I am relieved as we leave another Earth Day behind. I get very irritated when I see the messages all around, calling me a criminal for throwing my recyclable goods in the trash. Sometimes, when I’m feeling especially rebellious, I like to throw my junk mail and empty cans in the garbage can. Is it apparent yet that I like to live on the wild side?
So why do we need a special day for this? A day to remind people not to throw their recyclables in the trash, to put those newspapers in the bin, to buy organic, or to say, down with pesticides. Does it make people feel good to focus on how responsible they are being for just that day? How about just that week? Really, does it last through the month? I think overall the being green is a trend that makes people feel good about their actions that day. I think a lot of people suffer from the “herd mentality” and follow what they are told to do to be environmentally conscious.
We are told to buy organic everything because it doesn’t pollute the earth and leave that nasty human footprint. Does it? I mean, if it’s organic it has to be good, right? I saw an ad a few days ago telling people to buy the company’s 100% organic products. These products are great. Shipped directly to your front door from your friendly overseas neighbors. Sure, the materials were grown naturally in a field somewhere, using no pesticides, and were handpicked before being processed and turned into your feel-good green product. But what about the energy required to get it to your front door? How was it packaged? Does it use lots of plastic or paper made from an endangered tree? How much raw material was discarded before gathering enough material to create your green product? How much were those children paid to pick the materials for your green product?
We are told to buy a hybrid car by people sipping water out of plastic bottles. Get rid of your incandescent light bulbs and put in the energy-efficient cfl [mercury] ones, brought to you by the people who have their furnace set to 75 degrees and their air conditioner to 65 degrees. Or how about the people who look down their nose at others for buying things at Walmart yet they stuff their garbage full of things that can be composted?
Being green begins at home. Shop local. If it comes from India chances are the trip over here outweighs any good done by being organic. Turn off your lights. Do you need that light on in the other room so your furniture can see? Read the fine print. If it’s recyclable, great. Can you toss it on your compost pile? Even better, buy it! Live through real sustainability, not by following popular trends, and certainly not just for one Earth Day.
As a lifetime fan, I was very excited about Disney’s The Princess and the Frog coming out. I am somewhat of an art snob, and am fairly particular about animation. The new graphics coming out, while pretty cool from a graphic-computer point, just don’t do it for me artistically. I prefer the hand-drawn look, the rich colors, the uneven, natural shading. Watching a “real” Disney movie makes me happy and at peace, and takes me back to when I was a little girl.
However, a Disney movie must be more than just visual. For the experience to be complete it must touch on both vision and hearing. The music and the singing must be present, and done well to guide you smoothly through the scenes. In this, I must say, they succeeded rather nicely. The voices of the cast are fantastic. Each character’s voice has a unique personality. The inflections are exaggerated and just perfect; be it a more general southern accent, one from New Orleans, or the most fascinating Cajun dialect.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this movie, so much so that I will be purchasing this today on Blu-ray. The art was beautiful, the music and voices fantastic, and the story so enjoyable and relevant to today. Everything was done to perfection [as if I would accept anything less.] To top it off, I was able to see this movie at a small little theater in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. The Rivoli is a small hometown theater that plays just one movie per week. I took my son to see this and would not trade the experience of sitting in a [packed] movie theater with an audience of mostly squeely and excited children. I can’t wait until the next one!
A few years ago when my son was born I would get up every few hours at night for the first few months, trying to get my tiny baby to eat. Rapidly becoming a creature of habit, my son would wake up every night around the time Conan O’Brien came on. Through these often mind-blowingly exhausting feedings, I would laugh my butt off.
I was very happy when Conan got the job on the Tonight Show. This show would entice me away from Fox around 10pm. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss the monologue and through the wonders of Hulu I was able to watch the rest of the show as well. Conan O’Brien is not for everyone. I do think he is like whiskey; an acquired taste. It takes a bit, but once you have the taste of this in your system, it’s hard to let go.
Sadly, his short run is at an end. I will miss Conan. I definitely will not make it a point to watch Jay Leno. The whole fiasco leaves me feeling a little peeved with NBC. Back to Fox it is.
Go Conan!
WHAT YOU SEE…AND WHAT YOU DON’T
Working behind the scenes
What is important to you when placing an order for a disc? Do you want the best price? Do you want it yesterday? Do you want it to look good and stand out from the rest of the discs out there? Perhaps you want all of these? My goal is to get you a great-looking disc every time, on time.
Daily I struggle with art files to get an optimal print possible on our discs. Each art file is unique and comes with special problems. Rare is the art file that sails through the room without issues. Unless the art is a one color, fonts-outlined, totally vector Illustrator file, I often find myself spending at least 15 minutes, if not more, on preparing it to print.
What do I do with your art file, you ask?
Before I send a proof I strip the file of any unnecessary extras which may cause problems during film creation or printing. I remove all live text, extra colors, templates, layers, and masks. The only items I want left in the file are the ones that are supposed to print.
Next I look for any issues that may come up during printing. Are we supposed to match any packaging pieces? Does the file contain halftones or solid colors made up of 4 color process? Are any colors out of spec and will it look terrible printed? I will also glance through the file and look at the spelling, the placement of art, or see if anything in general looks odd. I may see if I can find any better quality logos if the file contains low quality ones. Overall, I remove and fix all questionable spots to ensure a smooth print.
Then I fix the file to the best of my ability. If there are concerns with the file which will cause issues and I cannot fix them, I make my customer aware. This includes anything with color, quality of print, or low quality of files. Sometimes my emails get very long and detailed, but I want to make sure the customer knows precisely how the disc will print.
So you see, preparing the art is not just plopping something in our template and sending it on its merry way. Before the customer even sees the proof I make sure I know or fix known issues. When I send out the proof I will give all warnings and make sure it is understood how this file will print. I take enormous pride in our printing and the work that comes out of my room and want to make sure the best possible product leaves our building and comes to you.
printing specs & templates
The Adobe ADOBE IS GREAT Corner:
Separations On-Screen
Continuing my “green” waste-not-want-not trend, I’d like to spend a moment on a cool new feature in
Illustrator CS4 and
InDesign.
In my area of the printing industry, everything gets trapped manually, and printing separations is crucial to verify that everything is printing as it is supposed to.
Our workflow is as follows:
- Strip file clean and proof it in our template
- Once it’s approved, trap all applicable colors and create films
- Check trapping on films and accuracy of text, photos, etc… and send on to make screens
During this process we were printing numerous separations before creating real films. Every time we noticed an error new separations were needed. This was wasting a lot of paper. It is also very difficult to see if colors are actually trapped until the films come back and you can hold them together and verify.
I had been playing around with InDesign CS2 for a while then, and noticed it had a separations palette. Instead of printing the separations on paper I could now view them instantly on-screen. Better yet, I was able to view the trapping between 2 or all colors right on screen. The Separations Palette also displayed the percentage breakdown of the colors when hovering the mouse over parts of the art. This palette can be found in Windows>Output> Separations Preview. In order to see the individual colors you will need to turn the view to Separations and then click on each color to see it individually. If you click on the arrow of the palette you can also play around with how the colors in your file will print.
This separations palette has been in InDesign since at least the CS2 version. I liked it so much I wanted it for Illustrator as well. I found a plug-in online that allows Illustrator to show separations. With CS4, however, the Separations Palette is now standard in Illustrator as well. This can be found in Windows>Separations Preview. Overprint Preview must be checked in order to view the separations.
The separations palette has become an invaluable tool in my department. We no longer print any separations out, which is saving us an enormous amount of paper. With each file change I can simply update in the links palette and view the updates on my monitor accurately and more precisely than I ever could on paper. It was this feature that finally convinced me to move from Quark Xpress to Adobe InDesign.
Staying Green in a Conservative World
I have to come clean. I have numerous conservative tendencies that fight to become dominant. I am conservative in nature; I like things to stay constant, I like to drive my gas-guzzling vehicle (28 mpg) around for hours on end (15 minutes each way to work, thank you), and I am in no way environmentally conscious. Really?
I am not supposed to care about the environment. I am an evil conservative who wishes to fill the air with smog and stuff the landfills until they overflow into your backyards. I love to litter. Except that I don’t. I die a little each time I throw a can in the regular bin. I cringe when I drop a paper towel in the garbage. I start screaming at my husband for daring to toss the rest of an apple in with the garbage.
I hate to waste anything. My thought is that if it can be used again, it does not belong in the garbage. To that end, I recycle anything I can. I am proudly storing bags upon bags of refuse on my deck, waiting for a sunny day before making my way through the soggy garden to the compost pile. I painstakingly wash out my bottles and cans to put with the recycling. I buy the smaller paper towels and tear off only as much as I need, sometimes a square inch for the little messes. I think about what I use in my daily life.
I have to admit, though, my striving to make mine a “green” world is not so much environmental as fiscal. I hate to spend money if I don’t have to. Buying a car that has higher gas mileage, composting, turning the lights off when not in use. All these things save me money and as an aside also end up being good for the environment since I am not using up so many resources. So call me cheap or call me green. In the end I think they are the same for me.
THE ADOBE CS4 CORNER:
Scaling the modern way in Photoshop CS4
Have you ever had a photo that just wouldn’t fit where you wanted it to? I have. I am always trying to get art to fit properly on a 4 ½” circle. An important part of the photo always seems to be cut off by the circle in the center or the curved outside edges. The fix is usually to include only parts of the image or reduce the size and harm the integrity of the design.
Enter
Photoshop CS4. One of the new features is the
Content-Aware Scale. This feature
Free-Transforms your photo to fit the designated size but does it in a smart way. The function will look for empty areas and compact those before resizing the real objects.
For example, I have a photo I would like to fit on a disc.
I really like the tree on the left but I also want to keep all the boats on the right. Before CS4 I would have had to place the image in a disc template and leave white space around it or attempt to fill it in with whatever struck my fancy at the time. I hate white space. I do not like to try and balance an image on a disc with white space. So I now use the Content-Aware Scale to fit all the objects I want on a disc.
The disc on the left shows how I would need to fit the photo to get all of it to print. The disc on the right fills the whole surface with a modified image. Some of the objects are distorted, but in my opinion not so much that you would be able to tell unless you were familiar with the original photo.
This next photo shows how much of an image can be compressed while leaving the objects virtually untouched. It compacts mostly the blue sky and clouds and leaves the trees alone. The first, again, shows the original image. The second shows my “fixed” image.
While I do love this feature, it cannot be used for every photo. There has to be some empty space in the photo for the feature to compact. I have tried this with very busy photographs and the result is a confusing jumble of pixels. If you would like to try this feature, it can be found in Edit>Content-Aware Scale when you have an editable file open (see below).
If you would like to find other new features in your Adobe CS4 suite go to Windows>Workspace>What’s New in CS4. This will highlight all the new features in the pull-down menus.
All this and more I learned at a fantastic seminar at the 2008 Graph Expo in Chicago. The seminar was given by Sandee Cohen, a well-known expert in various Adobe products. Beyond her seminars and speaking engagements, she has written numerous books including her latest, InDesign CS4 for Macintosh and Windows: Visual Quickstart Guide.
If it has an i in front of it, it must be cool!
I am fairly level-headed in most cases and try not to let ads and brand names sway me. However, I freely admit to being sucked in by Apple’s ingenious marketing schemes. I look forward to each new ad out featuring the Mac and PC characters. I will go to Apple’s website and watch them, snickering quietly as my husband stares at me. In my opinion, Apple has successfully combined breathtakingly beautiful products with clever branding. Their iPod has set off an industry of gadgets. Anything cool nowadays begins with an i.
With all the bargains to be had this year, the Christmas tree towered above a bevy of gadgets. My favorite present by far was my Apple iPod touch. As I explained to my husband when asked why I wanted one, the reasons were very plain. An iPod touch is a very useful tool in every day life. It can keep track of your appointments, surf the net, store your formerly-wallet photos, and, most importantly, it looks oh-so cool. I easily defend my choice when asked why not a cheaper MP3 player. A simple they’re not Apple will suffice.
There seems to be no end to the entertainment an iPod touch can provide. I have uploaded my favorite music and latest photos, my favorite games, and I finally started an appointment book I hopefully won’t lose. There are numerous free applications to put on your iPod touch including Pac-Man and Facebook. If inclined, I could even turn it into a lightsaber! No bright light, but definitely the cool sound effects.
As with the other Apple products I own, this was no disappointment. I love to scroll through everything I have on this beautiful little machine. I carry it with me everywhere. I am now and possibly forever, an Apple fan.
