Scott Bush

Just got word that Netflix is rescinding their decision to eliminate account profiles. I flipped out about this just recently: I posted a blog entry, wrote them a professional—though annoyed—e-mail, and read a number of tweets by my fellow peeved Netflix users. Someone even created an online petition to keep the useful feature.

As an aside: a “tweet” is a short blurb of no more than 140 characters people write about what they’re doing. Friends then “subscribe” to these updates through a service called Twitter.com, hence the name “tweet.” Why it’s not a “twit” I don’t know. (Facebook does the same thing but calls it a status update. That’s more accurate but less cool.)

Kudos to Netflix for listening to their customers. This goes a long way in my book. Now I don’t have to dirty myself over at Blockbuster!

My wife is participating in the breast cancer 3-Day walk
in Sept. Part of that commitment includes a $2,200 donation for which she’s been fundraising. She and her team, the Wonder Women, are hosting an evening event they’re calling “‘Tinis for Ta-Tas” (that’s “martinis” for breasts—get it?! Har har har…). July 9 should be a very fun evening at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, thanks in part Ruby Shuz, our friend’s band for generously donating their musical services and magician Joseph Réohm for agreeing to perform close-up walk-around magic. So we’ll see you there at 7, okay?!

I agreed to help by designing the event poster that is being posted around Ballard as I write, and will appear on college campuses and other places next week. It’s been a while since I designed a visual document like this so I wanted to share it.

A striking image of a woman with a martini at a party is the basis of the poster (see the full poster here). I ran across it on iStockPhoto while browsing for images with “martini” keywords (and trust me, there are lots). I saw it and thought “perfect!” My Illustrator chops aren’t very good so creating something from scratch would have been very difficult; heck, even modifying any vector image would have tricky, and I didn’t have a lot of time. This image pretty much fit the bill completely.

Using it as the hook upon which to hang the other elements, I dove in. The poster had to include five elements:

1. Title
2. Date and time
3. Location
4. Music and magician
5. Purpose

First, I filled in the bottom portion of the letter-sized page with the same dark burgundy color and decided to reverse all my type (meaning it appears white rather than black). The font is Neutraface Display and Neutraface Text, two excellent OpenType families that have a lot of weights and variation. I didn’t want the bottom to be too information-heavy so I started with the bar across the top of the poster to balance out the bottom. The three items in that list (”Fight breast cancer,” “Have a martini,” and “Rock out!”) pretty much sum up the event.

Next came the title. The image’s composition was perfect for the three-word phrase “‘Tinis for Ta-Tas,” allowing me to position the words in relation to the martini and, er… ta-tas in the image. Perfect. I had a couple of additional visual elements with the Ruby Shuz CD cover and Joe’s image. I played around with the sizing before ending up with the CD cover taking precedence; that is what most people would be interested in, after all.

After some fiddling, I realized the time, date, and location would be lost if they weren’t given prominence. That’s when I divided up the bottom portion into two sections, with information on either side aligned to a thin rule. Neutraface Display’s “titling” weight worked perfectly for the date, and different weights of that font filled out the remaining info: time, day, and location. The Tractor’s icon—<gasp>a tractor!—added another visual element to balance those on the other side.

The two remaining pieces of information, the cover charge and the benefits to Susan G. Koman needed to be included. Adding both to the bottom was too much, so I used a circular callout to display the cover charge and the included martini. The cover charge is very prominent, but I hope the free martini note is also apparent to the viewer due to its proximity to the large $15. The breast cancer pink ribbon and Susan G. Koman name wasn’t really coming together for me, so I decided to repeat a portion of the large image from above as a backdrop for it. It is a bit busy, but I think it works. I again used text on a path to explain what was in the circle… well, an oval in this case as a circle didn’t fit breasts background or suit the wide text-and-ribbon sitting upon it.

That’s the major work, but there were some minor tweaks: lots of spacing and leading (space between lines) adjustments, adding the rounded corners to images, etc. Those with sharp eyes will note the major issue with this piece: the burgundy in the image doesn’t exactly match the burgundy at the bottom and top. I don’t have a vector drawing program like Illustrator so had to rely on Photoshop’s import of the EPS file from iStockPhoto. For whatever reason, the CMYK values in InDesign didn’t create a like color, so I compensated visually. I know it was wrong, but I had to hurry.

Hope you enjoyed this not-so-little explanation of the piece and really hope you can come to the event at 7pm, Wednesday July 9 at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard!

This post will likely win me the “least chronologically-relevant post” of 2008. But I found a set list I’d scribbled down on the back of a receipt during the Death Cab for Cutie concert at the Key Arena waaaaay back on 4 December, 2006! A friend had two extra tickets so we went along at the last minute. With the release of their latest album, Narrow Stairs, it made sense to finally post this.

I did my best to record the set list. Some songs I knew instantly, others I had to think about for a while before the tile came to me. Others, I could only jot down some of the memorable lyrics (show below in quotes). If you know the song names of any of them, let me know. They played:

1. 405 (from 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes)
2. Your Heart is an Empty Room (from 2005’s Plans)
3. The New Year (from 2003’s Transatlanticism)
4. “I Love You Guinevere”
5. Crooked Teeth
6. Title and Registration (Transatlanticism)
7. ?
8. Unconcious states - “Highway”
9. Company Calls Epilogue (We Have the Facts…)
10. What Sarah Said (Plans)
11. I Will Follow You Into the Dark (Plans)
12. Soul Meets Body (Plans)
13. The Face That Launched 1000 Shits (from 1998’s Something About Airplanes)
14. We Looked Like Giants (Transatlanticism)
15. “C’mon C’mon C’mon”
16. Marching Bands of Manhattan (Plans)
17. Things all change but basically the stay the same - “cycle never ends, skin on steel”
18. Coming Home - A cover of a song by the Sonics

Also notable about this concert: it introduced me to Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, whose excellent Rabbit Fur Coat I later bought (and still listen to regularly). Imagine my happy surprise when I learned Jenny Lewis was the frontwoman for a band called Rilo Kiley who had put out like four studio albums that I could also enjoy.

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If you’ve never had the pleasure of using a web application by 37signals… well, you should. My first introduction to them was Basecamp, a project-management tool that actually helps facilitate the project. They also offer tools for collaborative writing, information sharing, and customer-relationship management.

The reason I like Basecamp is because the site was clearly designed to work with the web browser. Rather than drowning under tons of images and page loads for every click, it employs a snappy interface relying on true interface design concepts like size, color, and hierarchy. The scriptaculous-style visual cues like fading colors and sliding elements provide a slickness that’s hard not to love.

I mention all that because 37signals recently posted a blog entry about why they don’t use Photoshop to mock-up their interfaces. In my job I’ve had to work with websites “built” by ad agencies in Photoshop and then sliced up into an image-laden table. 37signals’ entry outlines all the reasons why this approach doesn’t work well. To be clear, they’re mostly referring to interaction-heavy web applications rather than interaction-light brochure-style web sites of the sort I’ve been given to publish. But it’s so refreshing to read some of the reasons they present for not using Photoshop when I recall so clearly shaking my head saying “jeeze, why do people build sites in Photoshop?!” For example:

The text in Photoshop is not the text on the web. Once you’re looking at a static Photoshop mockup you can’t quickly change the text without going back into Photoshop, changing the text, saving the file, exporting it as a gif/png/jpg, etc. You can’t post it online and tell someone to “reload in 5 seconds” like you can when you quickly edit HTML. You have to say “Give me a few minutes…”. Also, type in Photoshop never seems to be the right size as type in HTML. It just never seems to feel the same. It doesn’t wrap the same, it doesn’t space out the same.

That’s the reason why, when asked to make changes on such a site, I mentally cringe and think about the time and frustration it’ll cause me to implement those changes. It’s a real mess, but to people just looking at the site it’s not readily apparent—it just looks like a pretty site. The next time this situation arises I’m going to give one of those Photoshop document-to-valid, semantic XHTML from it. Now that’s something I’d like to see.