The Road To Hell Is Paved With Double-Clicks

A Lament
Before you read this post, know o faithful reader, that it is but an shadow of a longer, greater, wittier post that was lost in a horrible instant when a flaky trackpad conspired with WordPress autosave to destroy five hours of writing and editing. Would you believe me if I told you it was [...]

A Kinder Gentler Non-Designer

Just updated the PDF of the Non-Designer’s Design Checklist to make it a little less crude in case you might actually want to keep it for reference.

The Non-Designer’s Design Checklist

About a dozen years ago, as I embarked upon my journey into the realm of publishing, I bought a book called The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams. I’m pretty sure it was recommended to me by the guy who taught my first Quark XPress class. I remember thinking it was a fine and fun [...]

InDesign User Group Meet-up

I’m going to the next Boston InDesign User Group meeting.
Here are the details:
Authoring Interactive and Accessible PDFs with InDesign
Massachusetts College of Art
Thu, May 8, 2008, 6:00 PM
Some of the coolest things I saw all last year in the publishing realm were PDF/Flash mashups that had their genesis in InDesign. So I’m looking forward to this [...]

Cool, Kuler, Coolest Color

The colors of spring are starting to pop where I live. The forsythia are spewing pure 100y by the driveway. The birch are popping a crazy out-of-gamut green, something like L74a(65)b65, The magnolias are blooming default [paper] on Comm Ave. and even my grass is a greener shade of brown. So what better time than [...]

Lawyers, and Scrapers, and Splogs, Oh My!

Sorry to get all meta on you, but at this moment I have no choice but to blog about blogging.
Over the weekend, I was told by someone that they did a Google search for one of the recipes in the Ethan’s Family Cookbook and found it online. Actually what they found was one of the [...]

What color is your paper?

Because my friends don’t really understand what I do, I often get asked by them to do things that are outside my area of knowledge
Can you design my letterhead/business card/logo?
I’m not a designer. I know more about design than I used to, and I have a decent sense of the basics, but I’m not going [...]

XML Rock Band

OK, it’s Friday, time for a little goofiness. Well, a little more goofiness than the other 6 days of the week.
XML.
XML XML XML XML XML XML XML XML XML.
I am so bloody sick of XML. Why, you ask? Isn’t XML going to save the publishing industry? Isn’t it going to make possible the workflow of [...]

Photoshop For Cats

What started out as a joke in another post becomes a post in itself. C’est la blog.
Here’s my writing routine: Around 9 PM I head downstairs and settle in on the couch in the family room with my laptop. Shortly thereafter I am joined by two 11-week-old Siamese furballs named Sasha and Storm who make [...]

Cookbook 2.0 Is Served

Time again to peek in on our cookbook project and see if it’s baked yet. You know they say you lose 10° every time you open the oven door. So does that mean if I opened it enough times, I could turn the oven into a freezer? Just wondering.
We left off last time with

decent-looking code, [...]