in·ci·sive (/inˈsīsiv/) adj.

1. (of a person or mental process) Intelligently analytical and clear-thinking.

2. (of an account) Accurate and sharply focused: “the songs offer incisive pictures of Canadian ways”.

That, in a word, is what I like about the CBC, especially their Radio and Podcast releases. Their TV and online stuff can be a bit shallow and one dimensional, but when people like Paul Kennedy or Nora Young get a chance to stretch their wings, the results are often worth listening too. The reason I bring this up is that there’s been—as what some people perceive—a low intensity conflict between that’s been brewing between our current government and the naitonal broadcaster.

Most critics of the CBC says that it is a bit too ‘left’ leaning, maybe that assumption is correct. I say maybe because I’m not really sure what it means to be ‘left’ or ‘right’. Regardless, I think a lot of the times people will be surprised some of the different perspectives that are offerd on their airwaves and online offerings.

Case and point, the latest series from Ideas entitled ‘Demon Coal’. It’s about climate change… I usually don’t listen to stuff about climate change because most of the time the debate tends to degenerate into histerics and nastiness. However, the series is an example of why I like the CBC. It’s not about presenting both sides of the argument (as if there’s only ever two sides), but about having an honest and civil conversation and not pulling your punches when things don’t makes sense.

The points that are made about the unpredictability of climate models in the first part and the dangers of ‘cap-and-trade’ schemes in the second are worth the collective 1.5 hours you’ll spend listening to this.

I have an idea that I want to explore. As all good ideas it starts with a question. Please click through and let me know…

Facebook Poll: Do you use online invoicing applications to send invoices to your clients?

If you don’t have/use Facebook you can let me know in the comments. The options are:

• What is an ‘online invoicing application’?
• Yes
• No

For some, this might be a new concept. Others might have heard of it but’ve never gotten around to trying it. I’m talking about designing in-browser. In other words skipping Photoshop/Illustrator all together for website mock ups.

I’ve first stumbled onto this idea from the guys at 37Signals who wrote a blog post a while back called ‘Why we skip Photoshop’. I had a strong positive reaction to it as it confirmed some of the things that were bugging me about designing in Photoshop for web (more on that below). At that time I was still working at 70Main and felt like I didn’t have the leisure to try a radically new approach to my design process. However, I did start doing more and more design tweaking in-browser.

Then I read ‘Time to stop showing clients static design visuals’ by Andy Clarke and ‘Make Your Mockup in Markup’ by Meagan Fisher. These posts were a turning point for me and I started doing more and more design in-browser. At first, it felt a little bit weird... limiting is probably the best way to describe it. But, as I worked on more and more projects this way I got used to it and I gotta say I that at his point I wouldn't go back. I even do my mood-boards in-browser.

When I bring up this topics with some of my of design friends, almost all scrunche up their face… like ‘what the hell are you talking about?’ And then I try to layout my case. The main problems I have with designing in Photoshop/Illustrator is:

• Type rendering
• Lack of interactivity
• No way of demonstrating fluid/responsive layouts

And of course the point that Andy Clarke makes: Photoshop mock-ups are a giant waste of time as they, inevitably, end up in the garbage. You spend so much time making things pixel precise and the end-user will never, ever see that PSD file. What they will see is the website rendered in their browser. To me it just makes sense to spend all your time designing (and coding) that real, browser version rather then some simulacrum that, in the end, will get tossed.

I've always wanted a tool like this and it seems my buddy and motion-designer extraordinaire Jordan Lloyd, found it, like... half a year ago. Bascially, I have a template folder with specific files and sub-folders that I use for every single project. So whenever I have a new project I duplicate it and rename all the files/folders.

It's a good system because it keeps me organized and makes searching for files from previous projects much easier. But, it's a bit of a pain in the ass. Post Haste relieves me of that pain by automating the porcess.

Also, check out Jordan's other post on a file sharing service called CloudApp.

If you use Adobe Illustrator a lot this might be handy for you. You can do multiplication, division, addtion and subtraction within the app:

As the screenshot shows above, I have a 10mm box and I want to increase its width by 2. So in the ‘Width’ field I simply type in ‘10mm * 2’ and voila. Granted this is not that usefull for a simple operation like this however, if you find yourself often using decimals (e.g. the golden ratio) this is a time saver.

This post is the first in a series called “Mitsakes” where I’ll be exploring the various mistakes that I've made and how you can avoid them.

Some context

Recently I designed a poster for a client that was used in the subway system here in Toronto. I used Adobe Illustrator for the majority of the job and fired up Photoshop once or twice to edit the background image. The guidelines were pretty strict, but easy enough to follow and I did the usual quality control before sending the poster off:

• Proof-read the copy;
• Embedded the images;
• Outlined the fonts;
• Removed any unnecessary layers/objects; and
• Even outlined the dotted rule lines that were part of the design—just in case.

The final PDF looked good and the client approved it.

Uh oh…

This week I saw the product of my labours while riding the subway downtown. Unfortunately, the printed poster did not look like final PDF that was up on my screen. The mistake was slight, but still noticeable: a lightly tinted box enclosing the title. A box that I knew shouldn’t be there! So what did I miss?

There are a couple of possible answers, but I think the correct one is that I didn’t rasterize the effects that I had on the title. The title had a very slight drop-shadow applied to it, but because I was working in Illustrator this means that it was a raster effect applied to a vector object. Unfortunately, that combination can sometimes lead to unexpected results when printing, even if the final PDF looks fine on screen.

So how can you avoid this?

When working in Illustrator make sure to rasterize any vector objects that have raster effects applied to them. To do this:

1. Select the object
2. In the menu bar, go to Object > Rasterize…
3. A dialog box will appear with various options, select the applicable ones and click “OK”

That’s it. I would recommend doing this for all of your final deliverables.

What do you think? Am I right in the diagnosis of the problem? Could it have been something else? Let me know in the comments below.

I’ve been listening to/reading about Ayn Rand recently. She’s a pretty big deal in the world of ‘neo-liberals’ and ‘free-market evangelists’ (I'm not using those terms derogatorily).

As I understand it, the central thesis of Ayn Rand's philosophy is that selfishness is good; selfishness is a virtue; we should be selfish in pursuing our goals. The question that I have is: In the selfish pursuit of our own goals should we use any methods available to us to achieve what we want? Should we use force, coercion, bribery and corruption?

If the answer is no...

Then my next question is: Why not? I suspect that Ayn Rand would say that using the above mentioned methods would be immoral. But, why is it immoral? On whose authority are these methods immoral? Ayn’s? Why should we listen to her about what is moral and what is not. This becomes especially poignant considering that Ayn was an ardent atheist and considered faith in god to be an abdication of man’s ability to reason.

If the answer is yes..

On the other hand, if we are allowed to use any method available to us—including force, coercion, bribery and corruption—then in such a society monopolies and government favouritism would be inevitable. Yet anyone whose familiar with her philosophy knows that Ayn vigorously opposed and condemned such phenomena.

Let’s imagine a simple scenario. Any business that accumulates enough power would naturally want to hold on and even expand that power—that would be its selfish prerogative. If the above methods are considered legitimate then there would nothing stoping that business from bribing, corrupting, coercing and forcing the government to bend the rules in its favour and against the favour of its competitors. This business, through these methods, would then secure a monopoly in its sphere of industry and ... bye, bye free market.

Any thoughts?

Quick tip for people who use Coda for development and like their code to look clean and organized. Have you ever pasted in a snippet of code with tab spacing that’s out of sync with its surroundings?

Those <ul> and <li> tags are way to far to the right. Previously, I would have wasted so much time aligning them one-by-one. Then, by accident, I discovered that you can adjust the tab spacing of multiple lines at the same time.

Simply select the line that you wish to align and hold down Command + ] to tab them over to the right and Command + [ to tab them over to the left.
You’ll end up with nicely formatted code:

Biking on my way to work this morning I almost got into an accident. I was coasting up to the intersection and as the light turned green I began peddling again. Just as I did that the crankset on the bike, basically the front gear that's attached to the pedals and pulls the chain, literally came apart. My chain flew off, and being that my bike has a coaster break - i.e. I need my chain to break, for a moment there it looked like I was going to crash into the curb. Luckily I have a back up front break that saved the day.

After the adrenaline died down I was left to deal with the inconvenience of some how figuring out how to get my bike fixed and still get to work on time. I knew it wasn't an easy repair that I could do myself. However, there was no bike shop around that I knew off, and besides it was before 9AM and with exception of the exellent Urbane Cyclists all the other ones don't open until 10.

This got me thinking of a business idea: CAA for bikes. It would've been great if there was a bike shop that I could've called which would've then came and picked my bike up. Better yet, I could've locked my bike up, went to work, they could've then picked up my keys from my work, gotten my bike and repaired it.

And since in most cases simple repairs on a bike don't require many tools or a ton of space I could even forsee a travelling bike repair van of some sorts.

Let me know what you think.

So 9 days after my initial letter to the 4 major candidates running in the St.Paul's by-election only 2 have responded, Liberal candidate Dr. Eric Hoskins and the NDP candidate Julian Heller. So what I'll do is examine the Dr. Hoskins' response in this post and then save Mr. Heller's response for another day.

To be honest I'm actually quite surprised that only two have responded. The questions pretty soft ball and relatively "trendy" in terms of what going on in Ontario and North America. But, oh well.

I should also point out that neither of the candidates so far actually responded in person, it was just some person from their campaign, which is I think to be expected. So this is the first response that I got from Dr. Hoskins' camp:

Dan;

Thanks for contacting the campaign.

On the first question, about the Green Economy, I would refer you to the recent activities surrounding the Green Energy and Green Economy Act: http://www.greenenergyact.ca/. The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has also re-launced our Feed-in Tariff program by which we are procuring green electricity and thereby working to build the industry: http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/FIT/. As a local producer of solar panels, ARISE will benefit from these efforts as will other future local producers.

On your second question, I will have to make some inquiries and get back to you.

Hope that helps (for now),
rob.

This was kind of disappointing. I expected a more in-depth point by point response instead of a couple of links to some websites. To make matters worse the Green Energy and Green Economy Act website was pretty hard to navigate. I couldn't actually find what the Act was going to do, there were vague promises of "improving the environment and the economy of investing in green jobs ... blah ... blah." However, I didn't see anything concrete in terms of a plan or a list of projects that were going to be accomplished.

So I wrote them back saying this and asking them to outline some of the specific projects/incentives/investments that the OGEA will be making.
They responded back with:

Dan;

We are still in the regulatory stage of the Green Energy Act. The goal is for the the Green Energy Act to accomplish three things:

1. Smart grid - A network that can accomodate the multiple, distributed sources of energy.
2. Right-to-grid - Ensuring that if you produce the energy we will buy the energy.
3. Feed-in-tariff - Paying prices for renewable energy that encourage more people in to produce it.

The regulations being written will be to support these initiatives.

Hope that helps,
rob.

A bit better, but again no specifics AND they completely ignored my second question on the topic of The Internet & The Government. Overall, I wasn't that impressed by Dr. Hoskins' response, he gets marks for speed of response and follow up, but that's about it.
Final score — 2/5.

Check back soon for a look at how Julian Heller form the NDP handled the questions.