Album Cover Designers: The New Iconographers

When I was younger, I distinctly recalled noticing the dilemma faced, by album cover designers, when cassette tapes were introduced. Going from the large format LP to the small awkwardly vertical cassette cover had a big impact on design solutions. The CD reintroduced a canvas more square in shape but still diminutive compared to a real "album cover". Fast forward to today and you can see the latest challenge for album cover designers, the digital version of album art. Digital music players like iPod and Zune, that can now display album art, have reintroduced the importance of design and branding in music. There was a stretch there, where artwork was not so easily attached to the digital music. Apple's Coverflow (purchased from original creator steelskies) reintroduced the metaphor of browsing through a pile of records, albeit very tiny records .

How will this change trends in album art design? Will there be bolder, larger, simpler designs? Or is this no different from the challenges faced by traditional LP cover designers who aimed to make a large format record stand out on a shelf in a record store? We shall see, but I expect to notice a greater influence as album art designers start thinking like icon designers. One recent example, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails just released a free full length recording "The Slip". Like his last free album before it (Ghosts), each song has its own piece of artwork associated with it. 10 'covers', and a PDF booklet for one 'album'- now that's something new.

Safari + Gmail + .docx Attachments = .zip files!

Here's the scenario. You are accessing gmail on a Mac using Safari (2.x or 3.x BETA - 3.x on Leopard is fine), someone sends you a new Microsoft Office .docx format file, you download it, and it shows up as a .zip file. Or worse, that zip file automatically decompresses to a folder - Ugh.

The solution is actually easy, but it's an annoyance since Firefox on Mac will download the file correctly - so it appears to be a problem specific to Safari in these pre-Leopard versions:

Google Groups : "The new default file format is zipped xml, which can get interpreted as a zip file by some software. If this is the case, rename the file extension to .docx and then download the word2007 converter for the version of office you are currently using..."

NOTE: If you have Safari setup to automatically decompress files, you'll have the added hassle of finding that docx.zip file on your desktop as a folder. In this case, delete the folder and then retrieve the .zip version from your Trash and modify the extension on that.

Also, if you don't have Word for Mac, or the converter mentioned above, it's worth noting that NeoOffice for Mac supports the .docx file format - and it's free.

Box.net Releases Microsoft & Adobe Plug-ins

mashable.com: "Box.net, the file-sharing application, has launched a few more plug-ins due to the success of its plug-in developed for Microsoft Office.

There are now box.net plug-ins available for Open Office, Photoshop, Acrobat and 3ds max. These plug-ins allow you to back up files and share directly from each application."

Box is doing a great job at extending their service beyond the website only model. The widget they offer is very useful, now tying specific apps directly to online storage will be super handy as well (although they appear to be Windows only). I'd love to see them create an S3 option for their service as well, where they become the interface between you and (ie cheap) S3 storage.

Electric Rain Announces "Harmony" - Flash SWF to XAML Converter

Electric Rain Harmony - Flash SWF to XAML Converter - For WPF and Silverlight: "Announcing Electric Rain Harmony - Coming Summer 2007 A New Flash SWF to XAML-markup Converter Tool for Microsoft WPF and Silverlight Application Development... Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations*) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms."

Microsoft Reveals Silverlight as Adobe Flash Challenger

DailyTech: "In hopes to make a dent in the market dominance of Adobe's Flash, Microsoft unveiled at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference a new cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in called Silverlight... Previously called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), Silverlight works with on both Macintosh and Windows with a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari."

Adobe to Release PDF for Industry Standardization

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)."

As pointed out at TechCrunch this appears to be in part to attract more government users. I imagine it is also a step to thwart competing doc formats from Microsoft.

Why Browser War 2.0 Will Heat Up in 2007

readwriteweb.com: "Our theory is that in 2006 a lot of the ground work for a major battle was laid out. Microsoft launched a significant upgrade to Internet Explorer for the first time in about 5 years (IE7), while the Firefox team spent time polishing up their open source browser. But it is the latest developments which make it clear that Firefox thinks it's showtime."

This is an interesting article, and I really got a kick out of the illustration. Between the business interests and the (still) inconsistent support for web standards in IE7, it should be another interesting year in the browser-sphere.

Microsoft releases Expression Web

news.com: "As a start, the company on Monday released Expression Web, a tool for designing user interfaces. It is offering the product as an upgrade to its Microsoft FrontPage Web authoring tool.

In addition, Microsoft posted a public beta download of Expression Blend, its Windows-specific design software. And in the third related announcement, it delivered an early version of Expression Design, a tool for creating logos, animations and other individual visual elements.



These three products will be in Expression Studio, set for shipping in the second quarter of 2007."

Also, see the Microsoft Expression site for more details. I'll be interested to see what Adobe has in store for Dreamweaver post acquisition. Hopefully this release from MS will provide some healthy competition.

New Packaging for Windows Vista and 2007 Office System Announced

"With Windows Vista and 2007 Office system, we didn't just redesign the software packages themselves, but are also introducing new packaging for the two products... Designed to be user-friendly, the new packaging is a small, hard, plastic container that’s designed to protect the software inside for life-long use."

These appear to still be renderings, and no specifics on dimensions or materials. I'll be interested to see this form factor in person.

Microsoft releases long-awaited Explorer 7

"Microsoft Corp. released Internet Explorer 7 on Wednesday, the first major upgrade to its Web browser since 2001 with new features aimed at preventing online fraud and improving ease of use...

IE 7 is available immediately to Windows XP users and it will eventually serve as the default browser for Microsoft's much-anticipated Windows Vista operating system, due out to consumers in early 2007."

IE 7 is available for download at www.microsoft.com/ie

Let's hope that support for standards in this final release is close to that of Firefox. Unfortunately for designers/developers this more likely means that we'll be testing for IE 5, 6, and now 7 too - at least until Vista ships and the adoption rate for 7 picks up.