Smashing Magazine's Free Fonts Of The Month.

They definitely have some winners in this latest edition, my favorite is M+ Outline. I love the lowercase g in the regular set. It's like a little g bulldog with the pug-nose on the lip.

My favorite music video of 2007:

This Carnegie Mellon Professor is dying of pancreatic cancer in 6 months (at the time of the video). I just felt his outlook on life was worth viewing and I'd like to share it.

I already figured out most of what he's talking about, including the most applicable to graphic design (and probably everything) "don't complain, work harder" precept. So I guess this is the best video to watch after you've had a bad day.

Have you heard about Adobe's new Air software/platform thingy? I've known about it for awhile but the gist of it is you can build rich internet applications for the desktop. So the advantages of that are that it can make a web programmer a desktop application developer lickety-split! Cross-platform to boot as well!

For me, I can see graphic designers using this technology in a myriad of ways. Some in self-promotion but also some for creative expression.

Check out the website:
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Every once in awhile, a font comes along that sort of catches my eye and I register it in my consciousness. With Gotham, I first noticed it in magazines and then it quickly spread to design pieces (from clients and annuals) and finally through pop culture. With Barack Obama, I suppose Gotham is at it's height of popularity since he's using it in his tag line.

This font is visually appealing to me in most weights with the normal and condensed cuts being my favorite. It's simply very legible but has incredible personality and a understated elegance to it.

Here's a interesting link from the people who did the Helvetica Film that came out last year:
http://www.helveticafilm.com/blog/2008/02/19/a-font-we-can-believe-in/

You can find it's page here:
http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100008

Time Management #1: Why You Need to be Organised to be Creative by Mark McGuinness

Here's a nice article on how creative professionals can better manage their time. I myself firmly believe in the "routine" principle Mark harps on. Being the best I can be during working hours is important so I make sure I am physically and mentally prepared to take on the day as the article suggests.

Yes, there are always moments of occasional preoccupation (the 15 inning Yankees ALCS Aaron Boone game that ended 3 in the morning comes to mind) with other matters but I find that the overall method is successful... as well as practical.

Something I do during the middle of the day is to close out all my software programs and restart the program and work from a blank slate again. I find that having to re-open everything again re-focuses me and leaves me better organized (as well as helps the computer itself). This may not work for anybody but me but I think it's worth it if others find ways to help themselves out with issues of organization.

Image Replacement Using CSS

http://www.mezzoblue.com/tests/revised-image-replacement/

One word. GENIUS!

The gist of it is that inside a div, you hide text between span tags and put a background image on the div span attribute. Then you have a neat little way of having a special header on your web page that you can format to perfection in p'shop. Best part about it is that it's perfectly valid code that can be read by search engines, people with custom browser styles, and is accessible for screen readers!

For me, I like clean code and design and do not like to get too complicated for little design details that may or may not be worth the hassle. Well... this is a pretty clean way to add some detail if desired and not really impact the overall code or design.

Link also has the full rundown of other techniques out there!

My initial decision of using Blogger was a wrong one. I knew I was going to change after the first few posts so I took a vacation until I could transition it to its new home.

Google really messed up with this one for more advanced users like myself seeking a blog manager. They set up a different more simple WYSISWYG interface and it spits out ugly, difficult code that just made me want to projectile vomit. Their decision may attract a broader range of beginning bloggers but I no longer like it.

So I decided to go back to Movable Type CMS system that I used before I came to California. My so-called "Photo Blog". MT is OK, they have their own issues but they appeal to me much more than Blogger and have much more customizable options. Obviously it also allows me to keep my entire site under my jacktse.com domain umbrella.

So this is it! Bookmark this baby up and subscribe to the RSS feed:
http://www.jacktse.com/blog/atom.xml

You can think of what you see on the < a href="http://www.jacktse.com>jacktse.com as a skeleton that I will be fleshing out in the near future. I designed this layout so that it would work the way I want to but I'm finalizing my final ideas so that they do "engage, inspire, enchant and etc etc" as I see fit as per my creative prerogative.

• hire me: that map is not working for me aesthetically yet.
• jacktse.com blue "block" will have a flash graphic within it
• portfolio will be a DHTML solution, probably litebox
• this blog layout should perhaps have the normal jacktse.com navigation affixed to the left

I'm putting this on the fast track, so hopefully by the end of next weekend..

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/14577/Why-I-Will-Probably-Never-Buy-Another-Mac/page1/

I wanted to touch on this for just sec... Found this link to a guy who wrote a article: "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac". This is interesting to me because I do enjoy using Apple products and I wondered what his beef is.

To sum up his article:
• Doesn't like the tone of the Apple community
• Doesn't like Apple's marketing
• Doesn't like Apple technology because the components are the same as Windows
• Doesn't like the price premium Apple puts on it's products
• Doesn't like the perception of Apple products to consumers

I respect his opinion because he has actually owned Apple products before. However in the article he barely mentions anything about GUI, applications, usability and even much of his current preferred OS (Windows). He does hi-light many inconsequential issues like the mac cult and Apple marketing and comes off as looking a bit emotional about the subject though. So I think his article would be better if he gave specific reasons having to do with his actual productivity.

The two or three major computing platforms out there all have their pros and cons, if you're going to decide what tech to hang your hat on — choose the right one based on real features and technology. To me, Apple (and the community) carefully consider their product offerings a bit more and it comes across as superior.