ummm I really don’t know what to say about this … and this:

This is an image that can be printed out and posted on walls or signs or what not. What does the image represent? Nothing in the traditional way an image represents something. It’s a code–like a bar code–an image with embeded information. These are called QR Codes and are apparently all the rage in Japan. See if you have a cell phone with the QR Code reader software on it you can use your cell phones camera to decode the message, photo, music or whatever up to 1 mb! Pretty cool. I can see how advertisers might want to use it to lend an air of mystery and intrigue to their campaigns. I just like the idea of posting secret messages in plain sight.

Oh and I made the above image with their QR Code maker. It’s basically the story of my life … sort of.

I had the privilege of working on this project for the Mountain Dew aluminum bottle can roll out (the first soft drink to be packaged like this) with Peat Wollaeger my friend and a stencil artist. The over all experience was a good one except that at the end of the video a frame comes up that says that it was shot on an RCA Small Wonder, whatever that is. This is completely false, I shot this video with a Panasonic DVC 30 and a Panasonic DV-GS 700 (for the time lapse) each with an after market wide angle lens attachments. Post production and color finishing was done with Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

Overall though I think this was a worthwhile project. The artists got creative freedom to do what they wanted with the designs, as well as got a little chunk o’ corporate cash and some good exposure. All good things. The bottle designs are cool, and I hope to collect a few myself.

The site design really sucks though. It’s one of those wacky late 90’s style all Flash site where “coolness” trumps function. The design isn’t all that cool though. It’s all science fictiony and “electronic” looking that is soooo dated looking it’s really sad. Looking at it you can almost hear the meetings that must have took place while the thing was being designed.

“OK it’s gotta be green” Check.
“Lets make it space agey but still rough looking” Check.
“lets make the pages load as if they are drawn by lasers” Check.
“We gotta have a cool hip-hop beat behind everything–the kids still like that music right? Yeah a hip-hop beat” Check.

If these were their best ideas I would hate to know what their bad ones were.

Obvilously the main problem with an all flash site–besides the poor functionality, and it’s ugly dated looks–is the fact that there are no permalinks. So there is no way for me to say, link from here to the page on the site that this post is about. I have to give you the main site address and hope you find it. I tested out the “tell a friend” button (another throwback to 90’s web marketing–harvesting email addresses) on Peats page to see if I could get a permalink emailed to me that I could use, and yes I did … but … it didn’t … work. DOH!!

This release of Final Cut Studio seems to have everything I hoped for. One thing in particular is the new Color app that comes with the new suite. I love the fact that you are going to get near Photoshop level control over your video images now—and not only that but save the settings in portable files that can be traded in much the same way that Photoshop layer styles can be passed around. This is of particular interest to me because I’m a bit of a color nut when it comes to video. Maybe it’s my graphic design background and years of building Photoshop skill, but I can never just use the standard color I get from a camera. I frequently will increase the contrast and saturate or desaturate accordingly. The 3 channel color corrector in FCP is my most used effect. It was the singular tool that allowed me anywhere close to the level of control over all these things that I was looking for. But from I can see there are new curves controls that strongly resemble the curves palet in Photoshops UI. So … YAY!

Also from the looks of it, some of the functionality from Apple’s Shake compositing software has been cannibalized for FCP too. The video demo reveals a very shake like workflow UI that might take some getting used to. Shake had a reputation for being a little quirky in the UI department (this is what I’ve read—I’ve never used it myself).

So this stuff and all the new goodies in Motion and Soundtrack pro and I know that I’m gonna be out the $499 upgrade fee soon.

I rebuilt the sidebar at LO-FI SAINT LOUIS. Looks better but still needs some work. My friend Kopper has volunteered to help me out with some of the management and updates as well. I really want to redesign the whole thing. What a pain in the ass that will be. I would like to move to something along the lines of this. I also like this theme a lot but it would be too difficult to migrate to it. Also some of the important traditional “blog” features are missing, like a blogroll etc. which I think are important to have. I’m really surprised that there aren’t a lot of “vlog” themes for Wordpress yet–if you are a WP developer and are interested in what I would like to see in a Vlog theme let me know.

This is funny! I saw this on the blog A Sampler Of Things.

When I first moved to the neighborhood there was a big old Catholic Church near by called Holy Family. The local Archdiocese decided to close the church a couple of years ago and sell off the land. There were rumors that the Church was sold to an advertising firm last year but I never really did find out if they ever moved in–or even if the rumor was true. But lo and behold today I came across an article about the buildings that were left vacant by the big church closing that shuttered the place to begin with and sure enough an ad agency called CFX Advertising has moved in. From the (tiny) photos on their site they seem to have done some interesting things with the place.

Unfortunately, their site suffers from the problems that a lot of smaller design firms suffer from. Namely too much flash and design that seems to be sized for smaller monitors. I think that this has to do with designers coming of age and learning their trade in the late 90’s and never updating their skills. Web design rules are constantly in flux and one really needs to be immersed in them to keep up. In the late 90’s Flash was all the rage. Now most web developers know that CSS is the bomb—not just for fashionable reasons, but also for purely functional reasons too. If you design your entire site in flash, then it’s really hard to be discovered–not to mention the pain it is to redesign or even update. Flash has its place, but seriously it’s best use is not pure web design. Some design firms know this and they have people on staff that are proficient in modern web design techniques but due to lack of time and or budgets or both haven’t kept up with their own sites. Kind of the “Cobblers kids are the last to get shoes” syndrome. I don’t know what the deal is with this place but maybe I’ll take a stroll over and say hi to the new neighbors and maybe I’ll find out.