I’m at the HOW Design Conference in Boston for the first part of this week, thanks to the generous support of my employers, who like to send me on little adventures like this every now and then so that I can keep myself sharp, learn new things that might benefit our company, and (possibly most importantly) not go nuts and kill everyone in the office.

One of the most interesting parts of the HOW Conference is, for me, the opportunity to be around thousands of other designers. Generally speaking when someone says "I’m a designer" there’s a certain expectation of creative ability–the casual observer naturally wants to assign the designer some preternatural ability to ooze creative juices nonstop.

To some extent this is true; I’d certainly expect the folks at a conference of this sort to be the type that are always questioning everything around them and looking at things in new and different ways. But in all honesty, designers can be quite lazy, just as employees in virtually any other field can be (witness highway construction projects wherein one guy is in a hole doing something and seven other guys are standing around said hole, discussing it). And a couple of things that I’ve seen so far from my fellow attendees have dismayed me.

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My latest article has been posted on the Black Star Rising blog, which is a little bit more procedural in nature than last time and speaks to what I do with photos as they relate to design. Here’s a bit of it:

Neutral areas can be critical in choosing stock photography, particularly with spot photos. In many cases I need to place text on a photo to create promotional images or advertisements, but if an image doesn’t have enough of a neutral area around the primary subject, then I’m stuck unless I resort to some Photoshop manipulation.

On more than one occasion I’ve had to create long rectangular promo graphics advertising events featuring specific political figures, but have only been given official government 8 x 10 headshots to work with. As a result, I have to slide the image to one side of the canvas, match the background color and fill in the rest of the canvas with that, using the retouching tools to hide any “seam” between the two.

I don’t prefer to go this route, of course; if I have a choice, I like to be able to have a custom shoot or to select the best photo I can find on the Web, regardless of price. Unfortunately, these days it rarely works that way, particularly for online publishers and small businesses.

If you feel so inclined you can read the entire article at Black Star Rising.

I’m in the process of finishing up my thesis and won’t be posting links today; instead, I’d like to share this excerpt from the conclusion of my thesis containing my prognostications on the on-demand future of media. Keep in mind that the thesis is a cultural history of cooking/food shows, which should explain certain references that will likely make a little more sense in the overall context of the paper. I’ll post a link to the entire thesis when it’s completed, but in the meantime, your thoughts are welcome.

Over the next three to five years, as the USA completes the transition to digital broadcast signals, it’s likely that the volume of food-oriented programs will continue to increase. At the same time, it’s likely that more broadcasters will follow the lead of forward-thinking companies like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, News Corporation and NBC Universal by offering full-length, on-demand streaming versions of programs on websites like Hulu.com and MarthaStewart.com. Special made-for-the-web segments are likely to increase in volume as well; some of these kinds of videos are already cropping up on BravoTV.com, where visitors to the Top Chef website can view bonus clips called “Choice Cuts” that are either specifically made for the Internet or that were cut from the broadcast episodes. Wisely, the networks are learning to monetize these clips by pairing them with short unskippable advertisements that play before each segment.

In ten to fifteen years, though, it is conceivable that Americans will begin to see a massive shift in the way that we all watch television. It is unlikely that the actual term “television” will vanish from our lexicon (witness, for example, referring to content on websites as “channels,” which is a direct reference to television), and it is equally unlikely that our computer screens will replace our living room television screens, but the method of delivery for the shows that we watch will change drastically. Three recent inventions are specific harbingers of this paradigm shift—the CableCARD, TiVo and the newly released Apple TV.

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Some exciting news… I was asked a few weeks ago to become a regular contributor to Black Star Rising, which is a blog run by one of the most historic and respected photography agencies in New York!  My first entry was just posted there, and it concerns learning to work with photographers as an art director.  A short excerpt:

It’s true that most photographers would say that they are artists, but in this instance the photographer is an artist for hire. If you aren’t happy with what you’re getting back, say so, though this wasn’t really an issue for me. I tried to give specific directions (”Can you frame the model so that there’s more empty space over his left shoulder?”) and I made an effort to indicate if something needed to be reshot (”Let’s do a couple more of this pose, maybe from a higher angle this time”).

Read the entire entry here!

In my last Four for Friday post, I included a link to some ridiculous products that appeared in the SkyMall retail catalog, which included a “covert” cat box/planter, a bizarre multi-function folding cane, and an unwieldy and impractical-looking “back massager.” I can only imagine what the shipping costs must be for some of these inane items.

However, the more I thought about these items, the clearer it became to me that the problem with many of the items was simply that they just try to do too many things, running head-long into the law of diminishing returns.

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