[d]online

If you haven’t gotten a chance to see the site, I suggest you do. Some amazing, creative and crafty work that puts the rest of us digital font designers to shame.

Fig. 01: AIGA barker on the era//404 site

A little while back, Tina Roth-Eisenberg (known far and wide under the blog moniker “SwissMiss”) tweeted about an extra ticket to see the AIGA NY event with Ji Lee speaking about inspiration and the nexxus between gratification from work and gratification from personal projects.  For those that don’t know, Ji is one of a dozen or so creative directors at Google Creative Labs and the father of The Bubble Project.

The ticket, provided by the generous and inimitable Cameron Koczon, of Fictive Kin, opened up a world of creative thinkers, social drinkers and networking opportunities for design and development. We’ve had the honor of working with Ms. Roth-Eisenberg on various projects, including the MoMA staff site and I’ve followed SwissMiss‘s career for a half decade now, as well as the guest speaker and other participants in the event. And while many in the audience appeared to be students or those embarking on new careers, it was refreshing to see so many people passionate about design. Working in the vacuum that is era//404 can sometimes feel devoid of creative ideas, especially when members of a project are on the other side of the globe.

So, part of this year’s resolution was to create a stronger bond with members of the creative community in NYC and, with four days to spare, we joined the AIGA. The last professional organization I’ve been a part of was back in college (the American Center for Design‘s “Students in Design” and our chapter’s “Design Works” student organization) as well as participating in the Grand Rapids Area Advertising Foundation (GRAAF)’s annual “Addy Awards“, in which a colleague and I won a Citation of Excellence.

It is my secondary hope that, just as being members of NYPHP as brought us design opportunities among the developer network, being a member of the AIGA will bring us development opportunities among the designer network. First and foremost, however, we’re glad to be part of such a prestigious and reputable organization that shares membership with some of my greatest heroes in the design world: Paula Scher, Michael Beirut, Stefan Sagmeister, to name a few.

What are your experiences with the AIGA, or other professional organizations? I’d love to hear your thoughts as well!

A few weeks ago, I alluded to a web site era//404 was creating for an author that involved original video footage from Grand Central Station (shot by the inimitable Greg Stadnik) and motion tracking movie clips with Flash video smoothing. I’m proud to say that the site for Joshua Ferris’s “The Unnamed“ (Reagan Arthur, 2010) is now live. Pop on by to see the final result. I think it came out pretty nicely…but maybe I’m biased. What do you think?

» Visit The Unnamed
» Visit era//404′s Portfolio

Special Thanks to: Amanda Tobier, Greg Stadnik, Zeh Fernando and the author, himself, for all the original/beautiful content in the site.

As Shaun Inman calls it: Subversive. Delightfully subversive.

Google Chrome Frame is a plug-in that brings open web technologies and Google Chrome’s speedy V8 JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. Get more information here.

Thanks to Swiss-Miss for pointing this lovely poster to my attention. I sorta feel that it’s a trend in my posts for 2009. Here’s to 2010 being a better year for the freelancer!

era//404 just updated the Spring 2010 Fashion Colors for our PANTONE® Moods Facebook Application!

Two quick things in reference to my new [d]online typeface.

1. American Typographers: According to this site, put together by Luc Devroye, of the School of Computer Science at the esteemed McGill University in Montreal, I’m part of the American Type Scene and featured (less than prominently) on his New York City page:
(by the way, the French example translates to “On the lap of the sorceress”)

2. [d]afont: I’m now listed on dafont.com:

In light of the creation of [d]online, the font, and my recent post about The League of Moveable Type (to which [d]online was submitted), I did some poking around and found their new Social Font Manager, the Lettercase Application. Apparently, this application will enable like-minded typographers to collaboratively build typefaces. And, to this typophile and amateur typographer, with marginal ligature skills and a lack of patience for kerning, this is wonderful news. Other typographers: Join their beta test and follow them on Twitter.

While working on a new project for era//404, I received a great tip from Zeh, my Flash Obi Wan whom you’ve no doubt read me gushing about in the past. The site (which will be launched at the top of 2010) is centered around a video loop. The loop began as a 208MB raw Quicktime video clip shot by one of era//404′s video directors/editors, Greg Stadnik (you may remember his work from our Beautiful Children viral video that was featured in Gawker and AdRants last year). The clip was then scaled in 1/2, compressed using the On2 VP6 codec, imported into flash and then manipulated manually.  The final SWF was 3.12MB, but the quality suffered terribly.

This is when Zeh clued me in to video smoothing. It’s the same principle as bitmap smoothing, since embedded video clips are technically just an image sequence. The result was night and day. The left half of the below screenshot shows video smoothing set to true, where the right shows smoothing set to false.

Figure 1. Video Smoothing – Click image for larger/detailed version

Note that this is just the beginning of this site with the radial gradient and scanlines stripped away to accentuate the smoothing detail. Overall, it’s an easy way to preserve quality without increasing loadtime, memory or processor demand. Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was by the result.