Understanding Seth Godin Laterally

Posted on January 30, 2009 by madbadcat

I admit it. I am a malcontent, an outsider, and, as a result, a snob. It may be a result of my nomadic childhood, or maybe it is a result of ADHD addled brain, but I embrace my space. I am not agoraphobic but rather, misanthropic.

After years of struggling with my better nature, I can finally confess that my belief system is best triangulated by the Buddha, a samurai, and Harry Lockhart. I don’t play well with others. I fake it fairly well though, but hate myself for it later. I just don’t have any patience for posers, fakers, and paper-pushing mediocre middle management.

So it should come as no surprise then that, even in these desperate economic times, I have difficulty grasping the 21st century business models championed by Seth Godin and Tim Ferris. I see endless blogs and companies and people advocating these ideas without actually digesting them. Instead, these charlatans actualize success through surreptitious black-hat strategies while reciting chapter and verse that which their betters have said, well, better. The hype is so loud I cannot hear the message.

"Whatever else happens, I’ve got that sofa problem handled."

Skim through the posts at ArtsJournal.com and you too will see the negative effects this economy is having on the Arts as a whole. The misery is the reverse of trickledown: for every established art entity battling bankruptcy, there is a sea of talent drowning in the zeit geist of the changing markets.

IMHO, the failure of imagination by the carrion and the sheep at the center of our economic collapse has been dwindling the possibilities available to artists and creatives everywhere. If a prospective buyer can get a painting at IKEA or Pier 1 while shopping for a couch, why would it occur to him/ her to buy original art? The consumer "wins" by knowing the art they are purchasing matches their "style" because the retailer or HGTV told them so. That $400 painting produced in assembly plant style, has slowly strangled any opportunity for independent artists and craftsmen all over the US. In the years of the economic boom, Arts festivals all over the US partied more but have sold less, year after year.

So I do understand the need for the relevant application of these marketing principles to the business of art. It is why we here at DigitalAppleJuice chose to syndicate Bill Weaver’s Blog as part of our content. But it doesn’t mean that it resonates for me personally.

I cannot explain why, how, or what blind-link- following I took to get there, but I stumbled across Mark, Tony, and Brian of LateralAction.com. They have put THOSE concepts in perspective.

Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation

Go on. Read them.
Yes, now.

You are thinking, "Really, Fight Club?". You may even think I am kidding. I am not. Buried deep in that aggressive testosterone driven rhetoric lives the seed of Buddhism:

"…suffering is brought on by desire and attachment to wordly objects…"

Or in Fight Club speak:

"We’re the bi-products of a lifestyle obsession."

"I Know This Because Tyler Knows This…"

The singularly brilliant mind of Brian Clark has correlated Tyler Durden’s drive to be exceptional in a world of mediocrity to 21st century Business Strategies.

Rule No. 1

“No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”

See that? Succinct and precise. Surgical even. Do I really have to read another explanation or book or website about the 80-20 rule of productivity? No, not I.

Cause the boys at LateralAction.com are speaking my language.

Pixelmator: Creating a Clipping Mask

Posted on January 28, 2009 by madbadcat

Not to be confused with a quick mask, a clipping mask is in fact a series of layers; the dynamic between the base layer and the layers above it define the image that will be revealed. Various combinations of opacity and blending can result in extraordinary composite images.

The advantage of this method is simple: edit the base layer and you edit the shape of the composite image.

The Basics

1. Create or choose your base layer. By default, any new layer is called "untitled". I have renamed mine "base layer" for the sake of clarity.

Keep in mind that the visible content of the base layer becomes the visible shape of the content above it. Any areas in this layer that are transparent will remain transparent in the composite image as well.

2. Create a new layer above the base layer or or drag a layer from another image onto the base layer. as seen here, i have dragged a layer from another file onto my example file.

3. Create the "clipping mask" .
select your new layer then Layer > Create Clipping Mask (alternately, you can Option + Apple+G)

Add additional layers as needed by repeating this step. Drag and drop the overlying layers in any order that best suits your design.

As an additional refinement, note that any of the layers involved can have its opacity adjusted and the blending mode as a number of choices.

(I do miss the layers menu that Photoshop offers with the layer palette but that is more habit than anything else..)

Familiarity with Photoshop is helpful in learning Pixelmator. Once you get over the look of the UI, it is very easy to adjust to Pixelmator. See the quicktime movie of My First Attempt to Create a Clipping Mask with Pixelmator. After a couple of false starts, i was able to find all the relevant tools quickly. It was very easy, making Pixelmator an cheap and reliable substitute for Adobe Photoshop.

My first real attempts at using Pixelmator were to create composite images for a client (Toy-TMA.com) without reading the manual.

A Quick Composite (8.64)

An 3 Image Composite (14mb)

Pixelmator: The Challenge

Posted on January 5, 2009 by madbadcat

A while back, David Alison wrote about Pixelmator. He said it was a good program. I trust his judgment, and in general I’ve agreed with his assessment of Mac apps. As a result, I began recommending Pixelmator without hesitation to my clients.

I have to admit I am a Photoshop snob. I had never actually used Pixelmator. I had all sorts of excuses – didn’t want to pay for it, I already own the top image editor on the market so why bother learning a new one, yada yada. AND I own Imagewell from Xtralean. AND Lemke’s Graphic Converter.

Wondering why I would use anything but Photoshop? Sometimes all I need to do is resize and compress images for web use. Imagewell loads so fast and the interface for these two task is so handy that i can fly through resizing and outputing four images before Photoshop has even loaded!

Are you asking, "What about Graphic Converter?" Lemke’s wonder software was the first image editing software I ever owned and it has monster batch capabilities unmatched by any other software. I can fly through the resizing, renaming, converting, and outputing 1000 images in minutes. If there is an image file that Graphic Converter can’t open, I haven’t found it. (It makes favicons too).

So why bother with yet another image editor, right?

The Pixelmator Challenge.

One of these clients I previously mentioned (the ones i blindly and unabashedly recommend Pixelmator to) loves the editorial composite images I created for his website. He doubted that Pixelmator would be able to create anything like that. Knowing I am the said Photoshop snob, and knowing my penchant for a good challenge, he dared me to do a composite image using Pixelmator.

So I downloaded a copy of Pixelmator and went about doing some things I do every day with Photoshop.

My To Do List:

1. Create and use a clipping mask for an editorial image for a website.
2. Make a Quick Composite of two images
3. Composite three images into one.

Pixelmator fulfills my first rule of life: First, do something simple. Then read the manual.

This rule applies to software, hardware, remotes, printers, boyfriends, etc. If in my first interaction with any one thing, I cannot figure out how the most basic of functions works, then I can do without that one thing. Regardless of how special that one thing may be hyped to be.

After gathering up source materials and launching iSHowU Screen Recorder, It took me less than five minutes to accomplish my to-do-list. The only function I was uncomfortable with was typing text. The cursor disappears when you begin typing so I was never quite certain exactly where I was typing, but that might be a quirk with my system, affectionaltely named Pandora’s iMac.

Pixelmator is enough like Photoshop that the learning curve is negligible. One of my colleagues compared it to using Photoshop V.3, which is still head and shoulders above most of the image editors available at this price point ($59). There are enough selection, painting and color corrections tools to accomplish most tasks (certainly everything on my list) though, for some reason, I found the translucent black backgrounds distracting.

Soon I will be posting detailed tutorials for each task.

madbadcat.org

Monthly Archives: January 2009