corvairflair

Words for those who may care

Archive for October, 2007

God, I love New York

Oct 26

Posted by Mike in Personal | No Comments

I hadn’t been up to the Big Apple in quite some time and it was certainly refreshing to be back in the midst of all that action. Even though I was up on business manning a trade show booth at the Javits Center, I had a chance to experience some fine cuisine along with sites, smells and sounds that are part of this great city.

While I’m just glad to be a casual visitor here, I must say that NYC is one of my favorite places to visit for a short stint. It’s not necessarily the fine dining and cultural amenities that keep me coming back, but rather the people. It never ceases to amaze me the enormous diversity of human race that exists here. I could probably spend a week up here just sitting idly by “people watching”. The different ethnicities, sizes, shapes, and fashions are simply fascinating to me.

It may have only been a few days that I had to spend up there, but I cherished every minute.

Print…you know where you stand.

Oct 11

Posted by Mike in Design | No Comments

I’ve recently been doing some direct marketing design. You know the typical things, direct mailers, sell sheets, some corporate identity. What a change from web design! I totally forgot how different the two mediums really are. Until I recently jumped back into the world of print, I really did forget what I was missing.

From the the true point sizes of fonts and leading, to the actual colors and boundaries of your artwork palette and canvas. In the world of the web, these things are all very big variables, but with print, it’s pretty much what you see is what you get (wysiwyg). Don’t get me wrong, I love the web and all of the variables that come with it. To me that’s part of the challenge and there’s always something new to try and learn.

However, it’s also been quite fulfilling these days as I comb through my library of thousands of fonts to choose from and paging through my old Pantone books. Sometimes it’s good to know when you wrap some additional text and kern some spacing to avoid a widow, it won’t come back to haunt you later.

My only big negative with my foray back into the world of print is the overall waste that comes with it, literally. I go through a lot of paper product as I work through my eventual designs. With the web, I can at least keep a green conscience.