An artist I’ve come to enjoy recently is Saturday Index. The actual method of how I stumbled across them leaves me at the moment, but I apologize for not sharing them sooner. A melancholy and nature inspired EP from Saturday Index reflects the cooler imagery of early morning skies above tearful trees. Partly Cloudy follows a mellow wavelength capable of inducing deep thought and reasoning. Artist Jedidiah Becker from Denver, Colorado, mirrors the natural sky with crystalline melodies whose fronts progress and converge with one another.

The most exquisite part of this musical glory is the fact that it is not only excellent, but is freely available for download from the artist here. It makes my heart so happy that there are still artists out there who make music for the sake of making music and not just because “there is money to be made if we meet the right people, play the right gigs, and spend an hour in the morning doing our hair so it looks like we just rolled out of bed.”

In addition to the four tracks offered by Saturday Index are three reinterpreted title tracks by Sarin Sunday, Paramnesic, and Milieu.

I’ve included for you a couple samples below, but be sure to get the free EP from the download if you like what you hear.

Saturday Index – Partly Cloudy

Saturday Index – Satin Window

From a distance the poster just looks like it is faintly printed, but upon closer inspection the story is clearly legible, albeit quite small. It was a fun to work at getting the type size and leading just the proper size to create the cross, yet not manipulate the story to make it fit.

Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
– Stefan Sagmeister.

Stefan Sagmeister is my foremost design hero. His functional, eye-catching, controversial approach to design and typography is epic. Born in Austria and a graduate of University of Applied Arts Vienna and The Pratt Institute (which I would love to attend someday), he came to the U.S. in 1993 and later established himself with his design firm Sagmeister Inc. He has created album artwork for a plethora of artists you’ve heard of (such as: Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith, Pat Metheny, and many more) in ways that pushed the envelope of utilized the utmost in creativity in everything from the typography to the printing.

In this video he talks about his need for a sabbatical from his design work and how it has been immensly beneficial for his desire to continue designing, pushing his creativity, and allowing him time to work on personal projects. I can’t imagine the things I could accomplish in “a year just to create and be”. I aspire to have his mind and eye for creativity and design, and to be surrounded by people who not only desire to have the same thing, but to follow through and see them to fruition.

In this second video, he talks about the learnings of his first sabbatical and the projects he came up with and created. He assembled a book with these creations and the stories behind them called “Things I’ve Learned in My Life So Far” which you can purchase here.

Ben Benjamin, whose real name is Ben Mullins, is the solo work of his other musical endeavor “PostPrior Project”. He is currently recording under the label of Ghostly International with the likes of other stellar artists like Tycho, Kiln, Mobius Band, and a plethora of others that you should also fall in love with.

When it comes to Ben Benjamin, I love the simple but intricate parts of his music. So much of “produced music” now-a-days is a few loop tracks layered with a beat underneath it with someone who’s got “a buddy in the biz” using the Smule’s T-Pain app to mask their sorry excuse for vocals and calling themselves an artist. Boring, easy, over it.

I appreciate that the more you listen to Ben’s music the more detail you’re able to pick out of the layers of instrumentation he has in each track. Below you’ll find my favorite track off his album “The Many Moods of Ben Benjamin Vol. 1″, and I am sure you too will appreciate the simple to intricate build that takes place over the 2:48 length of the track. Enjoy and check him out for yourself on iTunes, Amazon, or here.

I have an iPhone, and I have Flickr. The iPhone has a pretty dang good camera (in the phone camera world), and when coupled with a few extra apps to help with the processing and color correction, you can actually end up with some pretty interesting shots. It has forced me to start looking more meticulously at my surroundings, always keeping in mind that there could be something worth capturing. In the past I have used the excuse of lugging around my mediocre camera equipment as being too much of a hassle to be worth the shots I was able to capture with it.
However, now that I have my iPhone with me at all times, I really have no excuse to keep my eyes peeled for such photographic opportunities. It’s made me more aware of my surroundings, forced me to look for more creative angles, and has kept my mind-gears spinning even when I think it’s just sitting there idle. I plan to take at least one ‘iPhonotograph’ (I made this term up, because I’m a designer and I can do that) per day. I’m going to see how long I can keep it up. I have found a few apps to be really helpful in the processing of photos, which now I shall explain.

I have been using Camera Genius as my primary photo taking tool. It is, in my opinion, superior to the iPhone’s built in camera thanks to its “Thirds Rulers”, timer, picture stabilizer (helpful with dark or night shots), big button (full screen button for when your trying to take pictures with you in it), and in rare cases the zoom function can be handy.

For color correction, Mill Colour has some amazing features, and also some pretty great preset effects that prove to be a great place to start from in the editing process. The Mill Colour name has been seasoned with excellence over the years thanks to their stellar color correction techniques for photography and cinema.

CameraBag is another app that I have grown to love. Though it doesn’t have the flexibility of working outside of their presets, they too are a great starting place for some color correction options. There are options within the app to toggle whether or not you want the filter to add an authentic border to your photos that would match the development style/cropping of the particular filter preset.

For editing, I have had great success with PhotoForge. Some editing apps can only do a few things, some can seemingly do too much without keeping the interface understandable for the simple edits like cropping and rotation. Within the app you can actually do some pretty great things with color as well with the built-in curves, levels, contrast, and exposure adjustment features. It has been called “Photoshop for the iPhone”, and while that may be a bit of an exaggeration, it really does do a great job.

And lastly, of course, Flickr. This app didn’t exist for a long time, but it really has made the process of browsing and uploading to Flickr a breeze. You’d have to be a brain damaged moron to not be able to figure out their intuitive interface, and the functionality is effective for your simple tasks of flickr, but somewhat limited in comparison to the website itself. However, for uploading on the go, it’s a more than adequate setup.

That’s my process of photo capture and editing on the iPhone, and here are just a few examples of what will hopefully be a good size collection of photos taken.

My iPhonotography gallery on Flickr.

It’s a style I haven’t really dabbled into before, but I like it. It was fun to come up with the composition in a new way, plus altering ITC Avant Garde for the type setting.

BRCC Arts '09 Promo Poster

If you are a part of the team, and this is the first you’d heard about it, be sure to check your e-mail for the eVite (I know i hate eVite too) and RSVP so we can have a headcount of how many to provide food for!

Oh and of course, if you get a chance, graphically what do you think of this piece? What would you have done different to achieve this style?

However, that wouldn’t be a terrible situation if the Epson 3000 printer worked well and had no issues, but this was not the case.

To keep the list brief, the Epson 3000 not only has only a Serial Port I/O, but is incompatible with the Mac OSX operating system which is what I use to create all the graphics. Also, it had to be babysat and made sure to not get the paper to bunch up on it’s pesky little paper tray, else you would end up with a sweet “accordion effect” on your prints. In the case that you needed to do multiple prints at once, good luck. if left unattended, the odds of it putting ink smears or blots on your prints at random unpredictable intervals were so good I’d bet my money 500 to 1.

If none or all of these symptoms have occurred, then chances are you’re going to get a full page of random WingDing-like characters printed out for your amusement as if the printer was saying, “I know your print is what you would/should have expected, but I thought you’d want to be able to see the wide array of zesty characters that could be at your disposal if you would just use wingdings on your next project.” Oh, and if you thought that the printer could be convinced that there is paper in the paper tray, you’re wrong. There is no convincing it. You have to trick it into thinking it has paper in it, like trying to get your dog to go into the garage when you need to leave by squeaking its favorite toy and throwing it in there like you’re going to spend the afternoon blissfully wrestling together. Yet, as soon as he’s a millimeter past the threshold you hit him in the butt with the door with a swift breeze that almost sweeps the smirk of accomplishment off your face. Needless to say, the 3000 was extremely unpredictable and frustratingly time consuming to print anything. In addition, given it’s print size constraints, to create anything larger than it’s limitations you would need a tall order of some good ol’ cutting, taping, and pasting of print pieces. The best part of all, is it is slow as Christmas. At a mind-blowing 1ft./hour you’re gonna need a good time wasting game on your iPhone while you’re babysitting this troubled lil’ tike. Ya, it was the kind of bliss that’s similar to pounding your head against a cinderblock wall…

So once my threshold of frustration and patience was surpassed, the motions were set in place to move towards getting a new solution that not only would be a replacement, but a step into the next direction of planning for the future and broadening our horizons of printing potential. After many conversations, research, research, budget adjustments, and more research, I landed on the Epson 9880 as the best solution for our current and future needs. Some things I was looking for were to be able to print on many kinds of media (including vinyl or Tyvek), at least 44″ of printable space (edge to edge), straight printing feed (for poster-board), auto cutting, unlimited linear printing length, color accuracy, Mac OSX compatibility, etc., to name a few.

So far, the Epson 9880 has been amazing. I know there are higher cost solutions out there, but for the money we invested, I can’t express to you how happy I am with it. The setup was a cinch, loading ink cartridges, calibration, driver setup was all seamless. The prints are beautiful, and holy crap it’s fast. So far, I’ve only had the chance to print about a dozen or so pieces with it, but what has transpired so far has been glorious. I will continue to post updates as to what I learn through more and more experience with the printer, and will keep blogging about my successes and shortcomings.

Have you ever had frustration with equipment like this, but then were so relieved by its replacement you can’t even fathom how you endured the predecessor for so long? Do tell in the comments, I’d love to hear about it.

So I like lists. I love to-do lists. I can’t express the satisfaction I get when ticking off the little completed box on an item in my Things application. I use things everyday, multiple times a day and I’m not gonna lie, though it’s a little bit pricey on the surface, when coupled with it’s iPhone App, it’s worth every penny. It syncs over Wi-Fi using the bonjour protocol, so no matter where I am, I always know what I’ve got on my plate, what’s coming down the pipes, or even what I need to remember to get at the grocery store.

Things is a beautifully focused and amazingly intuitive task manager. Other task managers either oversimplify or are too difficult to use. Either way you are not getting stuff done. Things instead has the right balance between ease of use and powerful features.

I have tried other apps like this in the past, (Remember The Milk, Process, Curio, Omni, etc) but have never had the experience that I’ve had with Things by Cultured Code. It’s strange because you would think that with an application like this you would think that more is better, but in this case, less is more. It starts with the simplicity of interface design. They understand what it takes to make something minimalistic, but not lacking (that’s a tough balance). The demo is free for the Mac App, and can be downloaded here. I suggest giving it a go, you won’t regret it.

Also for the growing number of you out there that are using the iPhone as your handheld link to the world around you, the Things App for the iPhone & iPod Touch is the perfect companion (or standalone) for the desktop application. Though it’s functionality is somewhat limited in comparison to the Desktop app, it’s still a great standalone application for task management and as a GTD solution.

The interface is simple but effective, which should be expected but in many cases isn’t present in a plethora of apps. Things has received rave reviews and won a good number of awards, and even took home the best in show award at Mac World 2009.

As I’m sure you’ve already gathered, I highly recommend Things, it’s been nothing but the right solution for me since I started using it. Things, you have my vote and my everyday use.

Lastly, if you do plan on buying the iPhone app and the OSX Desktop application, there is a 20% off coupon code for the Desktop app in the “about section” of the iPhone App. Now that’s an even better deal.

Louis Nizer

What quotes do you like? Any ideas for a good poster for the office?