that I duplicate all files every time, which is not really an issue in this day and age with 200GB+ hard disk space. It's only a problem if the image files are hundreds of megabytes large and do not change from version to version. In this case I usually create a separate folder for items that do not change, such as images or fonts.

I know the Adobe package contains Version Cue, but I never really managed to grasp how it works. Every time I try to learn about it, all I find is marketing mumbo-jumbo instead of a simple tutorial on how to use it, and I get discouraged. If you know a place to learn about it, please share!

Also, I would be interested to learn about your versioning strategy!

The application Art Files has been around for quite some time, but I noticed so many of my friends who use Illustrator a lot didn't know about it, so I thought it's worth sharing as it's a huge time saver.

Art Files is a stand-alone application that helps you with your work-flow. It prepares a folder that includes your Illustrator files and all other associated files, such as images and fonts to be sent to clients or colleagues. It only takes three steps to create such a complete and organized collection:

1. You open Art Files and drop all the Illustrator files you want to send in the drop zone.
2. Click files that are marked with a question mark and locate them. You can easily do that by using the built-in file search
3. Click Collect and see how Art Files collects all the necessary images and Fonts neatly organized into folders.

Art Files is not free, but it's well worth the cost if you can replace a lot of manual work.

Have you ever wondered if a client received your important email already? Don't you wish you had a way to tell?

It can be done, although it's a bit more complicated than just clicking a switch. Visit Spypig and follow the instructions for a one off tracking image that will be used to check the delivery of your email.

You could do this with your own web host, by checking when that particular unique image has been accessed by your recipients email application, but it would be complicated to set-up a new image every time and then keep checking when the stats show access.

The good thing Spypig works with most email systems, whether you use Apple Mail.app or Gmail.

I'm not a big fan of MS products usually. I use Apple and Google software mostly. But I have to admit msn's image search blows the competition away. It has so many cool features, such as:

• Lightbox (called Scratchpad by MS)
• Dynamic resizing of thumbnails
• Details of thumbnail on hover
• Easy refinement of search terms (size, orientation, color, style, face)
• Endlessly scrolling page (like Google Reader)
• You can give msn feedback on the images (not sure how useful this is)

I think all these make image search much faster and easier than doing the same with Google or Yahoo! Congrats MS! :)

Also, check out their video search, the videos start playing in a thumbnail on hover! WOW!

It's rare that I would argue against someone's opinion. After all everybody is entitled to their own. But when somebody is so uninformed as Preston Gralla, he deserves to be confronted. Read his infamous blog post about Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OSX. Now, if this post would've appeared on randomperson.blogspot.com I would not bother to comment and categorize him as a deluded but entertaining person, but he is a contributing editor for Computerworld, and the author of more than 35 books, yadda yadda. So, his opinion sort of counts, right?

Before reading the article, I was hoping to find out about some cool hidden features of Vista that I haven't heard of before. They probably exist, but the author didn't bother to look them up. He brought up some really tired arguments that were maybe somewhat true in the distant past (in technology and internet time), but certainly don't stand true today.

Now, let's look at his 5 points!

Here is a campaign from Singapore for the iPod Touch that brings back the eighties look typography combined with the Apple signature white backgrounds.

Here are some other Apple products related campaigns I posted here earlier from Australia, India, USA and Brazil.

It's always a good idea to present your logo and identity design pasted on objects. Also, when you prepare the graphic design guidelines you may want to include realistic looking mock-ups to present the artwork.

Here is a great collection of more than 200 clear images from diegomattei to help you with these tasks. Just apply your graphics on these surfaces with the layer option multiply and see how the identity instantly comes alive.

The collection includes the following categories:

Stationery

Download clear stationery images 6.9MB.