My apologies for being a bit tardy on this month's desktop calendar. I was out all last week for a family emergency. I am back now, and with a bright, bold September desktop. School is also back in session for many of you, and Newfangled wishes you the best of luck! Here's something for your new MacBook and iPhone (Zdenko).

Three sizes available this month:

1440x900

1280x1024

iPhone

With not much time to spare before the end of the month I bring you the August desktop calendar. Simplicity is key. I hope you enjoy it!

Three sizes available this month:

1440x900

1280x1024

iPhone

We have almost made it to another month! Tomorrow is the first day of the month in the Gregorian calendar named after Julius Caesar. This month's calendar desktop includes the Roman leader on his "triumphal chariot." I hope you enjoy this one. If so, please pass along the link.

Here's a preview:

Also, thanks to John at I Love Typography for posting the June desktop in his Sunday Type. (Maybe this one will make it, too!) If you have any interest in typography or design, his blog is a must-read! The site is climbing its way to 20,000 subscribers. Be one of them.

Right click and save the desktop below:

1440x900

UPDATE:

John did in fact post this desktop on I Love Typography. (Thanks John!) Be sure to check out the rest this week's Sunday Type.

As you may know already, we don't build Flash websites here at Newfangled. Some of our sites have flash content, but that's as far as we go in that direction. However, we do concede that the control you can obtain with Flash can greatly increase how the experience the user has with the site. For instance, I see a new trend rising of sites (or even parts of sites) that use a "no-click" navigation. In these environments, the roll-over is all that is needed.

The most obvious example, and they take it to the extreme, is www.dontclick.it. You are asked to click one last time before entering the site. After that, if you click...well, I won't spoil it.

Does anyone know if this would be possible without using Flash? 

Bettina posted a video the other day of a musical roller coaster. Below is a still from another musically themed video made from blood! Beautifully done, watch the video here.

I'll be out of the office Friday, and I am not sure if I will have time to post this tomorrow so here we go. Below is the June desktop calendar. This is the third desktop I've posted, and I plan on keeping them coming each month so stay tuned! Grab the RSS feed, and don't be shy about leaving requests for future imagery in the comments.

Right click and save the desktop below:

1440x900 (most of you will probably want this one)

1243x969 (This is the dimensions of my external monitor)

I've been on the hunt for a while now trying to find the best free image-editing software. I reviewed Picnik a while back, and I have been recommending it to clients. From what they have told me, it has been a great resource.
Just when I was feeling good about having found the best comes a whole suite of editing software, all named after birds! The suite is call Aviary. Described on their site as:

A suite of web-based applications (RIAs) for people who create. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for artists of all genres.

It's no secret that I love birds so I am anxious to see if these products live up to their branding. Right now use of the products is by invitation only, and I have yet to receive access. I will let you know, once I get in there, exactly what we're looking at. As of now, they have these tools:

Phoenix: Image editor

Toucan: Color swatches and palettes creator

Peacock: Computer algorithm-based pattern generator

Raven: Vector editor

Hummingbird: 3D modeller and skinner

Myna: Audio editor

Roc: Music generator

Starling: Video editor

Owl: Desktop publishing layout editor

Penguin: Word processing software geared towards creative writers

Pigeon: Painting simulator

Tern: Terrain generator (minitool)

Horus: Font editor

Woodpecker: Smart image resizer using seam carving (minitool)

Rookery: A free, unlimited distributed file system network that anyone can connect to and store data in. It also powers Aviary's file search engine.

Hawk: Digital content marketplace

Crane: Custom image product creator

Eagle: A smart online application that can identify complex data about an image based on the pixel patterns (i.e. which specific camera an image originally came from)

Whew! That's a handful. We'll see if it lives up to our expectations. For now, I'll stand by picnik for image-editing. Here is a list of other free resources Aviary will have to compete with:

GoogleSketchup: 3D for everyone (not to be confused with Google's ketchup)

Fontstruct: Create geometric fonts. 

Chocoflop and The Gimp: These are more like Photoshop. Chocoflop for MAc, Gimp for PC. 

Inkscape: Create vector art without Illustrator! 

I Like Your Colors: Type in a url and get the hex colors. 

Stripe Generator: Need a striped background for part of a website you are designing?

Audacity: Cross-platform audio editing software 

Open Office: Replace Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat for free! 

Avidmux: Video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

NVU: "A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users."

Please keep in mind that I have not used all of these, but ahve bookmarked them over time. I link them here just to spread the word, and I hope they come in handy for some one. Please let me know either way, and feel free to leave some links in the comments. Maybe you have created your own software? Cheers! 

Swiss musician and programmer, tokoloten, has built a fancy little online application that creates art by the movement of your mouse. It's called paintingmachine. Below is a progression that I created. I think the colors are different each time. I was hoping to introduce more colors in to this composition somehow, but could not. Maybe tokoleton will add this in a future version? Anyways, try it out. Maybe you can design the next Amon Tobin record cover. (Be sure to check out tokoloten's music while you are at it. It's electronica/ambient/noise)

Okay, I pulled it off. Another desktop calendar for you! Last months' was unusually bright and futuristic so I thought I'd bring it back with some earth tones, and I started with a drawing from my Moleskine sketchbook. I also created April's to look like it were in motion, but decided to have May be very grounded. Happy Spring, enjoy!

Download here (1243x969) 

The first day of Spring was the other day, and the days are getting a little longer. It's even going to get up to 80 degrees here in North Carolina this week! In the spirit of things, I'd like to offer you a little experiment I made as a desktop calendar. For those of you who need some color to spice up your office, I think you'll like this one. And for those of you who tend to keep things simple and toned down...well, I made a black & white version for you.

Download color version here (1243x969) 

Download b&w version here (1243x969)

Please let me know your thoughts. I'd like to make more of these, and your feedback or requests will help me cater to your needs. Now get outside and enjoy the weather!

If you use Flickr at all, you may already know about the online image editing application Picnik. I was a bit caught off guard the first time I tried to edit an image on Flickr. A prompt popped up asking me if I wanted to allow a third party application to have access to my flickr information. I clicked "okay" and was even more surprised by how much editing I could really do to my photo, and all online! That got me to thinking, maybe our clients could benefit from something like this. In the past I have suggested software like Gimp and Chocoflop, but sometimes clients are not allowed to download any software on their work computers. Some are even a bit intimidated by the idea of editing photos in general, and I don't blame them.

Image editing has gotten much easier as long as you don't mind having some shiny ads begging your attention while you edit your photos. Picnik offers a paid, no advertising, subscription for about $25 a year. Losing all of those ads allows for you to use the entire screen. I don't see any other good reason right now to upgrade. Soon they will have "professional" fonts from FontShop, and, as a subscriber, you get priority support.

So let's get to the application!

 Although there are some extra things you can do with Picnik, I am just focusing on 3 things: resizing, cropping, and saturation. These are probably the most needed features for editing images for the web.

Resizing your image could be critical. Let's say you are uploading new headshots to your company bio page. You've taken the photos with a 12 megapixel camera, and the photos are huge. Resizing the photo is necessary so that the image will fit in the content area of your website. In this case, my photo was 4000x3000 pixels. Way too big! (It's a photo I took of some popcorn I left out for the squirrels in my yard. I figured that if they didn't know what popcorn was, I'd let them know it was theirs to eat.)

Resizing the photo in Picnik is actually easier than Photoshop. You can choose to scale proportions, which is almost always recommended, to avoid distorting your photos. You can edit the dimensions until you have it right, and each time, it gives you a preview of your photo. Once you have it where you want it simply click "OK." You can reset the size at this point if you feel you have made an error.

So you have resized your image, but it's not square like the other headshots on the company bio page. This is also easier in Picnik than it is in Photoshop. You can specify the desired dimensions and move the crop box around to frame the photo just as you would like it before actually cropping it. Again, you can go back a step if you feel it needs to be done differently. Also, they have some default settings for creating you user icon from your favorite social networking site. They even have preset dimensions for creating desktops for your computer! (Seriously, I am not getting paid to write this.)

Now you would like to make your headshot look better than the others in your company. Easy. Using the Colors section, you can make your cashmere sweater a deeper blue, and bring a little contrast to give yourself that "I just had 3 cups of coffee" look you desire.

Like I said earlier, there are other features, and I suggest trying it out to see if it would be something that you could benefit from. I am sure it is, and if you do, please let me know what you think of it. You might find something to tone down my enthusiasm about it. ;)

If your were a mouse in our office for a day, and could survive long enough to sit on the top of the refrigerator for about 4 hours, this is some of what you might see:

Music: M. Ward

I used to experiment a lot with erasure poetry. I would take a Sharpie to a text, leaving a poem remaining on the page between the black lines. It was always amazing to see that, even though there was only a fraction of the text left, people could still tell what the original text was about.

That is kind of what Typotransformat does. It allows you to cut and paste a body of text in to "extract and break apart subtile content of text." Below is an image I retrieved by entering Chris's last post, "Is That Really You?"

I am sure you all saw highlights from last weeks Apple keynote, if not the entir(ing)e speech. The Macbook Air is no doubt a great step towards slimmer portable computers, but last week it got in the way.

How many of you went to The New York Times to get up-to-date on the news, and noticed that Apple bought up most of the homepage? Yes, there was a clever ad where some guy begins going around the whole internet to fix all the ads that say Leopard is faster than Vista. Once the little flash ad (that took up most of the homepage) was over, however, it turned to white space. We all know Apple banks on white space, but I was appalled that it had come to this. They even bought up the space that bookends the Times' logo at the top, and left it empty. I guess I am just surprised they didn't route nytimes.com to apple.com for the day!
Okay, I am stretching this a bit far, but I did find it over the top, and thought I'd share a couple of screenshots with you, too. The first is one that I had on hand from June 2006. the second one show's Apple's "white space."

Update: 

Here's an article by "A Thousand Times No" about the ad Apple ran last week. It's a clear rant on the punctuation in the WSJ quote. WARNING: True irritated geekiness ahead...

If you don't know about Layer Tennis, consider yourself informed. It's where 2 designers go head-to-head in making the best image. Sometimes they are even animated using programs like Flash, After Effects or Image Ready. The animated gif's battle was my personal favorite!

Watch tomorrow's match between Veerle Pieters vs Cindy Li! (The RSS feed helps to stay informed...) 

The above are 2 favorites from the animated gif battle between Matt Owens vs Jason Gnewikow.

Remember the first Batman movie where the Joker says, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?!" Well, that's kind of how I feel when I look at Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosties, a blog curated by Tim Young and Nancy Kuhl. Today they posted a puzzle, ca. 1880's, that is made of cubes, each side having a beautiful print of a then urban city.

There is no need to exaggerate the size of Eric's monitor. It looms over me daily, blocking the sun from our corner of the room. If it fell, I could die. If I touched it, I am sure that it would send a sudden shock through me, launching me into one of the offices exposed brick walls. This is not science fiction, folks. This is the Hanns-G. Monitor of death!

Thanks to the Core 77 blog, I heard of two pretty impressive land developments that I would love to visit. Each of them happen to be islands.

(I even made a short video from my time there.)

I started the morning out playing guitar and singing in the space. I even had an idea for some lyrics to a chord progression I have been fooling around with so I grabbed the laptop to record it. I even ended up changing the song a bit more, and adding another section to it! Once I got to cutting paper and painting things were going well.
I took a time lapse movie of my progression to share with you, and as you can see, the sun was moving hot across my back!

Time Lapse: "Anticipation" (Day 3) from able parris on Vimeo.

The past weeks have been busy, and I expect that it will continue well into the new year for me. I am involved in a few different projects outside of Newfangled, and hope to share some of them here. My wife and I were invited to do some installations at the church we have been attending in downtown Durham. For hers, Julia drew birds flying from the front window to the back of the space. It creates a wonderful movement through the space. I made a time lapse video of her making it. Unfortunately, I started the video after she had already begun drawing the birds.


Advent Installation at Emmaus Way from able parris on Vimeo.

My installation is called "Anticipation," and will be an ongoing even through the Advent season. I will be creating art on paper in the front window on the other side of the room from Julia's drawings. I will be working with paint and collage, and I am not sure how many pieces I will make in the given timeframe, but got pretty far on it this weekend. It feels great just to get my hands wet with paint and glue again. It had been a long time since I had worked with materials in that way, and I was a bit intimidated if the idea of creating a sort of studio in public space. While I was at work there on Saturday, the Durham Christmas Parade gathered a large crowd, and while waiting for the marching bands and fire engines, they stood just feet from me, watching.
I will continue working on the pieces until I think they are "finished," but here are a couple of the things I started this weekend. They have changed even since I snapped these pictures on Saturday afternoon, and I have started 3 o