Pinterest has a new look for profiles! You can’t do other than rearrange the boards and change your profile information. You can see all of your Boards, your Pins, Likes and Activity (who are you following, liked and repinned). Reminds me of the new Facebook timeline look but I am liking where they are going…

Time to update the blog!

So, one of the things I mentioned to Jake was that I want to start a yearly tradition:

Change the look for Design Backslash to the Pantone Color of the Year.

For 2012 is Tangerine Tango

You can download the Adobe Swatches here

Over the last 10 years, Pantone has given us the color of the year, for 2012, it’s Tangerine Tango (Pantone 17-1463). Here’s more information on it:

“Sophisticated but at the same time dramatic and seductive, Tangerine Tango is an orange with a lot of depth to it,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, Tangerine Tango marries the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy.”

Over the past several years, orange has grown in popularity and acceptance among designers and consumers alike. A provocative attention-getter, Tangerine Tango is especially appealing in men’s and women’s fashion. Fashion designers featured in the PANTONE Fashion Color Report Spring 2012, including Tommy Hilfiger, Nanette Lepore, Cynthia Steffe by Shaun Kearney, Elie Tahari and Adrienne Vittadini, are incorporating this attractive orange into their spring collections. A fun, lively take on a traditional autumnal hue, Tangerine Tango will surely carry through to fall fashion as well.

A winner in cosmetics because of its versatility, Tangerine Tango is a bit exotic, but in a very friendly, non-threatening way. Add a sultry flair to lips, cheeks and nails with Tangerine Tango. An unexpected eye shadow color, Tangerine Tango is a complementary opposite that flatters blue or green eyes. When paired with brown eyes, it brings out an amber cast.

The color of the year selection is a very thoughtful process. To arrive at the selection, Pantone quite literally combs the world looking for color influences. This can include the entertainment industry and films that are in production, traveling art collections, hot new artists, popular travel destinations and other socio-economic conditions. Influences may also stem from technology, availability of new textures and effects that impact color, and even upcoming sports events that capture worldwide attention.

For over 10 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home and industrial design, as well as product packaging and graphic design. Past colors include:

• PANTONE 18-2120 Honeysuckle (2011)
• PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise (2010)
• PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa (2009)
• PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris (2008)
• PANTONE 19-1557 Chili Pepper (2007)
• PANTONE 13-1106 Sand Dollar (2006)
• PANTONE 15-5217 Blue Turquoise (2005)
• PANTONE 17-1456 Tigerlily (2004)
• PANTONE 14-4811 Aqua Sky (2003)
• PANTONE 19-1664 True Red (2002)
• PANTONE 17-2031 Fuchsia Rose (2001)
• PANTONE 15-4020 Cerulean (2000)

World Graphics Day is celebrated on April 27, the anniversary of the founding of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda), the world body for graphic design, in 1963. It is a day to celebrate the profession of graphic and communication design. The day has been celebrated since 1995.

On this occasion, designers reflect and hope that an international network can contribute to a greater understanding between people and can help to build bridges where divides and inequities exist.

International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) was founded in London in 1963 and is the world body for professional communication design and visual communication. Icograda network members include professional associations, design promotion bodies, design media and design education institutions. Design media are affiliated through the Icograda Design Media Network. Individuals are affiliated through the Icograda Friends Network.

The Icograda Education Network (IEN) brings together the worldwide community of graphic design educational institutions. The IEN was inaugurated at a meeting in Brno, Czech Republic, in June 2002 attended by 73 delegates from 28 countries.

Happy World Graphics Day to you all!

I’m often asked what podcasts I listen to, hence I created not a post but a Page dedicated to it! I just updated the list.

Make sure to check it out and give me suggestions!

Podcasts I Listen to

Hello all! I know I’ve got you without any posts lately, but I’ve been a busy bee! First, let me remind you that Design Backslash is on Facebook! There, I share many of the news that catch my eye on the Design, Creative and Photography side, as well post updates on my work. Swing by and say hi!

Then, I’d also like to bring back one of this year’s first posts: SIR (Simplify, Imagine and Reach). This has been a crazy start of the year, but a good one. As in many business, January is the slowest month,, but February has come (and almost gone) proving to come stronger followed by a very busy March and a crazy April. I won’t lie, there have been times where I forget about SIR and just go crazy, but I need to take a breather and remember my three words. Saying them out loud helps.

Now that I made you read a bit, here’s my peace offering for having you dry on news here: A set of two wallpapers. The picture was taken on one hot summer sunday in Lake George (Upstate NY). The day was overly cast and the mood was all around nostalgic. On our way back to the car with Jake from Prepressology, we walked by this site and I called out to him to stop. The picture was perfect and became an instant wallpaper for my iPhone and Mac:

Click here for the Desktop/Laptop version

Click here for the iPhone version

Enjoy them and talk to you soon!

This week, in between projects I managed to squeeze in the updated look for The Foodies’ Kitchen for the holiday season.  I wanted to add a little bit of the White Christmas feeling to it. I hope you enjoy it using it as much as I did designing it!

Font Management is essential for any designer who uses more than just a handful of fonts. As many designers know, if you keep all the fonts activated at the same time, it uses more system resources, making any mac and its applications run slow. Font Management allows to activate fonts for the time that you actually need them. We get fonts from all the place: Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Quark – just to mention the fonts that get installed with the applications that we use every day. To this, you need to add the fonts you purchase and use for client projects. With a good Font Management system, you can find, sort, preview, activate/deactivate fonts as you go. If I hadn’t look more into Font Management, I would be lost!

After this tweet from @curtismchale (and going back and forth a few times) I decided to right this article about Font Management. I started really looking into Font Management a few years ago, just before heading to the InDesign Conference in Miami back in 2008. I was using Font Book from OS X since it became available, but the Adobe and Macromedia apps integration was flawed and not very efficient. Font Book would  ask for missing fonts in documents, but wouldn’t “call” them for activation. This would take time specially if I was working on several projects at once. At the conference, I got the hint about (then free version) Linotype FontExplorer X. I immediately fell in love with the application, and let’s face it, there were not any functional, affordable or pretty Font Management applications for OS X. I could create collections, sets and manage them all from FontExplorer and not worry about how the fonts would be called from the apps. After a while, FontExplorer X went from free to paid, so I went back for a while to Font Book. I couldn’t get used to the downgrade so I started a quest to find a cheaper replacement to cover all my needs.

I tested just two applications: FontCase and FontExplorer X Pro. There are two other solid and good applications that I’ve tried before but didn’t test back then. My reasons where that both FontAgent Pro and Suitcase Fusion had the same features as FontExplorer and since they cost the same, I already felt comfortable enough with what I knew. Researching for this article, I found a couple of nifty features from Suitcase Fusion that I would love to see ported to FontExplorer X: Find Similar Fonts by selecting any font in your collection, Suitcase Fusion does a glyph-level comparison of all fonts in your collection to locate similar fonts. And Web Page Previews, to test/preview fonts on sites before purchasing. Now, moving on to my comments from each of the two tested apps.

Fontcase

Developed by Bohemian Coding, Fontcase is a slick, pretty looking, functional and intuitive Font Management. However, I found that with a overly large and extensive font collection it will become slugish. It is indeed the iTunes for Font Management. It displays a preview of your activated and deactivated fonts, like iTunes would do with a cover. You can Tag fonts, group them in collections, smart folders and sort them by languages. When an applications needs a font that’s inactive, FontCase can activate it for you, keeping track which fonts were auto-activated and it will deactivate those when you quit Fontcase. There’s an option (for InDesign only though) to deactivate those fonts when closing documents. You can compare fonts not only with sample text, but complete paragraphs. Also, you can share (via Bonjour) your font collection to other macs in your household or office, making it easier to work as a team. But this is not just plain sharing, it’s preview and download fonts from shared libraries. you don’t need a server since it’s already built in. You can password protect it, share just select collections, control if you allow font downloads from others and look for shared libraries (as you would in iTunes).  You can also look for duplicate fonts and make beautiful print outs of your fonts (previews and metadata). One thing that it does not have though, it’s a built in font store. Some other functions like Maintenance, are run through plug-ins (available at the plug-in page) made from both Bohemian Coding and other font case users. This application has much room to grow, and for the amateur font user or a designer that doesn’t require many specifics on Font Management, this is their winning choice.

OS X 10.5 and greater are supported.

Pricing:

• Single user – $53 (Can be used by on e person on up to 5 Macs)
• Family pack – $87 (Can be used for up to 5 Macs or family members)
• Business pack – $251 (For up to 15 Macs or 15 people within the same company)

FontExplorer X Pro

Linotype (Europe and rest of the world) and Monotype Imaging (US) got together and gave life to FontExplorer X. When I launched it the first time after using Fontcase for a month, I felt right back at home. I had been using the free version for nearly two years, and became more than used to it, so yes, I was home. Not only this is serious Font Management, but you can use  folders, tags and smart sets to make it your own back yard. And like it says on the site, the software is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible – and I love it. Keeping up with the game, this app has also Print functionality, making it easy to print a detailed sample of the typefaces through templates (preformatted and customizable through drag and drop). One of my favorite features from the app is Auto-activation for InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop (also available QuarkXPress).  You also get control of how Font Explorer reacts when certain applications start up. For example, I can make a set to get active every time I start up Illustrator or InDesign. You have smart sets already created (under the Library Menu) that can help you on your every day design and management: System Fonts, System Collections (from Font Book), Last Imported and Conflicts. You can choose how to address those conflicts and get them out of the way, from duplicates, to fonts no longer in the Finder or Fonts with missing printer-font files. You also have an Activation Control center, that allows you to see all the application sets (mentioned before) as well as Font requests and Activations (Fonts activated Permanently, until quit or Log out). They also have a built in store that can keep track of your purchase history, favorites and a shopping cart. For font usability, you don’t have big paragraphs like in Fontcase, but you get an extensive selection of Preview Samples that you can change at will and customize on the go for a quick preview of single words or phrases. With careful importing handling and exporting options, you get a robust set of features from this app: for example, when importing a duplicate, FontExplorer asks if you want to keep the current font or the new one. And yoou can keep the Finder folder structure of your fonts. Me? I let the app make sense of them under it’s own folder. You can monitor fonts for incompatibility, duplicates and major activating, deactivating and exporting fonts. What would a mac app would be without backups? You can backup your configuration (and load if porting from another mac) and you can also backup your entire library. This backup includes the fonts, folder and smart set structures, labels, ratings and preferences. Another nice feature is that you can Clean and Organize your Fonts folder (and review those orphan fonts that always sneak around), Clean both System and Application Font Caches.

Supported Systems OS X  10.4.x, 10.5.x and 10.6.x

Pricing:

• FontExplorer X Pro, a $79 standalone font manager;
• FontExplorer X Server, which uses FontExplorer X Pro as a front-end client. For pricing, you must contact them.

Final Choice

My personal choice was FontExplorer. All around, this is the go-to app if you want to get into serious Font Management. It gave me all the tools I needed, peace of mind and amazing performance. I’m currently using it with CS4 and they plugins are already updated to CS5.

Final advice: Test run them all. You’ll know after a couple of weeks if it’s the right app for you. I did my research and figured that these two are what I wanted to try out. Don’t be afraid of test them all, just don’t do it at once– make sure to install and uninstall the apps as directed and always always backup your font collection before any trial version testing.

On a quick side note and bonus fact, @Vonster pointed out that @Hicksdesign created the Font Explorer brand icons. You can see more of the project here.

Hello all! It’s been a while since I posted something, but I’ve been a busy bee. For Helga and I, October is the kick off of the holiday seasons… We decided we wanted to modify our Foodies site to look more like Halloween!

We wanted to incorporate Halloween treats: skulls, bats, witches.. the works. I did the theme a bit darker and with oranges, greens, bats and an owl. It all took me about 2 afternoons and a few cups of coffee… I loved it!

This theme will be up all of October, then it’s a few weeks until Holiday season… So expect another theme change for December!

Jake is getting back into Freelancing business to (hopefully soon) do that full time. We upgraded all his services… And when he said that Prepressology needed a new look… I jumped into it! I fired up MAMP and started working locally.

The first thing I did when approaching this project was to see his (and his business needs), bringing the blog up to the new social media standards. Working together was key. I wanted to give it a prepress look, and took the idea from the menu bar on the color blocks. Here was my first suggestion for one of the accent dividers in between posts:

After I showed that to Jake on the preview for the site, he suggested I do it on CMYK order:

Looked better, but still something was off.  We decided to use the color registration marks with 80%-100%-20% opacity for each color, and we got our winning combination! Looks so much smoother and well thought of.

After that, we wanted to make a custom Gravatar for those who don’t have one set up for themselves. We’re both fans an app called PressCheck, and they have some out of registration marks on the splash screen. We were inspired about that and put together the avatar for the site.

My next step was to download the Database locally so I could check up all the posts, links and content on the new template. It was crazy I tell you. Jake has been blogging since August 2005, and there was something funky with the DB. It was 86.0 MB- just the wp_coments was up to 64MB. I seeked out help from the wiseman (a.k.a Nico Pin from Snowy Day Design) and he suggested export and download everything on the data base but the comments and then a second round with just the comments. Finally it worked that way and I got to test it locally.

Then time of truth: Jake still was using WP2.1. With Jake, we decided to uninstall everything and start from scratch. I imported the clean and fresh DB (the problem was on how spam was handled), installed WP, Plugins and the theme. Then… The final result:

Home

Blog Post

I added the RT button, Facebook likes for each post, as well as links to his Twitter, Facebook and Flickr Pages. We still need to fix some little things here and there, but overall the look for the site is pretty much it. Over the next few weeks, we’ll add a portfolio section to the site to showcase all his work.

I hope you like Prepressology‘s new look, I had a blast working on the site!