Digital Media Blog
Content from the Digital Media Middle East Magazine.
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August, 2009
Social Networking as business strategy
Corporations increasingly see social media as key communication and marketing tools. We want to look at today’s most popular social networking platforms and see how creative professionals can benefit from participating.
Facebook is as of 2009 the most visited social networking platform worldwide. I have joined the club about two years ago, after resisting for quite some time. In the end I received so many invitations that I felt like I was missing out on something and joined eventually. I spent hours and hours on it to catch up with old classmates I haven’t seen in ages, caught up on the latest gossip and made some interesting business acquaintances. But after some time the enthusiasm decreased and I am left with the thought that Facebook’s strongest attraction is only the number of members. Like so many other people, I have been put off a little lately by spam applications, zombie invitations and the fact that people who have nothing to say do it anyway.
The question how useful Facebook really is at the end of the day for your business purposes is questionable? At first I found it quite convenient to have friends and business contacts all under one roof. A year and 1 million status updates later, I have doubts. Especially, if I think about how drastically my opinion and trust in certain colleagues and business contacts has changed. Nevertheless, Facebook is still a great way to stay or get in touch. It’s easy to set up a page, event or group about your company or website and share it a vast amount of people.
MySpace
MySpace is famous for its ugly user pages, its culture of connecting to thousands of your “closest friends” and its reputation as “the muso platform”. Personally I’m not a fan of MySpace, in fact I hate it with great passion. And yet every time I write about social media platforms it slips in as the site artists, especially music-related, need to be on. I also find myself in the same dilemma every time I do so because I can’t give you relevant arguments. The tools MySpace offers to musicians are far better elsewhere, there is very little conceptional thinking and organization behind most profiles and I have witnessed very few productive and relevant conversations so far. However, it does have the numbers once again. With a population of over 100 million people and about 810 million visits every month it still is THE online community for music interested people, whether you like it or not.
The youngest of the “in platforms” is also the simplest. Once you have joined the club you will get one tool: a text box that holds a maximum of 140 characters with the question “What are you doing?”. Now unless you are David Copperfield or a mighty dragon warrior please don’t answer the question! I honestly doubt that anyone has the slightest urge to know what flavor your tea has this morning, when you take a nap, not even who you are meeting for lunch (unless it is Brad Pitt). The most interesting twitterers I have come across so far are the ones who ask questions, post links to interesting websites or videos or offer some tips and advice. For creatives I like the “brainstorming touch” twitter has. Don’t go there and expect to be mentally stimulated or challenged, 140 characters hopefully won’t do that for you. But I know many colleagues who get on twitter if they are stuck with a project and come back with plenty of creative ideas.
Yes I said Linked in! I know many creative people argue that it is too business minded and not creative enough but that’s not the point. It is an excellent tool for research, building an online portfolio black on white and meeting like-minded people from similar industries.
To give you a quick example, when I did some research for this article I posted the question “How useful do you find Facebook/LinkedIn “ in 3 relevant groups on Facebook and 3 on LinkedIn. Within 24 hours I had 18 serious and very helpful replies on LinkedIn and 1 on Facebook, completely ignoring the question and asking me to look at his portfolio instead.
I initially found LinkedIn quite restrictive because you have to actually be somehow related to a person you want to connect with. Either you belong to the same group, get introduced through one of your contacts or know the person’s email address. But after using it for a while I started to appreciate that fact, because it is very likely that people actually know their entire network and have “real-life” relationships with them, which makes it a whole lot more relevant. You might find that 70 connections on LinkedIn might do more for your professional career than 7,000 on MySpace.
To give you some insights from other creative professionals, here are some of the answers I received in the Question/Answer section of LinkedIn:
I really appreciate LinkedIn for this very purpose. Being a self-employed freelance professional can lead to major isolation. But LinkedIn groups provide an excellent forum where I can get answers to questions, network with other professionals in my field, and pick up advice about relevant topics like business, and even design related specifics.
Joel Glovier, Freelance Design / Consulting ProfessionalNetworks like this are a necessary evil for artists. We tend to cringe at this side of the business because it doesn't always translate our abilities. LinkedIn is not a visual/portfolio network like deviantART (as Damian wrote), it looks at your skill set from the business world's point of view. This can be a major conflict for art professionals, who show their skills through their work. However, at some point, every professional is evaluated based on what they look like "on paper." Resume's come before the portfolio.
Natalie Carlson, Independent Graphic and Web DesignerI love using LinkedIn to connect with fellow marketers and potential clients. It's brought me quite a few invaluable opportunities. I look to LinkedIn for most of my leads.
Julie Tyios, Online Marketing Consultant
Essential for creative professionals
DeviantART
DeviantArt is with over 8.5 Million active users one of the largest art communities in the world. It covers a variety of art forms, including traditional, digital, photographic, craft, clothing, manga and even jig saw puzzles. The site allows users to showcase and sell their art in addition to the common social media features such as chat, forum, profiling and journals. You will also find excellent tutorials on all kinds of art forms on the site. Check it out at www.deviantart.com
The Behance Network
The Behance Network offers a place to showcase your work to potential clients and connect with other creatives. Users can share projects through “circles” and collaborate on projects in their own sub-network of which each has its own message board and rating system. Behance have done a great job in promoting the platform to potential clients. The site has reached traffic of over 6 million page views per months. More at www.behance.net.
Dubai Lime
Dubai Lime is a small online community for creatives, mainly musicians, in the Middle East. Check out www.dubailime.com or www.dubaibands.com
TasmeemME
A just recently launched online community for creative talent in the Middle East. Still very small but might be worth keeping an eye on. Visit www.tasmeemme.com
July, 2009
Google Wave
What is it?
At last weeks’ Google I/O conference in San Francisco the search engine giant revealed its latest toy – Google Wave. Developed by brothers Lars
and Jens Rasmussen (the original creators of Google Maps)
and Stephanie Hannon, who have been secretly working on the project out of Google’s Sydney offices for the past 2 years. The projects code name Walkabout, which is an Australian aboriginal tradition for taking a journey to trace the songlines that their ancestors took and learn the world anew, is very appropriate for the world’s most innovative communications and collaborations tool since the invention of the internet. Or as Lars Rasmussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”
Functionality and Features
Email and instant messaging all in one
Google wave not only erases the distinction between email and instant messaging but let’s us look at online communication from a whole new angle.
Let’s assume you have a message from your work colleague. If both of you are currently online you can simply continue the conversation below the message as you are used to from instant messaging, with one major difference. You don’t have to wait until the other hits send to get to read the message. Google Wave is all about real-time and you can see each letter as the other types them in. Considering how much time we all spend waiting on a chat partner to hit enter, this might be an interesting feature and speed up conversations. A small problem, if you are a bad speller and constantly have to re-write words, but in that case you can simply turn the real time feature off and swap to instant messaging as we know it.
In case your colleague isn’t online he/she will receive the message as she would receive an email also with a nice tweak which allows him/her to add her reply right below the message, without having to open a new window as we have to with current email applications. Also responding to particular parts of the message has become clearer.
If we now want to add a third person to our conversation we can do that anytime. To help people joining conversations at a later stage, Google Wave has a playback feature, which will replay the exact order of the appearance of each message.
Messages can include photos, video and audio, which can be simply added via drag and drop. All participants of the Wave can collaborate to change titles of pictures or videos. Also text content can be edited in wiki-style by anyone participating in the conversation. Each comment is outlined and tagged with the users individual color to make complex conversations relatively clear.
Should you want to send a message privately to one participant of a multi-person wave, you can easily break off a private conversation.
Extensions
Google developers were extraordinarily original with naming the extensions. Let’s see what Bloggy, Spelly, Linky and their brothers can do.
Bloggy – you might have guessed, converts Waves into blogs. People join the conversation by commenting on the blog.
Spelly is a great feature which not only looks through a dictionary for spelling (which is what “normal” spell check does) but also looks for context in your sentence.
Linky the link recognition engine that is not only smart enough to recognize a link but also whether the link is a youtube video, a photo or audio file and gives you the option to embed the target into the Wave.
Polly lets you incorporate polls into a wave.
Twave brings in tweets from your stream and lets you respond from within Wave.
Buggy lets you interact with bug tracking software and administer bugs
Searchy lets you perform a google search and integrate the content straight away
Interactive Games Developers can build interactive online games which can be played in real-time.
Translate in real time
An amazing real-time translation engine that translates the text as you type.
Wave - The Developer platform
Google Wave is a HTML 5 app and was built on Google’s Web Toolkit with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to build new extensions and embed waves into other web services. Google has opened the Google Wave only for developers as of now and is hoping to encourage them to adopt their protocol and wants other providers to adopt Wave as a new fundamental service on the net. “We want it to be an open system like email. We want other services to build Wave services even in competition with Google,” said Lars Rasmussen. Further the team explained that the product is still basically in its infancy and it is up to the independent developers in which direction Wave will transform and how big and useful it will get in the future.
We think it is definitely something to keep an eye on. The first phase is supposed to be available later on this year.
June, 2009
Do we really need another version of Illustrator?
Oh yes we do!
It’s funny how I always think I’m going to skip the next upgrade of Adobe’s Creative Suite because there really can’t be many new features and improvements that I can’t live (or work) without. And every time again, I see something where I go: “…ah, exactly this is it! This has always annoyed me in previous versions! I need to have it!” Well, Adobe has done it once again.
Enriched Workspace tools
Artboards
One thing that has frustrated me about Illustrator was its inability to work on multiple pages. Every time I had to design a double-sided business card I couldn’t help but gritting my teeth, just slightly. Anyone who has ever worked with me knows that I love efficiency, and there simply was no optimal way to do a double-sided document in Illustrator. I’m not a big fan of the crop tool when it comes to print file preparation and my other option of creating two separate files, I always found very awkward. Especially if you have clients who realize 5 minutes before everything is due to go to print that they gave you the wrong phone number to put on and you end up having to open two files again. For this exact reason, I gave up on Illustrator several years ago and started using InDesign for projects with multiple pages. But guess what? Illustrator finally fixed it and the solution is called multiple artboards!
In Illustrator CS4 you can create up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. They can overlap each other, appear side-by-side, or be stacked on top of each other. Furthermore, you can place multiple Illustrator documents into applications such as Photoshop, InDesign and Flash, save and export them in several formats and print artboards together as well as independently, which can be an enormous time saver.
Tabbed document windows, Document Arrangement panel
As already discussed in last issue’s Photoshop CS4 review, also Illustrator CS4 has introduced the Tabbed Document View and Document Arrange Panel, which allows you to display multiple documents nice and neatly arranged side by side. For me this feature helped drastically clean up my workspace and I love how simple it is now to arrange my documents on the screen.
Practical Smart Guides and Object Alignment
Smart guides have finally become more refined in CS4. Being used to the way objects snap to guides as well as in Photoshop and InDesign, I always found myself disappointed when I tried it in Illustrator and it didn’t work. Another feature that I found very useful were the little pop-ups with alignment and measurement information, that appear when moving or transforming objects.
CS4 provides you with quick access to the key alignment option through the Align and Control panel and let you specify Key Objects, which are objects that you want other objects to align with.
The Blob Brush
The intelligent Blob Brush is perhaps the most innovative feature in CS4. I have always found it quite odd that a program called Illustrator is actually not so good to do illustrations and many professional artists preferred to work in Photoshop or Painter because these programs allow for more creativity. The pressure-sensitive calligraphic brush doesn’t work with Live Paint and anchor points can be quite irritating. These issues have been resolved with the Blob Brush as each pressure-sensitive stroke can be filled with Live Paint, as well as the Eraser Tool. The “intelligent” part of the brush comes into game when you intersect a stroke of the same color, it will merge like-colored objects together. Use the bracket keys to adjust the size of the brush and when using a Wacom tablet, you can use the eraser of the pen by simply flipping your pen.
Gradients and Transparency
Gradients and their past lack of transparencies were another feature that always made me want to work in Photoshop, whenever I was in Illustrator. CS4 finally gives you the option to assign opacity to any color stop in a gradient. CS4 also has a new feature, which gives you the option to adjust and edit gradients directly on the artboard, which makes life a lot easier and gives you more time to spend on being creative.
Little bits here and there…Clipping Masks, Separations Preview and more
In CS4, masked areas are finally truly hidden and only displayed while you are moving or transforming a masked object. To edit the mask double-click the object to open it in isolation mode, where you can edit the mask independently of all other objects.
The Separations Preview panel lets you now preview single channels before printing, which is great and will help a lot avoiding color output errors and unwanted overprinting.
The Appearance Panel doesn’t look very exciting at first, but once you start using it you realize how much smoother your workflow gets. No more jumping from the Color Panel to the Swatch Panel to the stroke panel and back.
The Enriched Graphic Styles Panel provides you with a quick and easy way to apply styles to objects and gives you a preview on the artboard. I also love the fact that effects- only elements now display the outlines of the object on which the style was created.
All in all Illustrator CS4 has many nice new features and improved tools. For me personally the new artboard tool and gradients with transparency were such significant changes that it was reason enough to upgrade to CS4. I can also imagine that illustrators and animators love the new blob brush and will start using Illustrator more again. What I liked best about this upgrade is the fact that all new features and improvements are relevant. No extraordinarily “cool” features that you only end up using once a month, just real useful basic improvements that will make life a lot easier.