With all of the excitement surrounding social media, Meetup is the perfect blend of behind-the-keyboard and face-to-face. I’ve been having fun exploring parts of the city I may never have known before and have met some really awesome people. It gets me out doing things I may normally not ever do. It’s easy come, easy go as far as picking and choosing how involved I want to be. Their tagline is “Do something; Learn Something; Share Something; Change Something” and I’ve found it to be absolutely true.

I’ve been having a ball on hiking expeditions, happy hour and trivia Meetups so far. Here are a few more groups I’m thinking about checking out in the future:

• The Atlanta Graphic Design Collective on Meetup
• Sky’s the Limit Adventures ATLANTA
• Atlanta Web Design Group
• Georgia Adventurers Group
• Dog hikers of Kennesaw Mountain
• Atlanta Wine & Dine Group
• Atlanta Chocolate Meetup

Just like an app, there really is something for everyone. I have found myself saying, “There’s a Meetup for that!” For example, here’s a few more ‘unique’ groups happening in the ATL area right now:

• The Atlanta Dungeons & Dragons Meetup Group
• Atlanta Firewalking
• Atlanta Jugglers Association
• The North Georgia Pet Chicken Meetup Group
• Cobb County UFO Experiencers
• Hundredth Monkey Sangha

…and the list goes on!

Don’t find what you’re into? You can always become a group organizer for your “OTP Underwater Basket Weavers”. Currently there are 7.2 million members with 46,000 Meetup topics in 45,000 cities registered with the site. A few quotes on their site sum it all up:

“Meetup allows people to find people who would never find each other in the regular world. It’s begun to change interpersonal communication.”

“For instance, if you’re into dressing your cat up like a Star Trek character, you’ll find someone else out there that does the same — it brings people together.”

Meetup’s been a great social networking experience for me so far! If you want to do something, learn something, share something or change something, check it out.

There are 3 main types of linear composition: The grid, diagonals and curvilinear. Here’s a small crash course on each.

1. The Grid

You probably know that a steady beat or rhythm is used to compose any piece of music. That basic “1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and” count is one of the first things you’re taught when you learn an instrument. The evenly-timed cadence is pleasing to the ear.

Your eye works in much the same way. Just as a composer or musician uses beat and rhythm to divide sound, an artist uses vertical and horizontal lines of a grid to divide a visual space because equal divisions of space are pleasing to the eye.

Let’s use Georges Seurat’s famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as an example.

What makes this painting so remarkable is the grid composition underpinning the placement of all of the elements. To the casual observer, the scene looks like randomly-placed people, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s start by overlaying 3 vertical lines, dividing the painting up into 4 equal parts:

The vertical lines show the woman in red is purposefully placed in the center, giving us the focal point of the painting. The line on the left is used to place the tree and provide a compositional guide for the placement of the men sitting on the ground. Also take note of how the right vertical line is used to place both the couple in the foreground and the couple walking off in the distance.

In this painting, Seurat ultimately divided the painting up into twelve parts. Look closely and see if you can spot all of the elements and edges that fall along these lines:

But we’re not quite finished. Not only can the space from left to right be divided, we can also find horizontal lines of composition. Again, pay attention to the elements that are placed along these equally-spaced lines:

And here’s the complete grid overlay:

2. Diagonals

The second type of compositional line is the diagonal, the two most common lie from the top left corner to the bottom right corner and from the bottom left corner to the top right. Any square or rectangle naturally has this X composition and you’ll see artists throughout history employ it.

But the natural X isn’t always the strongest compositional line, as we’ll see in Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware:

Washington Crossing the Delaware has one of the most iconic lines of composition in all of American painting, uniting Washington and the American flag in a dramatic effect:

This single diagonal dominates the composition of the painting. The line runs through the staff of the flag, provides a compositional placement for Washington (almost like he’s sitting on this diagonal) and then terminates where the paddle hits the water at the edge of the painting.

A secondary diagonal is one of the two corner diagonals:

Notice how this line guides the pose of the man in red rowing the boat and provides the angle for the flow of Washington’s red cape. The intersection of these two diagonals is intentional, not only to make the grouping of Washington, James Monroe and the flag the painting’s focus, but also to serve as an intersection point for the horizon of the landscape (which also happens to be the center line):

3. Curvilinear

The third and final type of linear composition is the curve. This is by far the hardest to spot, but it is no less important to composition. Almost always, this curve enters from the left side of the painting, loops once, sometimes more, and exits to the right. If a piece of art or design has a “flow” to it, it’s most likely the result of a curvilinear composition.

Let’s take a look at an easy example of a curvilinear composition with Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna:

In typical Renaissance fashion, the centered, restrained pose of the Madonna and Child is achieved using a single looping curve. This curve guides the tilt of the heads, the placement of the Madonna’s shoulder, hands, and blanket, and contains the Child to the mother:

Now compare the quiet, restrained Renaissance curve above with a more dramatic Romantic period double curve composition such as David’s The Death of Socrates:

The next time you find yourself looking at a painting, building or design that you like, try to pick out its linear composition. It’s there, doing its work by giving form and purpose to what you see. You’d be surprised how often it’s used.

Is it here yet? I am anxiously waiting the release date for the new Adobe CS5. For those of you who don’t speak geek, Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is THE collection of graphic design, web development and video editing applications. This includes Photoshop (for amazing photo manipulation), Illustrator (vector-based tools for creating illustrations and logos), InDesign (super-duper page layout program), Flash (for beautiful motion), Dreamweaver (for web development) and Acrobat Pro (great for taking .pdf files to the next level).

I am most looking forward to InDesign in CS5. This new version has some really neat upgrades that will really help with productivity. One of the features that I think I will use the most is the different page sizes in one document. Great for working on concepts in a single file, business packages, binders, direct mail and pocket folders.

A few other features that I think will be helpful are paragraphs that span or split columns, no more separate text boxes to create this. I’m also loving the new gap tool in aligning and distributing, the enhanced layers panel and live corners to adjust the radius of an image frame on-the-fly. Oh, and I can’t forget, you can export pdfs in the background as you continue to work on a document. This will be so helpful, especially when you export those huge files that seem to take forever.

One last interesting thing I think printers and designers who share files can benefit from is the automatic font activation for fonts inside of a packaged (or ready for production) file. This could save a lot of headaches with corrupt or misplaced fonts.

The other programs seem to have some really great features as well. I think this will be a really great upgrade for Adobe. Our pre-ordered version should be here any day. Stay tuned for a review!

Bill took on the role of principal at Ford Elementary School where his son Zach attends.

When Zach, 10, was asked about his father’s role as Principal of the Day, he said,  “It was the most horrifying experience of my life.”

One night I happened to catch a news clip about our online identities and what happens after someone passed away. Not something you ever really think about, but you can imagine what families might have to endure if they were denied access to important personal accounts simply because they didn’t have the passwords. Such was the case with Jeremy Toeman, who wanted to get access to his grandmother’s accounts after she passed but couldn’t. He recognized that if something were to happen to him that his family would have the same problem.

This inspired Jeremy to build a program called Legacy Locker, a safe and convenient way to pass along logins to loved ones. On Legacy Locker you can not only store your digital assets but also copy documents such as deeds, stock certificates, contracts and even write a letter to a loved one or create a video document. The site also allows you to setup different beneficiaries for different assets and you can easily change them.

As our lives become more and more tied to digital data, services such as Legacy Locker will become increasingly necessary to manage that data.

What’s the difference between a vector and raster file?
A vector graphic is an image that is not made up of a specific number of dots, it can be scaled to a larger size and will not lose any image quality. If you blow up a raster graphic, it will look blocky, or “pixelated.” When you blow up a vector graphic, the edges of each object within the graphic stay smooth and clean. This makes vector graphics ideal for logos, which can be small enough to appear on a business card, but can also be scaled to fill a billboard. Common types of vector graphics include Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand and EPS files.

.ai – Adobe Illustrator Vector Drawing
Fully scalable, composed of paths or lines connected by points, instead of bitmap data.

.bmp – Bitmap
Raster image format used to store display images, suitable for photos. Made up of a rectangular grid of pixels, each pixel is a different color which together form an image.

.eps – Encapsulated PostScript
A platform independent format used for vector or raster information. Fully scalable when it is saved from Illustrator.

.gif – Graphics Interchange Format
Compressed image file used for screen presentation only. Used on the Internet for images with 256 colors or less. Can also make transparent gifs for web and animated gifs.

.jpeg or .jpg – Joint Photographic Experts Group
Compressed image file format. JPEG images are not limited to a certain amount of color, like GIF images are. They are used on the Internet, and for decreasing file size for larger images.

.pdf – Portable Document Format
Enables files to be viewed cross-platform and without the original program that created them. Acrobat Reader is required to view pdf file. Since PDFs contain color-accurate information, they should also print the same way they look on your screen. Many printers can print from high-resolution print-ready PDFs with crops and bleeds.

.pict or .pct – Picture File
Mainly for Mac applications, counterpart of the Windows Metafile (WMF) format. The PICT format has largely been replaced by PDF format.

.ps – Postscript
A page description language for both PC and Mac platforms, primarily used for printing documents on laser printers. The evolution of PostScript led to the development of Adobe Acrobat, which creates a PDF.

.psd – Photoshop Document
May include image layers, adjustment layers, layer masks, annotation notes, file information, keywords and other Photoshop-specific elements. Documents support RGB, CMYK, grayscale, monochrome, duotone, indexed color, Lab color, and multichannel color modes; the color mode can be changed within the Image.

.png – Portable Network Graphic
Image format that uses indexed colors. Also include an 8-bit transparency channel, which allows the colors in the image to fade from opaque to transparent. GIF images only support fully opaque or fully transparent pixels. PNG images are now supported by most Web browsers.

.tiff or .tif – Tag Image File
High-quality raster graphic format often used for storing images with many colors, such as digital photo, includes support for layers and multiple pages. Can be saved in a uncompressed format. Supported in almost all software.

Based on the new information just released by Space.com the Mopdog offices will be adjusting it business hours accordingly. With the Earth’s axis being affected by the recent earthquakes in Chile our days have been shorten. As owner I feel it only fair to our clients and employees that we make these necessary adjustment to our schedule to keep current with our surroundings, after all these things add up over time.

So for now, or until the next earthquake makes additional changes we will be staying a little later each day.

You’re standing atop a grassy cliff overlooking an expansive ocean that rises to meet the sky in a perfect horizon. You hear the call of seagulls between the gentle honking of traffic and melodic mists of surf crashing on the rocks beneath. The sun is shining and its warmth is nothing short of rejuvenating. The wind blows and you feel alive.

Did anything seem out of place in that paragraph?

Right! The traffic. Take away the honking of traffic, no matter how gentle, and the picture becomes that much more spectacular. Book me there, sans traffic. I’d go in a heartbeat.

The traffic jumped out because it was out of place. It was inconsistent with the image that was being described. And because of that one inconsistency, the whole tone of the description suffers.

But consistency isn’t always about having the same details. I could’ve described the scene above a thousand different ways, but as long as you – the audience – perceive the same spectacular vision, it would maintain consistency.

Brand consistency works in the same way. In branding, a consistent brand is a well-toned brand. It’s about managing perception. It’s always painting a compatible picture of your company in the minds of your customers – and getting rid of the elements that are out of place, and ultimately, being consistent with your brand idea.

Here are 3 steps you can take to tone your brand:

1. Define how your company views itself. Now define how your customer views your company. Compare the two. Be honest with yourself! Are there any inconsistencies? If there are, take steps to tone that area of your brand.

2. Are there any areas of your brand that are inconsistent with your brand idea? Any honking traffic in an otherwise picturesque brand? Trim it.

3. Is your brand trying to say too much? It’s best to focus a brand on one consistent message. Try to be all things to all customers, and your brand will inevitably become inconsistent, lose its flexibility, tone and effectiveness.

Your brand feeling a little softy around the middle? Give us a call. Think of us as your brand’s personal trainer.

I don’t remember who said that. Maybe a 4-star general or Lincoln or somebody. The point is that we have limited control over the big events in our life. Or the large, sweeping changes in the world for that matter. We can, however, try to excel at the little things. Because it’s those small, overlooked parts that over time compound, add up and multiply into something big.

I know this concept has all kinds of positive applications in your daily life (exercise, career, calling your mom more than once a month, etc.), but that’s not where I want to go with it. Let’s talk about ads.

Take a look at the ad to the left.

It’s a one-column ad from 1991 in the back of an issue of The Village Voice, a weekly, alternative New York culture pub.

Now, I don’t know if this little ad got any more pull than the standard “SUBSCRIBE NOW!” approach. I don’t have the data on that. To be honest, I don’t know if I would’ve done anything different myself.

But what I can tell you is that the current, alternative-minded subscribers who read this ad loved the magazine that much more. So much so that it created enough buzz to catch the ear of Communication Arts, an advertising/design magazine, which promptly picked it up for a 1991 issue. It was so well received among the Communication Arts readership that it then made the 1991 Advertising of the Year Annual.

But the little-ad-that-could wasn’t done.

It went on to make a return appearance in the 50th Anniversary Communication Arts issue 19 years later, which sits on my desk next to me as I write this.

On a side note, readership of the Village Voice did go up.

All of this from a small subscription ad. All of this because someone had the initiative to take something small, overlooked and passed-over, and make it into something great.

Now that’s thinking big.

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