At every office I’ve worked there has been the scourge of bad file naming. It’s caused countless problems and even heated discussions (we designers are so emo!). I’ve heard out other people’s naming systems and just found them riddled with problems. When we founded Objective Subject, we cracked this nut. I thought I’d share, if anyone out there is suffering the same problems.
Goals
The user base of a naming system is both the creator and the outsider. A good naming system should satisfy the following requirements:
- Be legible and transparent to the outsider
- Make the creator’s life easier
- Work in current conditions and those within the foreseeable future
- Enable order and hierarchy
- Extend beyond a particular file format or workflow
Solution
[Client] [Filename] [YYYYMMDD] [EDITOR'S INITIALS] [A-Z].[ext]
That should result in something like this:
DeOrchis Web Presentation 2 20100906 ADC A.ai
Hopefully it reads without explanation, but it came from a long and reasoned brainstorm, and you deserve the whys and wherefores.
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I’ve long enjoyed using Google Maps’ street view to peruse memories as well as places. Walk the streets in Italy from my college study abroad, finding the amazing restaurants I can remember by sight but not by name. When I feel like a real nostalgia bomb I dial up my old house. It’s hard to see the house I grew up in and the foolhardy tree trimming that’s resulted in sun damage (hey, that’s my climbing tree!). I wish there were a way to dial back to see what it looked like when I was there. But, really, how long will it be before Google has this ability? They’re already diligently documenting and re-documenting major metropolitan areas in order to be current with the ever changing street scape. They surely keep the old images. They must have 4 or 5 years of images for New York City, and that’s enough time for the city to look as foreign as my 20 year distant childhood home.
I thought I’d help them out by showing what I want, though it’s exaggerated by my use of the excellent Shorpy archive:
Update: Google Earth has a time slider very similar to the one I imagined above available for historic satellite imagery. It’s only available in the stand alone app, not the web version, but has some fascinating glimpses into history, including before and after 9/11.
by
Aaron
13 January 2011
Posted in News
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To celebrate each new year, we send out a small batch of print cards to friends and clients as a way of jump starting some positivity. This year, with as many as eight people (wahoo!), we thought we’d make it about the group and share our resolutions—a blueprint for 2011.
The blueprint as a whole.
The posters were printed on cyanotype blueprints, divided into four sections, and mailed separately. Side by side, the sections still read as a whole.
Divided in sections, each mailable poster still reads continuously.
Getting ready to be mailed!
This seemed a bit too one-sided, so we went ahead and transformed the printed poster into a website, blueprint2011.com:
The site launched as the blueprints were mailed, and since then, we’ve racked up over a hundred resolutions, and counting. Being the internet, there have been several ‘not safe for work’ resolutions, but we’re loving the rest. From the cryptic, “forget about the the”, to the romantic, “say i love you”, the response has been great.
Since 2011 is still in its developmental stages, please drop by the site and add your plans, borrow from others, and create a list of things you resolve to do (or not do) in the months ahead.
Happy 2011 from Objective Subject!
Check out the newly launched identity, website, and print collateral for Athena Capital Research we designed!
While integrating the latest technologies in quantitative trading and investment strategies, Athena Capital Research suffered from a stodgy and outdated identity. They needed a modernized brand that reflected their position as trendsetters and trendforecasters as specialized investment managers.
We created a dynamic “brandgraph” logo, recalling mathetmatical equations, as well as the letter “A” in Athena. The ever changing logo suggests their versatility and vitality, while the deep blue color palette and contemporary typography underline their authority as successful traders. It’s a pretty cool translation of the classic navy pin stripe suit. Don’t you think? Visit their website.
The brand graph is a dynamic logo reflecting the market
Unique "brandgraph" logo for different business cards
The Starbucks Effect could describe the turn of fortune which befell the company after it schooled the world in coffee and its students graduated to become local-roast, fair-trade, organic coffee connoisseurs. The alumni moved on from Starbucks to local cafes with house-roated fair-trade beans and pastries from local bakeries. Domino’s Pizza may be unwittingly teaching locavorism in the same way.
A caricature of local food made explicit with frozen Canada and desert Mexico.
Domino’s has launched a campaign touting the origins of its ingredients, “Behind the Pizza“. The result is a sort of nationwide farmville, with cheese from Wisconsin and mushrooms from California. They even specify the name of the farms which are illustrated as idyllic little operations on green knolls (disclaimed as not to scale). You get points as you educate yourself online.
Not getting bogged down by spin—the farms are surely not adorable and these are merely exemplars—what Domino’s is doing is interesting. Building awareness and promoting real, local food is good. Strangely, however, by pointing out that the mushrooms in their pizza come from California when they could come from truly local—and therefore better—farms forces the audience to question their ‘local’ pitch. Pointing it out on a map makes it all the more obvious.
I love that they’re promoting real food, but can only hope that they Starbucks themselves, creating a national awareness of food origin to the extent that the audience matures into locavores. Here is hoping.
by
Aaron
22 October 2010
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13 months after launching Friend's of Type, Aaron and friends spoke at TDC on Oct 21. A good way to celebrate FoT's one year anniversary!
Our own Aaron Carámbula and his Friends of Type cohorts—Erik, Jason, and Dennis—spoke to a capacity-crowd at the Type Directors Club last night. They upped the ante by providing their favorite beer, Duvel, and cocktails featuring Celtic Crossings to make the discussion a lively one. Topics spread from the group’s origins, inspirations, and process. It was fun seeing the site’s fans and friends assembled in one place and in person. Thanks for coming!
We recently launched a new brand for esteemed maritime law firm DeOrchis & Partners. The process began with a holistic, cross-media design exploration in which we looked at multiple typographic and photographic ways to express the firm’s primary legal focus and prestige in the field.
We designed a new identity with a stylized monogram evoking maritime imagery.
A simple and bold direction, combining traditional elements in a unique way, struck the right note.
The firm’s lead touchpoint—its website—furthers the modern, nautical system through imagery, layout, and interaction. Visit the site to see it for yourself.
The website is interactive, with animated page transitions evoking a seafaring perspective.
OK, Steve just killed Flash, but did you see the really big news buried in the six-pointed death knell?
Is the magic gone? The multi-touch magic mouse may be the last rodent on my desk.
In his fifth point about touch/mouse/hover (our lament since iPhone came out), Steve notes that Flash was “designed for PCs using mice’ and that Flash content would need to be rewritten for touch”. In his conclusions puts a finer point on it saying, “Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.” This is some seriously intentional past-tense, and is meant to be read, “This is the era of mobile and touch.”
Steve and Apple have been notorious for picking up technologies before their competition and dropping them just as fast. They had floppy drives, double floppy drives, and then, with the iMac, they dropped floppies completely, together with legacy ports like SCSI and serial. People actually got upset! Who now can say what they’d do with a 1.4mb storage device?
Well, the peripheral that started it all, the mouse, is going to go the way of the floppy disc, too. They grabbed the mouse by the tail from Xerox and ushered in the PC revolution 30 years ago. They’ve even stood by their mice, stubbornly holding to simplicity and beauty where most made mice into eight-headed, mangled desk-vermin.
The death of the mouse makes perfect sense. It is an abstraction, a thick layer of separation between user and object. The only thing it has on touch is accuracy (down to the pixel). One might say hover is a benefit, but I’d argue that hover is a technical hurdle for touch, but ultimately a natural extension. With multi-touch, the possibilities explode. Nobs can be turned (the mouse was never good at curves). Drawing can be done on the screen (holy meat-brush-stylus, Batman). Awkward key commands can be dropped for gestures. The physical nature of touch will also improve the GUI metaphor, extending the usable space to infinity rather than being confined to the pixel dimensions of the screen (the screen will be a portal to dragging and pulling content, not a container for it).
I expect that I just set up my last desktop computer to come with a mouse and a touch-less screen.
Let’s remember and celebrate the mouse (and its virtual avatar, the cursor) for all that it’s done for us—the zillions of pixelated arrows in print ads, the cute anthropomorphic illustrations, the internet—and forgive it the carpal tunnel syndrome.
Update 2010 07 27: Apple has rung the bell again for the mouse, launching the Magic Trackpad, a large wireless touch pad that brings the laptop’s trackpad to the PC.
Update 2011 08 08: Almost a year since the Magic Trackpad release, Phill Schiller in the WWDC keynote spoke about killing scroll bars because they’re for mice (how useless!) and later said you can ‘tap’ on a button. They’re building in more and more multi-touch. The mouse is being actively displaced.
With books, magazines, and newspapers flocking to iPad with hopes of a new working model, and the calls for the death of print that feel like echoes of the 90s, I present a quick, non-exhaustive, biased, romanticized list…
iPad newspapers, magazines, and books can’t
- swat flies
- be stored for 20 years for the next generation to uncover in the attic
- be stored for 100 years for the next 5 generations to uncover in the attic
- be left at the cottage to separate ‘real books’ from ‘vacation books’
- be left on an airplane to dispose evidence of having ever read ‘US Weekly’
- be thrown by menacing delivery boys
- be fetched by good dogs in the morning
- have the comics reproduced onto silly putty
- be used for paper mâché
- be clipped into pieces for science projects
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Again late to post, but we found our friend and sometime collaborator Christian in the pages of Wallpaper. A handsome portrait taken inside his gallery in Berlin, Exile, is accompanied by a bit about his venture.
