Designing Logos & Brand Personality

Ever since I have used the earliest of Macs, I had always had the question of who designed the Apple logo, and why? Today as I was browsing some exchanges on Tidbits, I came across this interview of Rob Janoff, the designer who gave the world the original Apple logo. Its interesting to learn how Rob came upon designing various aspects of the logo, and what he feels about the changes the logo has undergone in the last few years. I myself have been inspired by the simplicity of Apple logo and overall design in designing the logo for my wife's online tea business and her online bespoke shirts business.

Read the interview if you are fascinated by this stuff. Its a must read for marketers whose job it is to design communication tools that humanize our products.

GIMP: Using Layers Mask To Improve Image

GIMP Tutorial - How to make an ordinary picture dramatic

Here is a easy technique to make an ordinary looking picture look more dramatic. Many thanks to Arun Vyas without whose creative eye, we wouldn't be witnessing this beautiful scene. Here is the tutorial. Enjoy!

This is what the original picture looks like. Original picture credit Arun Vyas of Nametheframe blog

..and this is what it looks like when we post process it using GIMP.

Are we reaching a tech bubble again?

Reading this press release from Mosso brought back fond memories of another time when tech companies started giving themselves and their employees some seriously ridiculous names and titles.

Rackspace(R) Hosting's cloud division Mosso(R) (www.mosso.com), today announced that it has named technology industry and operations veteran Bruce Runyan Chief Uptime Officer. In this role, Runyan is responsible for ensuring that Mosso continues to provide a reliable and consistent customer experience as the cloud scales....

Chief Uptime Officer? Come on! I thought "Cloud computing" was ridiculous, but the "Chief Uptime Officer" title takes the cake!

We must be nearing another tech bubble.

Uninspiring Way To Display Photos - Picasaweb

Google Photos Blog: Full-album Downloads
I have been using PicasaWeb ever since it was launched. One of the main reasons for using picasaweb for me was the close integration with Apple's photo program. Since its launch, the Picasaweb team has done a great job of providing us new functionalities such as the mobilepicasa (my favorite on iPhone), Geotagging of photos, and now, the ability to download entire album. This particular feature is very handy in distributing pictures to far flung family members.

Yet, lately I have been feeling rather depressed looking at the myriad different ways in which photos can be displayed using flash animation, and the pathetically uninspiring way in which my photos are displayed on Picasaweb! There are a gazillion ways of displaying photos attractively, but its a mystery as to why Google has decided against improving the way the pictures get displayed in Picasaweb. The way they are displayed currently, there is no way to put a border around the pictures, no special effects to transition between photos, and no way to move from one photo to a different one in a slide show.

People want their photographs to be displayed attractively so that they feel like sharing them with their family and friends. If Google were to improve upon this "usability" function, I think Picasaweb could quickly become the dominant way of sharing pictures on the web. Otherwise, it will remain only a marginal player to Flickr.

iPhone 2.0 update breaks Jailbreak

I should have known it! As soon as I updated the iPhone to 2.0, Jailbreak installer and all the programs I had downloaded before are "GONE"! There are a few new apps on iTunes, but I find the process of downloading them extremely cumbersome. All apps have to be downloaded from iTunes, unlike the jailbreak installer which installs the apps wirelessly.

And none of my favorite apps are available yet on iTunes! There are others of course, but I miss the "Shoplist" app, the "chess game", "Go game" and many others which I found so invaluable over the last six months.

I guess I will have to "jailbreak" my iPhone again!

Copying a dvd to iPhone

As you have it, I have to head over to Mexico again for a business meeting. This is my third trip to Mexico in six weeks and the prospect of watching the same movies on the plane sent me looking for a way to get some of the favorite DVDs in my collection on to the iPhone. A quick search led me to this website, which describes the process in detail.

So I downloaded Handbrake from here, and loaded it up on the computer. Second, I inserted the DVD into the carousel, and opened Handbrake. Clicking "Source" allowed me to select the Video folder of the DVD, upon which the program started reading all the files.

In order to code the file for iPhone, the how to website recommends several steps. But Handbrake also has some presets such as the ones shown here. I simply selected the preset for iPhone and started the process of encoding the files to be iPhone ready.