Had to share this link at Adobe TV.

Great feature to help you work more efficiently with clients this year.

DesignGeek says… "UNPLUG!"

I love my digital electronic devices, and my computers and my software…If you have read this blog you know this to be true.

But I am a creative problem solver at the heart of it all and I know that the best way to get inspiration is to unplug, look and listen.

I was out hiking with my daughter and our airedale the other day through a nature preserve, and we passed 2 individuals on the trail all plugged into iphone/ipod and one was texting.

Part of me geeks out at seeing this because it is so cool to be able to compute anywhere in the world! But the artist in me thought "you are missing the whole point of this space!"

Unplugging oneself is a luxury we need to indulge in daily.

This planet has an abundance of sights and sounds man made and natural that need to be observed by the innovative and the creative.

Observing how light and shadow play in the woods and fields can inspire new lighting filters and mood patterns for painting, illustrating and sound design inspiration.

We found great patches of lichens and moss in the snow and the textures are incredible and the color contrasts are awesome.

My daughter found rocks and twigs all ending up in my pocket with assorted seed pods and the like…great stuff to render and examine later in the studio.

Ambient sounds are great to collect

I love collecting sounds, and when I am out on a walk at lunch downtown in a crowded Cincinnati street or off hiking in the woods I love picking up the most interesting audio content and letting my imagination run wild with how it could be applied.

In the hike mentioned above we saw a flock of canadian geese flying overhead and they were calling to each other. What did I get from that?

The sound of a goose and geese is priceless, great "Honk" I could actually use this when describing the senate health care debate ;-)

And this is not all about hugging trees and getting all Walden Pond on everyone… the mechanical sounds of mankind are very interesting and tell a great story if you listen.

Listen to the buses and cars and jack-hammers and try to filter in the other sounds of talking, wind blowing, and you get a symphony of modern human technology.

Also be a fly on the path when walking in a crowd listen to the overall drone of many conversations as they pass by. It is as though you are swimming through a sea of oscillating sound waves. Let it splash all over your creative muscles! The content you can pull from that journey is amazing!

Observe the sights of a city, beautiful and ugly. Remember one person's beauty is someone else's ugly, and vice versa.

I can even find some interesting patterns and textures in smashed paper mixed with slush on a sidewalk...seriously!

It is black and gray and nasty but it can trigger an inspiration of mood and can also serve as a texture for some visual exploration in the future.

Look at all the manmade textures, purposeful and discarded…it can be quite a multimedia toolkit!

In closing try it…take a walk anywhere, unplug your eyes and ears and stimulate your brain…then come back and create something amazing!!

Digital Designers, Gear up for 2010!

Ok enough about the recession and how hard 2009 was…time to move on.

It looks like the shock and awe of the economic downturn has sunk in with the companies around the globe and they have divided into 2 distinct groups…

Ones who will fail next year

and my favorite…

Companies that know that innovation in new products and services are going to help them capture the lion's share of the market.

How do you become a design leader in the second group?

Enhance your capabilities…that's right not your portfolio but your arsenal of services that you can bring to your clients.

Strengthen your core creative offering with new tools necessary for today's marketplace.

Adjust your pricing and your attitude toward the projects that you get.

Work hard at listening to the client and ASK them for clarity around deliverables before diving into the work.

And lastly, tuck any design arrogance that has latched on to you over the years back under the rock where it came from.

Designers in the Digital era are a very lucky few. We have skills and knowledge to help innovators visualize their ideas in context of the marketplace. We can help them rapidly prototype their mental ideas into a visual that could secure capital investments for development and deployment.

We are the rare breed that can make a static presentation come alive with color, type and motion. We understand how to get someone's attention. And we understand how to keep an audience's attention with visual and audio queues.

Designers of this era are better connected than ever before through LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Twitter. USE THOSE CONNECTIONS to solve creative problems that come your way.

Unabashedly reach out to those connections when you need someone's expertise to help you solve a technical issue that you cannot resolve yourself.

This is not just common sense but it can also spread business to other sectors that will fuel innovative producers in the future.

Expand your horizons through new education

Yeah I know "when will I have time?, I don't have the money, the kids have soccer…"

Quit your whining!

Online training resources abound from the free to the moderately priced.

And the new education model uses a technology paradigm called "passive meeting technology"

This means, it works with you on your schedule on your downtime or uptime.

And it comes right to your desk or smartphone.

I always have one response to our culture when they put learning off as a last resort…"quit the business".

Yes you read it correctly. You have to keep learning and relearning in this industry and many others in order to stay ahead of the curve.

And trust me from experience, if you do quit a skill think about the learning and training time you will invest in a new line of work?

Integrate your new education into something meaningful!

We all have personal projects that we want to do and never have the time to accomplish.

Well now is your chance! if you are learning a new skill then use the training time to build that interactive photo album or video or game for the family.

I have been training creative professionals for years on the latest technology and I have found that people will retain the information longer and build stronger problem solving skills if they learn through meaningful application.

Personal experience, I wanted to learn game development that I could apply to business. I could have frantically accepted a project and worked round the clock stressed out in hopes of applying lessons to someone's paid expectations. I thought about the risk versus the reward on this approach, and it did not look like a favorable option.

So I made a game for my kids. I was able to take my time making something I liked from a visual standpoint and I was able to take the proper amount of time to understand how to write the scripts for the game play.

I now have a great toolbox to use for future billable projects.

And lastly…" I have a job with a firm and they will not let me learn something new. we have to work on the old billable work".

What?!?!?

First off you own your career as a designer, your firm is just a place you work on projects for money.

You have an arrangement of "goods for services" they supply goods in the way of money and select benefits. You supply them with a high level of service based on your initial agreement.

But to stop stretching your ability because the current "client" does not want or need a new offering is ridiculous.

Own your career!!! learn something new and create competitive offerings for your current client or new clients.

So race into 2010 with the attitude that as a digital designer you offer creative solutions to complex problems that face us all. Learn about some new tools that will help you create innovation opportunities that will in turn strengthen global economies one project at a time.

Happy New Year!

Nick

FLASH for the iphone! development Beta

Adobe announced that Flash CS5 will allow you to develop for the iphone FINALLY.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/

This means two things… One, that rich media content can be developed in Flash for all mobile devices on the market today as well as Television, Web, and Game systems like the Wii.

Two, This platform will allow designers, illustrators to work more collaboratively on rich media content without having to relearn a new set of tools. As the Adobe creative suite feeds each component (illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Flash, After Effects ) this makes it easier to utilize creative teams as they exist today. And it allows those who want to learn flash as an extension of their adobe knowledge a new canvas for which to present their visions.

Go forth and Learn Flash!!!

Nick

Actionscripting into the Fall…

Ahh the summer is ending here in Ohio and I am working hard at illustrating characters for a pro-bono animation project as well as re-learning Actionscript.

Well It seems as though I am having to start all over again with Actionscript 3.0

For those not familiar with Flash Actionscript is the language that Flash uses to make things happen in your animation or game creation or presentation.

The new version has a stricter set of rules than in previous applications, and for a visual creative person it can be daunting.

I have been rethinking the way that I learn and retain information with this exercise and it has been an incredible mental workout.

I am now looking at the pieces of art I create in a different way...as objects with very tangible traits.

If you ever have an interest to join the masses who like to make their visions move and interact with the user try some of these courses...

http://www.senocular.com/flash/tutorials/as3withflashcs3/

and most importantlyTodd Perkins' classes on Lynda.com

Selfless promotion…simplicity in character development

I have been working on an animation project for awhile and have

the character studies underway.

Had to share the look and feel of one of the characters.

Saying that I guess the topic of this post would be understanding how to create simplicity in your illustrations for movement. 

While this is still in the "digi-sketch" stage I have had many starts and misstarts on creating efficiencies in the creation of the body parts etc.

Art Authentication..

In my last post I discussed my fascination with Processing, a scripting language for artists to create just about anything through the employment of programming constructs.

This week I continue this discussion, by taking a look at a video shown on July 2, 2009 on Nova's Science Now.

In this video an artist is challenged to copy Vincent Van Gogh's "The Reaper". Then a team of computer scientists from various universities use their progrmming algorithms to determine which "Reaper" is the real painting by Van Gogh, and which painting was done by the contemporary artist in the study.

How the program(s) determine what is Van Gogh and what is a forgery is an amazing dive into the study of numeric patterns, and how they are represented in even the spontaneous brush strokes of an artist.

Where do I go with this?

I do not think that the digital medium should or could replace the spontaneity of our work, but it is fascinating that at the base level patterns can be realized and replicated. Whether in nature or in human-made visualizations.

Watch the video online at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0302/02.html