Last night I read this long, but very interesting article. Basically it talks about the moral behind design, and how the designers (we) have to deal with it. I believe this is the first article I have read that talks about moral issues, etc. and I think it is very important that we take this particular issue very serious, because it is likely that you will encounter this type of situation. I also would like to use this opportunity to encourage you to subscribe to ideas-on-ideas feed (which is where I read this article).

To get you in the mood here is bit of it:

There are those such as Victoria’s Secret.
Their mailings have surpassed their more utilitarian role of solely
cataloguing product and have now become cultural artifacts. They are
noted regularly in media, and without question carry substantial brand
currency. It’s interesting to note the cost of these catalogs to the
environment. Victoria Secret mails approximately one million of them a
day, of which almost all printed on virgin fiber.

Our endangered forests are being compromised to sell shiny underwear.
I have to wonder about the many creative people work on these
catalogues. We can suppose that a small army of creatives style them,
take the photos, design the catalogues, and subsequently coordinate all
of their related marketing. To learn more, and enjoy some smart
activism around the issue, visit the Victoria’s Dirty Secret website.

Read the complete article

technorati tags:web, design, moral

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Adobe has just released an updated version of its beta program Lightroom. Download it here (free adobe account required.)

Taken from the readme file, here is the list of the bugs fixed.

• There was an issue where a user could not edit a metadata field after editing it for another picture which has been fixed.
• The preview cache was using wrong relative path.
• There were a couple fixes in the database update feature, fixing a few situations where the database would not update properly. Also, upgraded libraries would not always
  allow images to be moved between shoots.
• There was an problem selecting an existing folder for web galleries. The web gallery would move all images previously in the folder to the trash silently. This has been
  fixed. All contents of directory where a web gallery is saved are sent to the trash with no warning. Also in web, large exported galleries will now have all the images
  expected.
• The app had a couple unexpected failures canceling dialogs. Selecting cancel on the Enter Password dialog now reliably works, as does selecting cancel in Page Setup.
• The shoot selection should no longer change unexpectedly.
• The “Additional External Editor” preference and the “Edit in Photoshop” preference are now separate.
• If you had mixed managed photos and by reference files, the paths of by reference files would be changed when changing the location of the managed folder.
• Images exported with Constrain Pixels would produce the wrong result for portrait-oriented images .
• There are some changes in the relationship between Luminance and Saturation.

Media Temple (where I host my website) have just launch a new look of their website and also added tons of features! If you are a media temple customer I suggest you stop doing everything and go check them out!!

technorati tags:mediatemple, hosting, web, design

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I couple of days ago I discovered the option to try the new yahoo mail, and I have to say that even though it’s in beta it works pretty good showing improvements on almost every aspect, and some of them are pretty impressive.

I’m not going to do a compare it with Gmail for example, and for what I’ve seen so far yahoo mail looks a bit better (at least for me). It’s going to be a quick overview of the things I found useful in my everyday life using yahoo mail. Continue reading ‘Yahoo Mail (beta)’

An article from A List Apart explaining a way of detecting your visitors initial font size setting, Read Text-Resize Detections here.

technorati tags:font, resizing, alistapart, web, design

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