News Graphics

OK, granted, this is a tweet but it looks oddly familiar to BiC...
Blast from the past

Happy 420 Day

In honor of 4/20/14 the crack programming & graphics department at Blogging Isn't Cool has concocted a marijuana Photoshop brush (usable in other software (like TheGimp)) and made it available to you for free download!

OG'd
What the Fuck is this shit ?
WCPO has changed their graphics. I would like to say it is a "retro" look as the garish gold 3D shit was very popular at one time, but nowadays it just looks pathetic. I am reminded of the satirical take on black exploitation movies, I'm Gonna get Ya Sucka! where the guy died of "overgolding". I was going to compare this to the graphics at The Onion where they go over the top on purpose, but even they have toned it down! Hell, Fox News isn't as crazy as this anymore.
Awhile ago, I posted that WCPO was laying off graphics folks & parent, Scripps, was consolidating graphics in Tampa. I am hopeful the decision to use this graphic theme was not made in Cincinnati. I have seen the work of area designers & have been privileged to work with a few. This area is teeming with talent. Apparently, Tampa is not. Or the head of Scripps just gave his teenage nephew with a warez copy of 3D Max a job.....
Beyond the garish hideousness is the impracticality & just doofynessness of the design.

In the 4-up / Hollywood squares kinda graphic, the announcers seem painfully aware that they look like douchebags.




The graphics dwarf the talent, they need to get the talent's head bigger. The title bar thingie is raised higher than need be to accomodate scrolling ticker crap. Don't see why they can't slide it down when there's nothing there. With all the other crap moving around, it wouldn't be any more distracting.




What the hell is this? Some 3D debris that was still flying around from the previous animation ? Just more flying shit. Digital monkey house design.....




The field photographers need to rethink how they are shooting & frame everything higher. Dunno if they can glob the new graphics into their viewfinder. Maybe stick some tape on it ?




the photographers need to rethink their canvas & maybe the talent should get a little bigger & move over to the side then frame the news scene to the side of the announcer. This would also move the title thingie away from the speaker's chin.
If the folks at WCPO want my help, I would be more than happy to oblige.

Cincinnati's New Logo

Cincinnati recently unveiled it's new logo designed by LPK for a cool $75k paid by Macy's.
I don't terribly dislike it. I like the colors - city blue, a light blue & green. It screams water, earth, air, clarity & transparency. The shape, however, is pretty uninspirational. A torus with a wedge knocked out of it.
What bothers me is it's functionality. It looks great on white but the vignetted edges & goofy highlights & shadows are gonna be hell to reproduce on other colors, patterns & images.

It won't photocopy or fax well.

You can't just stick it on a photo.

Simple outlining still has issues with the vignetted edges.
It does appear to have a shape and a 3Dness to it. this has potential, especially with the transparency thing going on.

Static

Animated
poorly
The shape still needs masking & stuff for the soft edges. Hopefully LPK has supplied masks, grayscales & hell, even a 3d model (for $75k) so the city can get the widest range of uses out of this thing.

Fishwrap story here.

3D For the Interwebs ?
I have heard the promise since about 1990. At the 09 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco The Khronos Group announced their intent to develop a set of open APIs for development of 3D graphics for the internet. They said the action was in response to a request from Mozilla and that Google had expressed interest as well.
The Khronos Group lists about every computer/graphics/media/network type company in the world (except for Adobe & Microsoft, of course) as some kind of member of he organization. This includes that of the Safari browser developer, Apple.
Khronos has handled the development of SGI's OpenGL, created in 1992, since 2006. SGI, of course originally made the VRML viewer, Cosmo Player - got nowhere with it, handed it off to Computer Associates (for some reason) where it continued to go nowhere.
Probably the most successful attempt at web 3D is the perfectly awful Second Life. While there may be a practical application for 3D in your surfing experience, it won't be attractive with a slow delivery of lame graphics and overly complex controls. People like telephones & TVs. Computers and internet speeds have improved vastly since 1992 but the horsepower needed for lush graphics and complex worlds ain't really there. Add to that that most people just lazily use M$oft's Internet Explorer and M$oft will likely never adopt any kind of standard graphic format when they can make their own and use their monopoly status to flood the market with their product. Unlike any other browser in the world, M$oft has dragged it's heels in supporting PNG and, AFAIK, IE is the only browser in the world to have no support for SVG.
Good graphics are crucial to the success of web 3D and that means artists need good tools to create those graphics. Adobe pretty much has the market cornered on that and with their Flash products they really have no reason to support anything that comes out of Khronos. Even if they did, their track record with SVG and Atmosphere doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
Somehow, I think this will just wind up another pipe dream.

Use your own handwriting as a font with the YourFont online font creation tool.
The online service is OS agnostic and generates a TrueType font usable on Lin, Mac & Win.
You can use your font like any other TrueType font

And, of course, stunning video effects !

To send your documents out to friends and foes, use a word processor like Writer in OpenOffice and simply export your document with the font embedded using the Export to PDF function.
The process is pretty simple. You download a template from Yourfont, print it, enter your characters, scan it and upload it to YourFont. It processes the images to a font nd you download & install. Processing took about 2 minutes.
Placement of the letter in the template is important. As you can see, I did a horrible job. Anything in the boxes of the template is going to become part of the font, tho so you can't draw rules on the paper. I would sugget editing your scan in an image editing tool like GIMP and making sure everything is placed right using guides. This is especially important if you are trying to create a script font.
I would suggest using a hard paper or even plastic to print your template on and using a felt tip pen so you get a good smooth line. You also might want to practice some of those weird characters you don't use every day, like §s and æs and ¤s.
A whole alphabet is not neccesary, You can just make decorative capitals or scrolly embellishments.
What's really cool about this is that you don't really have to use the regular alphabet. You can make your own alchemical font or hieroglyphics or veve library. Or you can just buy professional versions at Deniart.
I imagine you could even use high contrast images of the fam.