Dropbox owns all of your data?

I'll preface this by saying that I LOVE Dropbox. The ability to store my data in the cloud, sync it to all of the computers I use, and avoid the hassle of FTP or big email files with my clients has made my life incredibly easy. That being said, Dropbox recently updated it's Terms of Service, and it included some REALLY scary language about ownership of data that everyone that uses the service should probably be aware of.

"By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service."

They've since added some clarifying language, but this still scares the hell out of me! The fact,  nay, the mere concept of the fact that I don't "own" my data is incredibly disturbing. Is it time to find a provider that better values our privacy and ownership needs? Is this something that just looks bad on screen, and is essentially innocuous?

What are your thoughts? Read the whole blog post here.

My 2nd half of 2011 bucket list

Call it a mid year's resolution, but with the year half over today, there's a ton of things I want to do this year. I figured I'd write them down here so that I could get some feedback, inspiration and encouragement from you guys!

Design
Design my own font
Reopen myself to freelancing
Design and fabricate house signs for my sister's new house and my Parents'
Design a piece of merchandise and put it up for sale
Do more glass work

Personal Development
Attend at least one conference this year
Develop and stick to a "personal style" design wise
RUN. 3 days a week.
Read a book a month on the typography of yesteryear
Find more friends in real life. This is a big one.

Family
Take 2 days off of work and spend a 4 day weekend as just the 4 of us
Cook for Jen most mondays
Host more people over for dinner and cookouts
Spend more time with the sound of the ocean in my ear

Around the House
Replant the front lawn
Buy and install a flagpole

What about you- What's on your 2nd half bucket list? Post it in the comments below!

How NOT to strip vinyl lettering from a trailer

This tutorial will teach you exactly how to NOT strip vinyl decals from a landscape trailer. This should save you HUNDREDS of dollars over the cost of having a professional do the job right the first time. I hope that you find this informative, if you have any questions or anything to add, please feel free to comment below!

Step 1: Remove your brain.

This step is of great importance. If you can't physically remove your brain, 6-8 months of smoking pot heavily on a daily basis should do the trick.

Step 2: Use absolutely no heat to remove the vinyl decals.

See that heat gun, blow torch or even hair dryer over there? Just totally ignore it. You're gonna want to chip that vinyl off in timy little pieces, and make sure you leave ALL of the adhesive.

Step 3: If some of the vinyl is being stubborn, you should really get the scraper out and really get working at it.  Metal is wicked hard. You aren't gonna hurt that, for sure.

Step.. what step were we on? I'm too lazy too look ALL the way up there

If you don't get all the way around to finishing taking the vinyl off, it's all good. I mean dinner might have been ready, that episode of Glee you've been dying to see might be on, there's a lot of stuff that can take a busy, hard working guy like yourself away from such a meaningless task.

Step next- Really screw everything up; break out the power tools.

You might be getting frustrated. maybe watching that saved by the bell re-run made you mad that you never got your own personal Kelly Kopowski. Power tools make stuff faster. Let's look through that shed, garage or closet and find something that'll really speed things up for you. Oh, you've got a power buffer? Detailers use power buffers! Detailers clean stuff up! You see where I'm going with this? Oh man, you're a damn genius. You just figured out how you're gonna save those greenbacks!

There's a trick to this though, so pay attention! You back with me? Cool. I need you to keep that buffer in one spot until ALL of the adhesive is gone. don't worry about the paint, metal is hard, remember? Just keep it RIGHT where it is. If anything goes wrong, people always say "that'll buff out" so I'm sure we can fix it.

Step Oh F*#%&)K

Oh man... I forgot to mention. Metal's wicked hard, but paint... paint's kinda not hard. all that buffing that you did on the adhesive? Well, that area's looking GOOD, but the adhesive kinda acts like a sandblast mask, so you might see some "ghosting" in the area around the letters. It's cool, people pay big money for polished aluminum.

If you got this far, CONGRATULATIONS! You only got this far on one spot? It's cool. Ship it on over to the sign guys. That compound in the adhesive? Leave it. They can go right over that.

I know you're smart enough to realize the sarcasm in all of this. This was a perfect case of "Penny wise, Pound foolish;" When we quoted this trailer lettering job, we figured on 3 hours for removal. This guy has at least triple that in getting this far. Our shop rate for 1 guy is $75 an hour. We've got 7 hours into fixing this mess. so to save $225, he's now $525 and at least 12 hours of his time. Please, let the professionals, with the proper tools and experience handle your next job.

LOTS of work coming up!

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My new thing lately has been gold leaf, and I've been jumping into it with both feet- I've got lots of work that's ALMOST done, and I can't wait to share it with you! There's a hand carved sign with a '59 corvette on it (I'm going to do a post that follows the build of this sign), there's gold leaf window lettering for The Boston Tattoo Company, there's a two tone house eagle that should be ready in the next couple of days- STAY TUNED! I'll leave you with a quick shot of a sign that we hand carved at work for Lobster Express- I wish I had the talent to make a block of foam into something so incredible!

Google Eats Its Own Tail, Competes With Investment

Today's launch of Google Offers, the Groupon competitor from search behemoth Google, highlights the declining state of affairs at Mountain View. Not because it is branching out into yet another venture that takes it away from its core business, but because it is now in direct competition with its own investment.

I'd imagine Seth Priebatsch is feeling bit by the hand that fed him.

picture via staplenews.com

Priebatsch, the 22 year old founder (and as is obligitory to mention when speaking of him, Princeton dropout) of Cambridge based LBS game SCVNGR, went live with LevelUp in March; a tiered, rewards driven deals site that aimed to draw upon SCVNRG's existing user base and percolate into the general public. LevelUp's immediate success has been so good in its initial cities (Philadelphia, San Fransisco and Boston) that Preisbatch has received "nasty emails from competitors," a sure sign that he must be doing something right. LevelUp is planning to expand into all major cities and take some market share from the big 2 in the industry, Groupon and LivingSocial.

Here's the rub; Google has a significant amount of money tied up in SCVNGR; in addition to the $4 million that they invested in late 2009, they were also involved in the latest round of funding for the game, in January of this year, a round that brought the company $15M.

With the launch of Google Offers today, the boys from Mountain View will be directly competing with the company they felt confident enough to pour a large chunk of money into, while it's still in its infancy. Considering it is still in its pilot program and barely one quarter old, I can't imagine that there has been great experience to be shared from LevelUp yet, which might have justified the recent investment. Did Google disapprove of the expansion into deals by SCVNGR and it's Wonderkid prodigy? Only time will tell if this helps Google, helps SCVNGR, helps LevelUp, but for right now it feels like a ill-advised move into an investment's market.

I'm bringin' Billhead back!

What is billhead you ask? Billhead, a cousin of letterhead, was a highly decorative engraving used on receipts from around 1860 to 1940; these works were incredibly detailed, almost always one color, and were used as one of the initial counterfeit security measures for purchases. The detailed engraving was similar in style to a dollar bill or stock certificate, and they made it nearly impossible for anyone with nefarious plans to steal and return merchandise for cash; remember this is a time where credit cards and even checks were nonexistent. 

A few fine examples of billhead to whet your appetite:

You can see that the details were limited only be the skill of the engraver and the depth of the client's pockets.

One of my new year's resolutions for 2011 was to take this as a retrospective year, going back and looking at the best design concepts from history, learning their styles and finding a way to keep them alive and updated. I printed out my standard quickbooks invoice, and as I looked it over to make sure it was right I started thinking about how boring it was. How many of us have invoices that look something like this?

It was time to sit down and design my own billhead.

I spent the better part of 2 months looking at examples of billhead, letterhead, panel shapes, scrolls, engravings of all kinds and I finally put pencil to paper (yup, I still draw things out, I know it's a lost art but it has significantly increased my productivity) and came up with a concept sketch.

Sometimes you don't have a sketchbook handy when the thought hits.

I sat down in illustrator and started laying out the shapes, and I decided that the wheat and rope were superfluous; they didn't really add anything and would have forced me to take the address and contact info out of the design, which I didn't want to do. What I came up with was this

A little detail view

My only frustration is that the computer is too even. I might work to make it more "flawed". The scrolls were really fun- and I couldn't have made them happen without Jimro on deviantart's incredible lineart brushes. Huge thanks also to Letterhead fonts- They've got the BEST period fonts, period! I've found myself collecting more and more of their fonts, and this design incorporates 5 of them- Brewer's Bold, Bank Note, Billhead 1900, Essendine and Goldsmith Script. The contact info is in Chopin Script.

The final product

Now, which would you pay first?

I love the look, what are your thoughts? Would you like to try and create your own billhead?

The Devolution of a design

The customer is not always right. I'll come right out and say it. When is creative control NOT creative control? When you've got a client that doesn't value your experience.

A client contacted me on Monday, looking to have a sign for outside their front door designed. Here's the design brief that I got:

From: Dali Restaurant
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 10:43 AM

Hi,

Here's the basic sign- but we want the D and the W VERY ornate- something like Lucida Blackletter? I don't have it on my computer, so I can't tell what it looks like. We want something scrolly so that it really stands out. I'd like different divider symbols between the sun-wed and thu-sat and the hours.

I need to see the layout first.

Using this, here's what I came up with.

As a first draft, I was pretty happy with it. There are a few things that irked me about the layout of the text below the logo, but the logo I was really happy with.

There's lots of cool, old style hand work on these letters, all of which takes time.

Truth be told, I think this design is almost worthy of a dribbble invite. If anyone's got one and agrees, send one over!

The first round of feedback came in, and I was less than pleased.

From: Dali Restaurant

Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:03AM

Looks ok, a couple changes. Please remove the border, and use our colors- Reflex blue for the background, and pms 681 for the letters. Can you move the "and" between the D and the W?

Thanks

Ok. Big changes, but maybe I'll show it to her, and she'll see how bad it looks. I made the changes and sent her back the proof, which looked like this.

I got an email back almost instantly, and I was hoping that the internet's bad design filter had rejected my email. Then I was hoping to open the email and see "ohmygod that's terrible, print the one you made." Nope. I got "Can you change all of the text other than the D and W to times new roman?"

To which I sent this. You can see by how off-center the bottom text is that I've officially stopped caring. I even changed "Thu" to "Tue"

Which yielded this gem:

"Please change "tue" to "thurs" and replace the little leaf with a diamond design. Do you have any other letter font options to choose from? These are lovely, but I'd like a few choices before the final decision."

Normally, I'd cut my losses at this point and tell the client that things just aren't doing to work out between us; I decided I was going to make this job into a blog so I figured I'd follow it all the way through. Here's the final result, and a look back at where we came from:

 

What would you do in a situation like this? Acquiesce to the customer's wants, even at the expense of the design? Cancel the job? I've tried hard this year to concentrate on "good design" over "fast design", and I feel so much better about my original design than the final product. Hopefully I can develop more clients that appreciate the work that goes into creating something from scratch!

On a somewhat related, yet unrelated note, on Monday morning, I'll be starting to work at Hassan Sign in Cohasset. I'm greatly excited to be working for a company that puts out work like this!