WordPress is a blogging platform that has been celebrated for years as an open source and free blogging system.  That has arguably changed with the latest antics by Automattic, the maker of Akisment, an anti-spam plug-in for blogs.

If you have recently noticed a flood of spam on the front doorstep of your WordPress blog, you’re not alone. It seems that overnight, many of the previously free API keys that centralize the operation of the Akismet plug-in for WordPress users have mysteriously stopped working. Muddling through what might be the cause, curious users will eventually conclude that an “upgrade” is in order, synced with the upgrade to WordPress 3.0.

What exactly has been changed with Akismet? Nothing, other than making the pricing structure “more obvious”, according to one member of the Automattic team.

But many bloggers might disagree with that assertion. It would seem more is at play here than simply a renovation in the pricing page design. After getting in cozy with most WordPress users as a near indispensable tool, Akismet is without a doubt squeezing a corner of the WordPress world with the intent to capitalize, without honoring original key holders. When API keys in your plug-in no longer work and you are then forced to select a payment plan as a “commercial user”, that’s more than just a change in the typography arrangement of your menu; it’s a downright dirty trick. Of course, such a trick is well within their rights to inflict upon users who drank the anti-spam cool-aid that came bundled with WordPress originally.

Isn’t cyber capitalism grand?

We are free to seek alternatives, of course, and should. I know I will. It’s not the price that necessarily turns me off. Five dollars a month isn’t so bad. It’s the smarmy tactics Akismet has used to eventually monetize their plug-in that disgusts me.

Someone recently asked me if the Flash slide show in I have featured on my front page (www.mpalmerdesign.com) features original artwork. At first I didn’t even consider the need of saying so, but upon reflection, I suppose it does make sense to claim it—so yes, it was rendered by yours truly, with the exception of image 8, which includes tall and slender arches in curved vector grids. This was a piece of stock art I purchased from somewhere and proceeded to manipulate and add color effects to for a project of mine.

In fact, it bears mentioning that most of the artwork featured on the front is original art that was created specifically for a book cover, website or brochure. It struck me that many of the nebulous and abstract modern digital paintings that are in demand for modern design projects make excellent stand-alone pieces on their own. Some of these renderings are very large physically, too—some taking up to a full GB in disk space. I had the recent compulsion of formatting some of them to be printed out in the real world as fine prints and actually framed in my studio.  I find it odd I never considered that until recently.  I suppose it’s the traditionalist in me that refuses to see this Photoshop art as “real art”, but it certainly is.  The more I think of it, it’s somewhat strange how we categorize artists in the computer world as “digital artists”.  To me, the computer and its operating software is nothing more than another medium (albeit a complex and unique one at that). After all, do we call someone who writes a novel on a computer a “digital writer”?

Anyway, I may take up the notion of printing the abstract art pieces out and see how they look on a wall.  It will be an interesting adventure when I have the leisure.

I’m not sure why, but for the longest time I’ve avoided drawing tablets when I create digital still art.  It’s ludicrous, really—no less odd than insisting on painting with a brick.  I suppose the rarity of my visual art for no other reason than the sake of creating art is what keeps me from going out and purchasing a tablet (and learning how to use one).

Granted, there are some very practical uses of vector drawing, and I’m always amazed when I see a shaded and detailed drawing meticulously engineered with Bézier paths and control points.  I’m impressed because I seldom have the patience to align every curve and every point and close every fill for illustrating in strict vector.  Eventually, I give in to the bitmap medium of Photoshop and use its powerful tools to finish where I roughly started in vector, as in the image above.

The alien shapes were sketched out on paper during conceptual stage, then rendered in freehand as silhouettes.  After importing into Photoshop, I filled in their contents using various paintbrush tools and layer effects to add color and texturing (see here).

I’m planning on getting a tablet soon, however. While I’ll never get away from vector art due to my profession, when I create art, I cant help but to make the process as organic as possible.  Why not just pull out the paintbrush and canvas, you might say?

Two things.  Oil paint is messy…and there’s no undo.

M

I’m a designer and overall visual guy by trade, not a sociology major or information privacy buff, but when my recent rants conspire with coincidences of recent events, I can’t help but say a little more. Thankfully, it’s not more whining and doom and gloom about Google gobbling up internet freedoms. In fact, today’s news struck a chord in quite the opposite direction.

In little more than two months after having warned they would relocate their operations in China over subversive hacker attacks (which just so happened to suspiciously target political statements critical of the Chinese government—namely those of human rights advocates), Google closed shop and redirected its core internet search services to an uncensored engine in Hong Kong. Apparently, this is in violation of a written agreement between the popular internet search company and the Chinese government, which officials in the Chinese government are all too eager to point out.

Google apparently has some scruples yet, and I applaud their taking a stance against the Chinese government’s proactive—and one might say even hostile—censorship of internet search made available to the Chinese people.  While only a partial retreat from China, Google’s move is symbolic enough, and it is being heard loud and clear, it would seem.

When I think upon this further, I tend to wonder what the long-term picture between Google and the Chinese government will be (brings popcorn).  More to the point, I tend to wonder what Google thought the long-term picture would be when they first sought to bring their services to China in the first place.  Did they really believe the Chinese government would somehow loosen up their stranglehold on the freedom of information?  I’ve read from some sources that such an idea may have been in the cards.  If that was part of the plan at all, it seems to me Google got a bit of a reality check of late.  I’m not so jaundiced as to believe everything every company does is for growing market share and sphere of influence, but Google is a fairly powerful information search provider that has sought to expand its influence over the world for mainly commercial reasons, of course.  In this moment, however, the actions of this company lately have put it in the direction of earning my respect, much unlike foot-in-mouth sound bites from its CEO.

It remains to be seen if China pulls the plug on Google altogether. There’s a good chance it will, as internet censorship in that country has only increased, not slackened.  All this only goes to support a previous statement I made in this post, illustrating quite clearly that governments can and do have influence on Google’s search results within their respective regions, and will use that information to target certain individuals.  I’m glad the popular search company is taking its unofficial corporate motto of “don’t be evil” to heart; let’s hope they stay on that path and avoid conspiring with it.

M

While this gimmick has been used before, I felt it was applied tastefully to the message at hand.   I took some time on the YouTube website to watch the video entirely through, and enjoyed the upbeat message it really contains.  I couldn’t help but comment to add one dose of reality, however: such a clever message wouldn’t have to have been conjured in the first place if there wasn’t any truth to the idea that the print industry is loosing mucho business to the pixel industry. In the very least, the fact that we in the industry accept the flow of the words in the first half of this video as the antagonist concept represents some degree of recognition. That said, the message conveyed in the second half of this video by Dorling Kindersley isn’t easily dismissed, either.  It really is all in the way we see things, and I might say those who put this production together understand exactly what is needed in the modern age: a creative and proactive synergy between traditional and contemporary mediums.  Thank you, DK, for articulating that point so well.

M

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO had a few revealing things to say about privacy during a CNBC interview when he said, “I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines—including Google—do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

When I reconsider this statement after having enough time to fully digest it soberly, it does bring to mind why this information Google hunts down and methodically stores is even stored in the first place, among other things.  Chief among those “other things” might be how irresponsibly big brotherish such a flippant attitude about personal privacy can be.  According to him and apparently his company, secrets suck.  I suppose that makes sense, as his business is about collecting information, not protecting it.

People in America may shrug and simply think he’s an insensitive corporate jerk for such foot-in-mouthery, but those living under different flags in the world where what’s “wrong” and what’s “right” is dictated by a totalitarian government may have a different spin on it.  Depending upon where you find yourself living, such aggressively stored information paired with equally robust disregard for privacy is a very real personal threat, considering the power of certain governments to force ISPs and information collection services like Google to cooperate with them in targeting and tracking those who they consider enemies of the state for nothing more than their political views.  Where is the clear line between wrong and right there?

In a digital world where our identities, search queries and browsing records are all cached and logged, how are we to consider the “information superhighway” as anything less than invasive and potentially nefarious?  Beyond the machinations of totalitarian regimes and anonymous commercial interests, there is an everyday person-to-person level that seems to escape Mr. Schmidt’s concern.  Let’s accept, for instance, the fairly untenable argument of “you don’t need privacy if you’re not doing anything wrong” as perfectly sound.  Got it.  What about those who use the transparency of this data to inflict personal harm on others through tools such as google maps or Latitude? In essence, I’m going to do something wrong because you don’t have privacy. We see yet again that Schmidt’s rationale is flawed—or is that where the “don’t be evil” slogan comes in handy?  Granted, some cool things can be done with the tools as well, but the idea of using internet-based information gathering tools for ill use isn’t entirely novel, as cases like as Remsburg v. Docusearch clearly prove.

It’s not often I consider proxies like Tor or (the very aptly named) Anonymizer, but I must admit they are becoming more and more appealing to me as I feel we are entering further and faster into an age of constraint on our privacies.

M

Since the inception of my design service, it’s fascinating to look back over the years and see just how far the publishing industry—both print and pixel-based—has evolved.  I’m afraid I’m “old” enough to know what a stripping flat is.  More ironic, I’m old enough to know what an imposition on a rasterized sheet of film looks like.  Film?  Please!  Film is ancient technology.

When one stops to consider what’s in vogue for publishing methods today, it’s clear how aggressively the industry has evolved in the past decade compared to say, the past century.  I wonder how many people in the printing industry know who Alois Senefelder and Johann Guttenberg are?  I’m not blaming them for their lack historical knowledge, mind you; journalists, publishers, printers and designers today are too busy preparing to catch the next technological curve ball to think too long about stuff like trade roots.

I’ve even heard it said publishing and a good portion of printing axiom itself is on the verge of a metamorphosis—a tectonic shift from paper and ink to electronic readers.  I can handle FTP, CTP and POD—but a Kindle?  My goodness, what is my beloved publishing industry coming to?  The appearance of ordinary ink on paper, but it’s really fancy screen technology, apparently.  It’s not entirely new news at the moment, of course; the buzz has been around for some time, but will electronic readers—truly—catch on, or is this an overglorified high tech gizmo fad?  Sony and Amazon.com seems to believe in it, at least.

I’ve tested the Kindle out, too.  It’s a neat device, without a doubt; lightweight, space and power efficient, and easy on the eyes.  Now, can I honestly see myself getting cozy with a Kindle for an evening read?  I’m not so certain.  There is something for the tactile experience of the texture of pages—and even the scent of them—that makes me like traditional books more, as cool as these electronic readers are.

One must soberly consider the trends of the contemporary age, however.  Youth of today is processing, manipulating and navigating data like no other generation preceding it; and it is their collective preference that will ultimately matter.  I suppose that when I turn and look at the books on my shelf, they seem like relics even now.  My giant dictionaries, hardbacks and complete works of William Shakespeare do look somewhat like a prop in the next Harry Potter film.  There does seem something outdated about the tedium of flipping pages, I’ll agree. Jacob Weisberg of the Slate Group, after having experienced the convenience of the Kindle, has been quoted in saying, “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

Much like film-based cameras, I suspect.  Remember those?

Even so, I insist there is something to be said for owning a book versus, say, a download of a book.  There is a physical connection I have a hard time parting with in my head.  Or is that just a romantic notion?  Not entirely, I say.  I’d at least insist there is reason in my feelings, when one considers what artifacts of our civilization will remain in the coming centuries.  Photos aren’t accessed on film strips or family albums anymore (unless we make the effort to organize and print our terabytes of photo libraries on paper and printing methods that will last); now they reside on compact disks or hard drives. If books are to go the way of the dinosaur as well, what vestiges will remain of our knowledge and experiences, save those locked away in data blocks on a drive or storage media—or worse yet, a “cloud“?

As a designer I feel pretty comfortable creating stuff for either traditional or contemporary mediums.  We go where the market goes, essentially, and there is a strong case for the market being stronger than ever before, what with all the empowered self publishing authors we have today, as well as publishing methods.  And blogs…who can discount them?  Certainly not the journalism industry.  Regarding the digital world, I actually prefer working fully integrated  in it with all the modern tools of today at my disposal.  For all their power, many of us no doubt do see a cautionary note in between the lines of our new media trends.  That would perhaps be best illustrated with a comment left by a distraught Kindle user on Amazon’s site. Caught up between upgrades, he apparently lost a fortune of downloaded books and magazines while upgrading from one pricey machine to the latest and greatest version.  Poof!  Up in “flames”.  Reading his unrequited rant, I considered for a moment the irony of it all: in a world increasingly digitized and merged by giant corporate interests, it behooves us to perhaps consider how aptly named the “Kindle” really is.

M