Being a graphic designer (slash) web designer (slash) creative head (slash) mac nerd (slash) … requires a good knowledge of the own setup. But what does this mean: a setup? The question isn’t which kind of machine you are sitting on. Our daily business is powered by applications, which help us keeping the work flow. We are probably searching once a month for the latest software, but this can’t be the goal. Why searching for a change, when the current things work well? Because we are afraid to loose track of what is going on in the worldwide business.

I am that kind of guy. I am looking and searching and testing, but it takes so much of my time, that I am a little fed up with it. Isn’t there the perfect setup for a guy like me? I don’t think so. I will continue to look out and search and test apps, that could make my workflow faster.

On my last search though I was very happy to find The Setup, which is the reason, why I am writing all this stuff. Here you will find interviews with people of many professions, such as musicians, architects, hackers, photographers, designers, programmers, writers, developers and a robot builder. These individuals tell about their working-setup. It is quite interesting, because you’ll find software and techniques, you used to work with and apps, you don’t even think about using. It helped me to look at my setup from another perspective: it is good and it always was, because I decided myself what tools to use. There are some I haven’t even though of yet, but as it turns out, I don’t need them.

BumpTop Technologies published a message on their website, that a free version of the app will be available to May 7, 2010 for download. Then there will be no active download links left. I guess there will be major ideas at Google to use this technology. For instance they can tune up Google wave or just try to make their very own OS. It’s not a stupid idea, since we have seen them trying to make money with a mobile phone.

BumpTop was developed by computer scientist Anand Agarawala in context of his master thesis at University  of Toronto in 2006. He founded the company BumpTop Technologies on basis of this software.

Line-up:
Digital Heaven
The Jazoburbs
Lost Vedas

Melodyfarm — one day at the farm
date: Sunday, May 9, 2010 (all day long)
location: Sonnenseite @ Mauerpark, Berlin

»Auf Grund eines Fehlers waren in der Nacht vom Dienstag zum Mittwoch alle Mailadressen, die bei Facebook angegeben sind, für eine halbe Stunde lang sichtbar, so die Webseite gawker.com. Zahlreiche Personen hätten in dieser kurzen Zeit die Sicherheitslücke im Netz dokumentiert, so gawker.com weiter.

Auch Nicht-Freunde konnten private Mailadressen ansehen. In den Kommentaren bei gawker.com wird gewitzelt, dass die Viagra-Spam-Mafia jetzt 350 Millionen Adressen mehr hätte. Auch schreiben einige, dass sie “zum Glück” ihren Facebook-Account “vor einigen Tagen gelöscht” hätten.

Angesichts der Tatsache, dass Facebook-Chef Mark Zuckerberg offensiv für “Post Privacy” wirbt, also für ein Konzept, in dem es gar keine Privatsphäre mehr gibt, könnte diese Schlampigkeit übel aufstoßen. Zuckerberg könnte es egal sein, ob seine Mailadresse im Netz kursiert – ob aber alle Nutzer von Facebook das auch so sehen, darf bezweifelt werden.«

(Quelle: Die Tageszeitung)

Line-up:
Tweak of The Jazoburbs (10pm — 01am)
Digital Heaven (11pm)
Hairy Chest (01am)
Efalive of The Jazoburbs (01.30am — 04am)
Lost Vedas (04am — open end)

Melodyfarm — first harvest label party
date: Saturday, March 27, 2010
entry: 10pm
location: Der Club @ U-Bahnhof Schlesisches Tor, Berlin

»You really have to look closely to see how random and unrelated the objects […] actually are; yet they still match up perfectly.«

(ISO50 Blog — Link)

The playful installations and sculptures of Michael Johansson are impossible to categorize. He is a unique designer with great sensitivity for color and shape.

Johansson was born in Trollhättan 1975, took his MA at the Art Academy in Malmö 2005 where he still lives and works. The last years he has exhibited widely both within and outside of Sweden.

»For nearly 15 years, web designers had two frustrating choices when it came to type on the web: use one of the few “web safe” fonts preinstalled on major operating systems, or substitute text with images and Flash/JavaScript® hacks. Not anymore. Recent developments in web standards and font formats make it possible to render HTML text in typefaces other than the same old default fonts.«

(FontShop Newsletter — Link)

Web fonts have arrived at the market. In November 2009 the web magazine A List Apart wrote about implementing typography on the web with the use of the @font-face CSS property. This allows web designers to hook up any kind of font file with their websites. We are tired of using system fonts like Arial, Verdana or Georgia, and therefore this is a great leap forward. To learn more about using the @font-face CSS property please read the article at Nice Web Type.

Since there were just a few fonts optimized for the use on the web it wasn’t that fun at the beginning. But now it is finally time to suite up. FontShop released more than 30 web-optimized fonts including Clifford, Concon, Dax, DIN, Netto & the Meta Family. Now it’s up to us to increase the appeal of the medium web. I’ll be trying out the new technology on sgtfloydpepper.com within the next weeks.

(The web version of Erik Spiekermann’s Meta got its online debut on the Firefox 3.6 welcome page.)