bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Stages of Servitude

The 'toon in my "Gaping Void" widget today is too big a grin not to share before it scrolls. Every itinerant creative will enjoy. Click to see the strip full size: Three Stages of Slavery.

It only leaves us to muse what phases Four and Five might be?!

What's Cool in the Clouds: CrowdSpring

With this post I am adding a new tag, "Cool Tools Web2". Cloud computing (where the software lives up on a server and you log in to get things done online) is spawning a zillion cool apps that do cool things simply, typically for free. Much of it is quite entrepreneurial too, since the ranks of the self-employed are swelling now like a mushroom cloud.

Over the next two weeks, I will be doing a series of posts reviewing Web2 sites I have sampled and like. A few don't seem quite ready for prime time, but are worth a look anyway since early adapters often gain an edge. But my first in line has been around awhile, and seems to be a hotbed of creativity. This one is less a tool and more a community, but it is very Web2 in offering great connections quickly.

CrowdSpring.com is a collaborative of artists and designers who compete for commissions from clients. Want a logo? Post a request, say what you will pay, and dozens of artists may sketch suggestions within a day. Pick your favorite, pay the tab, and everyone wins, including the perusing web surfer like me who just enjoys browsing some really nice graphics.

Bits & Bytes from the Front of My Brain

Hot out of my InBox and my RSS feeds, some potentially interesting snips crossed my path this week:

• WallStats site is "reborn"
  Jess Bachman, one of my favorite info-artists, has changed the whole look of his blog and web site. Page and web designers will enjoy this posting with his before and after pics, along with  detail about the reasoning behind his new format. (Looks to me like he's been spending time around the work of Steve (Don't Make Me Think) Krug.) While you are at the WallStats site, you might also enjoy his latest, a lightening-fast-forward video replay of how he built this one poster frame by frame:
  
     Flowcapping: Golden Parachutes
     from Jess Bachman on Vimeo. 

• Speaking of favorite info-artists, Jessica Hagy (Indexed) made me laugh again today:

Genes or grades. Or grades of genes.
Debate away.

The Creative Monkey Scale

Did you happen to see this season of Top Chef? If so, perhaps you remember contestant Jeff, and what his opponent Carla said about the  "creative monkeys" he just couldn't tame.

Jeff was very capable in the kitchen and everyone seemed to enjoy him too. But when they teased him in the post-Finale episode, it was about how often he couldn't resist pulling out every trick with every ingredient on every plate. It didn't seem to be about ego or showing off; it came across like a kid in a candy store having too much fun to rein it in.

 

Unfocused might be the kindest way to put it. Except that wouldn't be entirely accurate, since Jeff was incredibly focused while working, and he had to be unusually good at multi-tasking to produce three variations or more on almost every theme. His problem, if it was one, was that he was the King of Complexity. He was rarely content producing one thing, unlike his opposite, Carla, the Queen of Simplicity, who was also very creative, but within a narrower range.

On my "Creative Monkey Scale" below, Jeff would clearly be a 5, while Carla would be a 1. If Jeff was challenged to a banana dish, he'd be hunting for every flavor and kind, from Chiquita to plantains, then presenting small bites of the experiments that worked out the best.  Carla, on the other side, would be looking for the one best banana in town, then making a great rendition of her single best banana dish.

History of the World in 400 Sheets

Thanks to a blogger over at OpenSalon.com who recently wrote a clever satircal post about how humans are the worst squatters in the universe (For Rent: One Planet), I was also tipped off to a fascinating little project posted online by students at the Worsley School in Canada.

I guess they have some long dark winters up there in northern Alberta, but whatever the impetus, the kids decided to plot the entire timeline of all Earth history on... {drumroll}.. a single roll of toilet paper.

Not surprisingly, it takes up to the last 10 squares to even get to the dinosaurs. Then it takes up to the very last millimeter (these are Canadians) to get to the first homo sapiens. And if you want to zoom in on the period covered by our own recorded history (give that a generous 10,000 years ago) you are now focused in on the last 1/10th of 1 millimeter of the last one of the 400 sheets. (Single or double ply was not specified.)

But this is one of those times, when pictures say more than words. Click photo at left to see the whole roll, then hit the link at the end of this paragraph to see pics of the whole project, including instructions for how to roll your own if you or some kids want to try this closer to home: Worsley TP TImeline.

Drooling At New Fonts

Back in the day when I had style-conscious clients with money to spend on good graphics, it was SOP to select s separate set of designer fonts for each project, whether the output was destined for web or print. Thus I have been poring over type catalogs for years. Nowadays, I get to drool more often than I get to purchase, but it doesn't stop me from style watching. If you watch font trends too, you may enjoy the "Best Fonts of 08" list over at MyFonts.com. This screenshot contains some of my personal faves (click on the image to see it full size.)

Tip o' The Week: Turn Your Data Into 'Info-Art'

Look at the graphic below and see what it seems to suggest before I tell you.

It's a screenshot from a chart that shows the most popular names for girl babies in Austria last year. But the point of my sharing it is not about Austria, or even baby names (and certainly not that my nom de plume is on it). I share it as a great little sample of 21st century "Info Art" in which words and numbers become something much more than the sum of their parts.

If you are familiar with "tag clouds" on blogs like mine, then you know without being told that the larger words have the most weight (in this case, popular with Austrian mothers of new baby girls). What you wouldn't know unless I filled in the blanks. is that it was made by uploading a spreadsheet of data to a free public site run by the Watson Reseach Center at IBM, where an online algorithim rendered it into this information graphic (yes, you can pick your own colors). The site, Many Eyes, is another great example of the Win-Win Web in which all participants benefit. They say their goal in offering it for free is to "democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis." Not to mention it's a nice public service from IBM. Word clouds are only one of the ways that Many Eyes can take your alpha-numeric data and turn it into a nifty info graphic. Use the following links to jump into ther visualizations yourself, take a tour, or read the rest of their "About" page.

Create Without Limits - Sell Without Fees

The title above is the slogan for a nifty-sounding site just getting launched. Artfire.com is for artisans selling their self-designed self-made wares online (click image for a sample view). The art can be whatever you wish, from a piece of jewelry all handmade to a custom digital template for a new business card. A basic storefront is free, and artists sell without added fees. The biz model appears to make its money off the larger shops, but even the full boat package is cheap ($7 monthly) a price they will guarantee for life to the next 5,000 accounts. The site seeks to build community too. It encourages members to interact, even to blog, and it has a go green section. With this level of energy and ease of access, they might become serious rivals for the niche-leader Etsy.com.

New & Neat This Week: Befunky

Another nifty "cloud app" I had lots of fun with recently is the "Cartoonizer" from Befunky.com.

You upload a picture (via a desktop file, a webcam snip or or an online link), apply the online tools (including sliders for sharpness and color), and voila, the photo is now a black and white sketch or a color cartoon or a cute little avatar.  Tweak it until you like it, then save to disk. Lots o' fun for gamers and bloggers. Only glitch: it did not play so well with my old version of IE, but worked like a charm in Firefox. (I used it for the NinaB pic here on my profile page,  while the sample at left is a screenshot of the toon-pic of Mehmet O., the Creative DIrector of Befunky.)

Thanks for this tip to Amit at the digital inspiration blog

New & Neat, No.2

My "New & Neat" Nominee this week is Clip2Net, a (free) little Windows utility I seem to be using constantly.

Clip2Net does one simple thing: screenshots. But it does it with such quick, fluid ease, I find myself getting much more visual in everything I write because what used to take a half dozen steps to snip, save and share now takes only two or three moves from me. It's a dream date for visual thinkers who like to show as much as tell.

Clip2Net does two things: (a) it turns your cursor into a temporary marquee to grab any part of what you see on screen and (b) saves that image to clipboard or disk or to a private online bin with its own URL that you can share anywhere. If you register your copy you also get control panel management of all your uploads, including a download counter and a generous hunk of storage space. You can also tag your uploads for how long you wish to keep them.

Consider the effect of simply putting the C2N logo at the head of this post. You instantly see if you already know what I'm talking about, and if so, you keep surfing. Or you have your interest piqued and decide to keep reading. So you, the viewer, can maximize the ROI on your time, while I, the author, can add visual impact, and the developers of C2N can reap more eyeballs if you decide to use it too.

That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I mention the "Win-Win Web" which is what all of Web 2.0 is rapidly coming to mean to me. But more about that in the next post and back to this handy little utility. Read on to find out more about what Clip2Net.can do.