Disqus - Latest Comments for Jeremy Fuksa

Re: What do you look for in a blog? (tiny rant follows)

Jeremy Fuksa — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:23:41 -0000

Thanks for the comments so far everyone, and thanks for the compliment Josh!

Abel, I am still in the process of tweaking ths design of this blog whenever I have a little spare time. Since none of my posts have ever really gotten this many comments, I truthfully wasn’t aware of the difficulty in reading multiple comments. That’s an issue I’ll tackle very soon... as in right now.

Re: One week with my Treo 650

Jeremy Fuksa — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 16:58:24 -0000

I’d be interested to know what carrier you use. I’ve heard that Cingular’s Treo 650s are less stable (at least before the update that came out a week or two ago) than the Sprint Treo, which is what I have.

So far, it’s been great, and it has to be better than my Treo 300, which would crash every time I missed a call and didn’t dismiss the dialog box within a given timeframe.

Re: The weary update

Jeremy Fuksa — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:16:00 -0000

Mmmm hmm… we haven’t exactly helped each other very much up to this point! :) Good idea though, we just need to follow through.

Re: Now I can finally “Think Different”

Jeremy Fuksa — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:37:21 -0000

Well, I really don’t plan on drinking the Apple Kool-Aid and diving into Mac zealotry, but I will say that so far my experience has been pretty impressive… especially on that first day at work when upgrading my old PC to Adobe CS2 for its new owner necessitated a full day for troubleshooting and eventually a hard drive format to get the upgrade to actually happen. :)

Re: Now I can finally “Think Different”

Jeremy Fuksa — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:32:07 -0000

Thanks guys! I’ll give it a shot. Of course, there’s always the Virtual PC route on this one if all else fails.

Re: More on bad design

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:24:20 -0000

In hindsight, I should actually have added more context into why this site has not been setting with me well. The site itself is not so much where I have my beef as how the site was borne from pious attitudes from people who take themselves too seriously.

The Bad Design Kills site was brought to my attention after scanning through this thread on the HOW Design Forums . Over the course of this thread the fellow responsible for baddesignkills.com takes (in my opinion, of course) a holier-than-thou approach that really gets me.

The aforementioned thread deals with the topic of creative plagiarism in logo design. I certainly do not endorse plagiarism in any form, and some of the logo examples Mr. Glitschka gave outraged me, but for totally different reasons than what I felt spawned the creation of his site. I was outgraged by the laziness of the plagiarizers and their inability to put forth their own effort. The proprietor of baddesignkills.com actually seems more incensed about the "craptacular rip-off" quality of the work, and the end feeling I get is that overall he feels that low-budget design is the equivalent of publicly taking a dump on a street corner. Jeez… after reading a few pages worth of his posts, I felt like creating affordably priced design for the masses is tantamaount to selling nuclear secrets to Iran!

My feeling about the thread that started my whole rant about this is twofold.

First, I applaud those who offer reasonably priced/decent quality design to small business and those who cannot afford the high prices that many of us (myself included on a number of occasions) consistently charge. Now, I'm not saying that you should give your services away unnecessarily, since that would definitely contradict my post entitled I could get an art student to do it for $35 and a six pack... never undercut your own worth. But, given the discovery of the "multi-lingual" aspect of the visual language, can we find ways to refine different dialects of the lower end of the visual language? Certainly. And, that's how I feel we gain ground and educate those who know no better... not by putting up a web site that basically calls those who create bad design stupid. That doesn't help matters.

Secondly, Pablo Picasso supposedly said "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Cameron Moll expanded the idea to include the world of design in his article Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal. We see tons of examples every day where designers steal from one another, some far less successfully than others. That overused grafitti/paint drip motif you see on nearly everything designed in the past couple of years? Yep... stolen one from another over and over and over again. Same thing with that weird deer head design motif from a year or two ago. Trends come and take hold because of creative stealing. Had these people accused of plagiarizing in that thread been a little better at adapting Picasso's quote to the design world (level 3 of Moll's article), they would have not only saved themselves from peer ridicule and potential legal action, they would have also taken inspiration from one thing, morphed it significantly to suit their needs and moved the world of design forward. Because, after all, that's what design is to me... the constant refining of our visual language to evolve it ever forward, no matter what common denominator you are speaking to.

Anyway... I'm rambling into a topic for another post.

So, I guess the question is… do I take baddesignkills.com seriously? No. Bad design does not kill just as good design does not necessarily save lives, cure cancer, reduce unemployment, etc. C'mon... we're just making pretty pictures here, people. Each of us should easily be able to distinguish between the craft of our design (i.e. general commercial design) and the craft of our art, should we choose to create any on our own time.

On an semi-unrelated note, Mr. Glitschka's illustrative work is excellent, and I would invite him to comment on this site to perhaps help me see that I may have misread the angle he was taking, or perhaps to better explain his position if indeed I do understand it correctly.

I am passionate about design and what I do, but if I ever take myself too seriously, PLEASE, someone bludgeon me with hard salami.

Re: More on bad design

Jeremy Fuksa — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 15:31:37 -0000

Well, as I said above, never undercut your own worth. I’m certainly not advocating creating cheap art for it’s own sake. But, one can also hopefully see that there is a need to offer affordable design alternatives to those who cannot afford more. When small businesses and other tightly budgeted organizations out there are educated on their options for receiving decent design product at a decent price, only then will they shut down Microsoft Publisher and stop churning out dreck on their own.

Re: Facelift in progress

Jeremy Fuksa — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 15:35:31 -0000

Since the new design has (mostly) been up for a week, I’m glad to see you like the new design. :)

As for animations, I’ll reserve them for my other sites, such as Tiki Bar: The Animated Series which is incidentally for an animated cartoon I am creating.

Re: Ooooh… naughty Flock! Naughty, naughty!

Jeremy Fuksa — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 10:52:55 -0000

Or, better yet, just not collect bookmarks based on visit frequency! :)

I have tons of sites that I go to on a regular basis that I have no desire to bookmark. I usually reserve bookmarks for sites that I won’t remember. But, of course, by keeping your favorite frequent bookmarks private sort of defeats the social nature of del.icio.us. However, for cases such as what I illustrated in the main post, there’s plenty of good reason to be able to turn of automatic del.icio.us posting in the preferences.

Thanks for the design compliment! I thought this was a little more subdued design. The lime green was fun, but not conducive for long term reading… and after all, I want people to stick on the site! :)

Re: Social Music

Jeremy Fuksa — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:29:32 -0000

True, I hadn’t even put Bluetooth pairing into the equation.

And, although my ASCAP/BMI fee statement is probably quite far fetched now that I look at it, it’s still some way for the RIAA to put a bite on the idea of music sharing in this manner.

Here’s one other idea (although still not the most feasible)... what if the iPods had FM transceivers in them, and you received an audiovisual alert when another iPod was broadcasting within your vicinity. You’d receive the frequency on which the stream was being broadcast coupled with track/station info.

Re: Awful album art

Jeremy Fuksa — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:28:37 -0000

Well, brave asdf, this has been covered before. Not only that, the reasons why I “keep sending crap like this to MXNA” are clearly stated in the left column under “What’s the deal?” (if you cared to read it before blindly criticizing me).

However, I will point you to my post entitled What do you look for in a blog?. You might find some of the comments interesting, especially the one from Mike Chambers, creator of MXNA:

Hi. As far as MXNA is concerned, you can post whatever you want. Because of Smart Categories at MXNA, readers can easily filter out off topic posts. More info here:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/archives/2005/04/filtering_out_t.cfm

So, I’m really getting a bit tired of folks like yourself coming on and taking pot shots like this when you can easily filter my posts, or better yet, just not click on the links! Apparently there are people who read MXNA who do enjoy this site, and I won’t be changing just because you want more Coldfusion tips.

Re: Awful album art

Jeremy Fuksa — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:50:14 -0000

Thanks stef, I won’t bother. Thanks for reading!

Re: Tiki Bar TV

Jeremy Fuksa — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 10:52:07 -0000

It looks like it was under Macromedia on DOUG because this blog is aggregated by the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA), which apparently DOUG uses to glean some of its latest posts. Some people do find it confusing that this blog is aggregated by Macromedia, because it usually focuses on design/creativity issues rather than Macromedia-specific technology – although it focuses on that too from time to time.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited Tiki Central. I need to drop back in soon!

Re: Design education = cultural study

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 10:39:13 -0000

Definitely, but to clarify, it’s really more than modern design that they study, it’s more accurately modern trends that they study.

Modern design as a philosophy is timeless… Those who study modern design are more familiar with names like Le Corbusier, Eames, Aarnio, and van der Rohe than they are of today’s design contemporaries. However, as in my original point, one must know them just as well as experience design innovators, local grafitti artists, DJs, sculptors, cartoonists, packaging designers, and what not in order to truly be educated about how to make their designs fit the culture and visual lingua franca in which they are working.

Re: AT&T bids farewell to Saul Bass icon

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:50:07 -0000

I read about their decision to abolish the Cingular brand after posting this today, and I also have to wonder what their marketing team is smoking. To me, the worst part about the whole thing is that they’re not assimilating the Cingular brand entirely. Apparently, there will still be some markets that SBC will continue to sell wireless services under the Cingular name. So, why (especially given the amount of money and effort used to fold AT&T Wireless into the Cingular brand) would they backtrack and reverse all this work only partially? Either you’re Cingular or you’re AT&T Wireless. Make up your mind!

As an aside, their service doesn’t matter to me much anyway, as my time as a Cingular customer was some of the worst in my cellular/wireless history.

And incidentally, I can’t decide whether I like the new logo or not. Lots of things about it make me not want to like it, but the more I think about it in terms of the rationale, it’s at least starting to make sense, even though I think some of the points of the rationale are weak at best.

Re: Roland Is God

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:01:31 -0000

Hey, glad to see the comment!

I’m excited to hear that he’s cool with you continuing the project. It’s very entertaining as well as inspiring. I kind of have a “WWRD” mentality when I critique my own work now. Let us know when more footage makes it online!

Re: Roland Is God

Jeremy Fuksa — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:02:31 -0000

I’d love to meet the guy.

Re: Roland Is God

Jeremy Fuksa — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 18:42:53 -0000

I had never really assumed that these videos totally encapsulated the Roland Young experience.

And honestly, like I mentioned above, had I only had someone that harsh ripping me up, the criticisms I face in my daily design work would be nothing. It’s too bad to hear that people have gone crazy or whatever, but perhaps that just means that maybe – just maybe – they weren’t made for the world of design.

There are a lot of supreme assholes in the advertising and design world. I should know, I've worked for and with quite a few of them. If there's someone out there who can teach you how to deal with that kind of bullshit in addition to teaching you how to design effectively, so much the better.

Re: Roland Is God

Jeremy Fuksa — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:50:43 -0000

Your post is exactly why I love this guy. Obviously, he makes you form a passionate opinion about him, love or hate. You’ll remember him (and what he put you through) forever and ever. That’s far better than the scores of generic professors that I don’t even remember.

The only professors I gained any real knowledge from are the ones I remember. So chances are, even if you think he’s a jerkoff, you’re going to damn well remember what you learned from him.

Re: Do not hit a teal minivan with gang bangers inside

Jeremy Fuksa — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:37:40 -0000

Yeah… not bad!

Re: Scanner Photography Project

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 19:24:42 -0000

Well, the link I mentioned above has a pretty comprehensive breakdown of how they built their cameras. I haven’t had the chance to try to put one together yet, so I can’t offer any personal advice.

Re: On to a new creative home…

Jeremy Fuksa — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 01:17:21 -0000

OK… that’s crazy! I had noticed a link off your site on my logs and looked around. Such a small ass world.

Wow, guess I’ll see you Monday. Awesome!

Re: Hunt For The Buried Volvo

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 20:11:52 -0000

Alright…

Good luck to you :)

Re: On to a new creative home…

Jeremy Fuksa — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 20:12:53 -0000

Thanks!
I’m on the second floor everyone. Come say hey.

Re: Eichler Homes

Jeremy Fuksa — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 13:31:35 -0000

Yes! That is very helpful. Seems that these Drummond homes are as in short supply as a good Eichler in CA. However, I did see that there was a developer who did a home last year based off these ideas, so at least now that gives me someone to contact when I’m in the market.